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Bartleby: Is the WFH debate settled?

2026-05-11 · 13:02 UTC ·Andrew Palmer at The Economist ·5 min read

Brief

Andrew Palmer’s Bartleby column (May 11, 2026) summarises recent evidence on commuting and remote work from long‑running surveys by Jose Maria Barrero, Nick Bloom and Steven Davis and complementary Atlanta Fed data. The academics — surveying since 2020 — report that about 25% of paid U.S. working days were WFH by 2025 (more than three times pre‑Covid) and that this level has been stable since 2023. Among hybrid workers 41% say they are more productive at home, 46% see no change, and most who favour home cite saved commuting/grooming time; empirically, an extra hour of commute/grooming predicts a 6.4 percentage‑point rise in desired time at home. Manager attitudes correlate with firms’ WFH rates, suggesting mutual selection and a durable shift toward hybrid work, albeit with task‑specific and boundary benefits to commuting.

Why it matters

Researchers Jose Maria Barrero, Nick Bloom and Steven Davis — surveying U.S. work-from-home (WFH) patterns since 2020 — find that by 2025 roughly 25% of paid working days were worked from home, over three times the pre‑pandemic rate and largely unchanged since 2023.

Key details

  • Among employees who do some remote work, 41% say they are more efficient at home and 46% see no difference; five out of six of those who feel more efficient cite time saved on commuting or 'grooming' as a reason.
  • An additional hour of commuting plus grooming time predicts a 6.4 percentage‑point increase in the share of the workweek people want to spend at home.
  • An Atlanta Federal Reserve manager survey shows managers’ views on WFH track their firms’ current remote‑work rates (more positive where remote work is already higher), supporting the researchers’ conclusion that firms and workers have largely self‑selected hybrid arrangements that are likely to persist.
Cleaned source text

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May 11th 2026 For subscribers

Bartleby

Your guide to the agonies of office life

Andrew Palmer

Bartleby columnist

Hello from London.

Exciting news. I got an email last week from a publisher saying that they were thrilled to announce a forthcoming special edition devoted to “The Most Visionary Leaders Shaping the Future of Management Journalism”. This is an enormously large pool of people, as you can imagine, so I was immediately intrigued. “After an extensive evaluation by our Editorial and Data Research team, it’s clear that ‘Andrew Palmer’ exemplifies the qualities of an influential leader driving meaningful impact,” it said. The quote marks around my name made me feel like the evaluation must have been very extensive indeed. So did a subsequent email from the same publication announcing a forthcoming special edition on “The Most Influential Real Estate Attorney Driving Legal Excellence”, for which “Andrew Palmer” was also an exemplary candidate. I haven’t decided which one of these editions to pay to appear in yet, but will keep you posted.

I wrote last week’s column about commuting. The short version is that employers cannot be indifferent to the length of people’s journeys. There is evidence to suggest that people with longer commutes are more likely to leave their jobs, and that women are particularly likely to switch roles when they have children. But it’s too simple to say that employers should therefore do whatever they can to reduce the burden of commuting on workers. Longer journeys bring individuals compensating benefits, such as lower housing costs or a larger pool of job opportunities. The commute can also play a useful role in delineating the boundary between work and home. I polled you about your ideal commute times last week: revealingly, only 21% of respondents wanted to get rid of it entirely.

There wasn’t space in the column to get into the working-from-home debate but happily for this newsletter, Jose Maria Barrero of Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México got in touch to alert me to his latest research. Along with Nick Bloom of Stanford University and Steven Davis of the Hoover Institution, Jose has been surveying work-from-home (WFH) patterns in America since 2020. By last year around 25% of all paid working days were being worked from home, more than three times the proportion before the covid-19 pandemic. Despite weirdly heated arguments on both sides about remote working, this figure has not changed materially since 2023.

Among those who do some remote work, 41% of workers think they are more efficient at home than at work; another 46% think there isn’t a difference between the two. Five out of six respondents who reckon they are more efficient at home say that one reason is the time saved on commuting or getting spruced up for work. Unsurprisingly, people with longer commutes are keener on working from home. An additional hour of commuting and “grooming” time predicts a 6.4 percentage-point increase in the proportion of the workweek that people want to spend at home.

That doesn’t mean people should be spared the commute entirely. Remote work suits some tasks better than others. There are tonnes of benefits from workers interacting in person. And employees may not be the best, or most truthful, judges of their own productivity. But survey data from the Atlanta Federal Reserve suggests that the managers who are most positive about the relative efficiency of WFH are those with higher rates of remote working, and that those who are least positive have lower WFH rates. This suggests that both firms and workers have now selected into the levels of remote working that suits them best, which is also why the researchers think current WFH patterns are likely to persist. Hybrid working is here to stay, and the commute helps explain why.

You can tell me whether you think remote-work arrangements at your firm have settled where they should, or if they still need to change, by writing to bartleby@economist.com. I’m quite busy shaping the future of management journalism and driving excellence in real-estate law but will make sure to read everything that comes in.

Latest column

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Ask someone if they have regrets, and very few people will say: “I wish I had spent more of my life commuting.” The time spent travelling from home to work and back again tends to be neither relaxing nor productive. It is usually routine and sometimes unpleasant: anything that involves loads of traffic or armpits is hard to like.

Read the full article →

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