JF: In the U.S. you’ve been involved in another data collection project, WFH Research. Describe that and how it got started.
NB: It was a Stanford student, Jack Blundell. I was his advisor, and he’d been running these online surveys looking at gender in the labor market in the U.K. I thought, I’d love to collect information on what’s happening right now on working from home, and so started to run these surveys. Since May 2020, we’ve been surveying 5,000 Americans aged 20 to 64 every month, and asking relatively straightforward questions on levels of work from home, post-pandemic desires by them, post-pandemic intentions by their employers and various other factors.

This is now maybe the best data in the U.S. on work from home. You’d think there’d be an official statistic where the Bureau of Labor Statistics would provide data. They do, but their question unfortunately was well-designed for the pandemic but is not well designed for 2022. It asks, “How many days a week do you work from home, because of the pandemic?” The “because of the pandemic” is a problem, because in 2022 it excludes people who worked from home pre-pandemic and people who are now working from home because their job offers it, independent of the pandemic. So that BLS series has fallen to below 10%, and it looks like no one’s working from home, which is not the case.

JF: In your time series, the percentage of days worked from home is stuck at a pretty high level. What’s changed is what people say about their own and their employer’s intentions going forward.
NB: This is like a play in three parts. In May 2020, Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook has decided it may stick with working from home post-pandemic. It was huge news. Up until that point, no firm had committed to sticking with it. It was seen as a short-run pandemic measure.

Roll it forward a year to May 2021, and for professionals and managers, most firms are saying you’re going to work from home post-pandemic, maybe one, two days a week. Three in the office, two at home, is the most popular plan.

Now we’ve had another year of heavy work from home, of tight labor markets, of productivity growth. Work from home has become entrenched and has actually grown. A good example of this is Apple. Apple announced its “three-two” plan in June 2021. There were complaints from employees, but our survey data suggested that was roughly in the middle of what people were wanting and what employers were promising a year ago. Now Apple’s plan looks kind of mean because the rest of tech has become increasingly generous.

It’s hard to know where we’ll settle down. I think most professionals, managers, most people reading this should expect to see something like two to three days a week in the office. One of my neighbors is a doctor. She now goes into the office four days a week and does telemedicine one day a week, which is new. But she says that’s roughly the mix that her patients want.

JF: One thing that’s striking in your survey data is when you ask people their preferences, the hybrid option that everybody’s talking about, two or three days in the office, is the least popular.
NB: This is why means and medians can be misleading. Just to explain in words, roughly one quarter of people don’t want to work from home at all. They want to go into the office five days a week. If you look at their demographics, they tend to be younger singles or older empty-nesters. Then one third are the opposite extreme. They want to work from home five days a week. They tend to be married with younger kids and have a long commute. The rest is spread out in between. You have a distribution that I call dumbbell-shaped. There are two masses at the edge and then a long, skinny bit in the middle.

It looks unlike most distributions you see in economics. For example, if I survey people about what temperature they want the air conditioning in the office, that’s typically a normal distribution: most of them in the middle, a few extremes. If you put something in the middle, most people are close to happy. With work from home, it’s really hard. The mean of that distribution is about 2.5, but as you point out, not many people actually live in that two or three days a week.