📊 LinkedIn data shows a surprise remote upswing

Good Morning,

18.8 million Americans will miss work today due to last night’s Super Bowl, according to The Workforce Institute at UKG. That said, I bet Chiefs fans who work remotely are less likely to need PTO today than Chiefs fans who normally commute into an office.

And quick note: if you haven’t signed up for the Steelcase chair giveaway, you have one week left.

Enter here, then you’ll see more ways to boost your chances of winning.

Need to know

Remote work is back on the upswing, according to LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence Index.

As you can see, even though hybrid work has been gradually increasing the last two years, pure remote work had been on a continuous decline — until now.

Whether it was the holidays, the bad weather, the employment shift, or everyone coming to their senses, we’re not sure. But I’ll welcome it with open arms.

WFH Research found differences in remote preference when sorting by age and managerial status.

Their results show that when sorting by this criteria, there is only one category of employee that prefers to be in the office more often than not: managers over 50.

This was a deeper look into an original finding they had, which was that on average, managers believe workers are most productive in the office full-time, whereas workers believe they are most productive working remotely.

More positive news: among companies that went remote in the pandemic, 82% of HR managers expect remote work to continue.

(1) Retention and (2) attraction of talent were the top reasons they expect remote work to continue.

Like we’ve said before, companies will inevitably bend to the will of their most talented employees, and as more talent wants to work from anywhere, companies and their policies will have to follow suit.

The best companies have acknowledged remote work is here to stay, and the laggards will continue to fall behind in the talent wars.

Elsewhere

• How Allstate moved 95% of its workforce remote in one weekend (Employee Benefit News)

• The companies backtracking on flexible work (BBC)

• Work from home success linked to work/life boundaries (Cornell)

• The financial advantages of a hybrid work model (Forbes)

• [Paywall] This tools suggests cities for remote workers based on their preferences (WSJ)

Happy Valentines Day (week), especially to you lovebirds working in close proximity to each other!

Cheers,
Grant