🙌 40% of US workers are at least partially remote

Good Morning,

I hope if you had to work on Monday, it wasn’t from an office!

Last week, we wrote about the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ final 2022 WFH figures: 34% of US workers were at least partially remote.

Stanford moves a little more quickly. They just released a working paper with more recent data, providing today’s first highlight ⬇️

🙌 Today, about 40% of all US workers are able to work either fully remote or hybrid. 12% of US workers are fully remote, and 29% are hybrid. (Stanford)

🏡 Remote work reduced turnover and increased diversity at Airbnb. One year after announcing complete flexibility for all employees, the company attributes these improvements to their WFH policy. (Fortune)

🌳 Several “Zoom towns” now have more workers seeking remote jobs. Many employees who took advantage of remote policies by moving to places like Bend, Oregon, are being asked to return to the office. This means they’re seeking new remote jobs and may start companies at higher-than-average rates. (CNBC)

PS: is this you? Check out our job board!

💼 307 professions ranked by WFH prevalence were listed by the New York Times last week. Leading the pack were Economists and Market Researchers (68%) and Writers and Authors (65%); see top 10 below. Unsurprisingly, categories like Opticians (4%) and Painters (3%) had very low remote flexibility. (New York Times)

📈 Lower-income and less-educated workers have seen slight increases in remote work since 2021, even though national averages for time spent working remotely in all occupations collectively since 2021 has slightly decreased. (Wall Street Journal)

❌ Return to office policies are harming retention, as shown by a slew of recent reports. Notably, 42% of companies that enforced RTO policies saw higher attrition rates, and 78% of employees would consider leaving their company if their flexible work arrangements were taken away. (Entrepreneur)

🤦 Don’t believe articles that say “fully remote is less productive.” The studies that The Economist cited last week to make this claim are about call center employees that were forced to go remote during Covid, data entry employees in India, IT employees in Asia, and chess players.

Unless you fall into one of these specific categories, don’t let your boss fall for this claim that office work will make you more productive - it’s comparing apples to oranges. (The Economist)

PS: If understanding how organizations manipulate data and studies is interesting to you, you may like the book How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff.

💡 Here’s a list of 40 WFH items that may enhance your remote work experience. Yes, it’s true, Buzzfeed listicles live on. This one is a good read if you’re thinking about improving your setup. (Buzzfeed)

🟢 And one more product to know about: the illuminated, physical Mute button from MuteMe. For $40, you can have total peace of mind that you’re either mic’d up or on mute, and anyone in your physical office can see too, based on the light color displayed. (MuteMe)

A company that’s been hit heavily by RTO mandates, Twitter, is bracing for Meta’s competitor “Threads” to launch tomorrow.

Eager to see how it plays out, especially given how Instagram’s “Stories” and “Reels” have competed so well vs. Snapchat and TikTok.

That said, Twitter is a force to be reckoned with, and I hope it continues to churn out hits like this:

Cheers,
Grant