Home office makes Americans save BRL 24 thousand/year – 02/22/2023 – Market

In her inauguration speech upon assuming her third term as mayor of Washington in January this year, Muriel Bowser warned the Joe Biden government: remote work is killing the US capital.

With much of the civil service still working remotely, the central regions of the American capital never recovered from the shock of Covid-19 and remain empty. As a result, bars and restaurants have closed, cafes have reduced opening hours and the city hall is concerned about the collection capacity.

But it failed to agree with the employees. A study of the home office conducted by researchers from the universities of Stanford, Chicago and the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de Mexico in large American cities points out that workers want to spend more days away from the office.

That’s because the economy is high. In Washington, workers on average spend $4,051 a year on meals, shopping and entertainment close to the workplace.

In more expensive cities like New York, the savings reach US$ 4,661 (R$ 24 thousand). In a city this size, savings per worker means $12 billion has been saved in the immediate vicinity of the office, according to a Bloomberg calculation.

It is precisely this that causes the impact denounced by Mayor Bowser and by other leaders across the country. In Washington alone, 48 restaurants were closed in 2022, according to the industry association, even with government aid.

The city is the most affected by home office among the most populous regions of the country, according to data from WFH Research, the monthly report on remote work made by the cited researchers. In the capital, there was a 37% reduction in days worked in the office. New York had 32.9%.

According to the city, a quarter of workers in Washington are employed by the federal government, which occupies a third of offices in the city. Before the pandemic, only 3% of federal workers had remote jobs.

Republican lawmakers have moved against that and last month introduced a bill in the House to force federal employees to return to their offices within 30 days.

“America wins when the place where people come together to change the world is buzzing,” said the mayor. “Noise from recent college grads and interns, the startup that has the big idea to meet with federal partners, business travelers who are coming to Washington for work, and, of course, Capitol Hill lobbyists.”

For the city hall, if the buildings are not reoccupied, the ideal is to transform them into housing so as not to turn the center into a dead zone. “Converting offices to housing is key to unlocking the potential of a reimagined, more vibrant downtown,” said Bowser, who has a goal of bringing 100,000 residents to the area.

In New York City, Mayor Eric Adams was another who urged workers to return to their offices. “You can’t stay in your pajamas at home all day. That’s not what we are as a city”, he said in February last year, saying that the end of the home office was vital for the city’s economy to recover.

CEOs of large companies have also made calls for the end of the home office, such as David Solomon, from Goldman Sachs, and Jamie Dimon, from JPMorgan Chase. Despite the appeals, remote work is resilient.

If until 2019 only 4.7% of work was done from home (an already significant jump over the 1% found in 1990, provided by the internet), today more than a quarter of Americans work in this modality. In January, 27.2% of the days worked were remotely, according to the WFH survey.

The highest level in the survey took place in the first survey, in May 2020, still at the beginning of the pandemic, with 61.5% of the work being done remotely. Between 2021 and mid-2022, this share fluctuated between 30% and 40%, and since August last year it has been below 30%.

Only 6 out of 10 American workers are working completely in-person, according to the study. In a hybrid way, which mixes days at home and days at the office, they are 28%. And fully remote are 12.7% of workers.

Employers are open to this hybrid regime —on average, the request is to work 2.2 days from home, according to the study).

Jose Maria Barrero, a professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico and author of the study, tells Folha that this is how the world of work should be organized from now on.

“The pandemic has taught that many jobs can be done effectively at least partially from home, and that’s something you can no longer reverse,” he says. “Hybrid working is most popular for two components. First there’s the part of the work you can do from any computer. Then there’s the component of interacting with colleagues, and there’s no substitute for socializing with colleagues when doing certain jobs “, he states.

Barrero argues that it is precisely remote work that is not going to kill American cities precisely because hybrid work should be the most popular modality, but he claims that governments need to create mechanisms to attract people to city centers for reasons other than strictly related to work —such as leisure, for example.

Another survey, by the security company Kastle, which monitors the occupation of companies on a weekly basis, shows that the presence varies according to the day of the week. On Fridays, only 32.3% of the work was done in person in January, the day with the lowest occupancy followed by Monday. Offices are most crowded on Tuesdays, with 59.6% attendance, according to company data.