WFH isn't going away
Workers love it, even if managers don't.
My promise to you today: No religion and no politics.
1. Remote work is stabilizing
I don’t know how I’d make it into an office five days a week. I guess I’d figure it out if I had to, but I’d probably also think hard about a career change.
It turns out I’m in the demographic that feels most strongly about this — a 40-something with young children — and you’ll pry WFM from our cold, dead fingers.
Or, just lay us off.
Some employers and governments (including the federal government and Indiana state government) are doing just that by curtailing or ending remote work and telling employees they can go elsewhere if they don’t like it. Despite those efforts, though, remote work is finding a post-pandemic equilibrium — and flexible work seems likely to outlast traditionalist boomer managers.
A new paper by Stanford University researchers finds that work-from-home has stabilized, with age groups adopting it unevenly in some surprising ways.
The authors write:
Young workers in their early 20s are starting out their careers, so they might WFH less often to benefit from the professional development and mentoring opportunities provided by face-to-face meetings in the workplace. Older workers, in their late 40s, 50s, or 60s, likely have other reasons to limit WFH. They might be less comfortable with remote-work technologies, or they might be managers who prefer in-person monitoring. That leaves workers in their 30s and 40s, who are more likely to have young children and appreciate the flexibility of remote work. The biggest predictor of WFH is education, however. Highly educated knowledge workers disproportionately work in jobs that are suitable for some remote work. College and graduate degree-holders have WFH rates that 15 percentage points greater than that of otherwise similar workers with no post-secondary education.
Some other key points:
25% of all work days by U.S. workers 20-64 years old have been remote since 2023.
Remote work saves two hours of commute time per worker, per week.
Women work from home at slightly higher rates (2%-3%) than men.
“Desired WFH rates exceed actual rates in every major demographic group — more so for women, workers with young children, and less educated workers.”
People really, really like remote work.
Children are the biggest drivers of pro-WFH preferences — and I can relate. Parenting is exactly why I value the flexibility.
My wife and I juggle dropoffs and pickups for two children to school and daycare, with our son’s school day not quite lasting the length of a typical workday. That means at least one of us starts work late and ends early (at least, until getting back to work again later) every day.
Plus, at least someone in our family has been sick almost every day this year, which, along with snow days, has made this a difficult couple months.
The headlines on work-from-home are noisy. It’s clicky content, because everyone has an opinion and people love reading about it (which may or may not be why I chose it as a newsletter topic). If you regularly read the news on remote work, you might think it’s in retreat.
Work-from-home is obviously not universal among knowledge workers anymore, as it was during the pandemic, but it is persisting at higher rates than we saw before 2020. It is also clear people want to work remotely even more than they already do, which suggests employers who take hard lines are going to struggle to recruit talent.
Meanwhile, the hardliners aren’t gaining many benefits by chaining people to desks. Research measuring productivity among remote workers does not support the idea that productivity gets lost at home. Everyone except managers of a certain age seems to know this.
In addition to helping individual workers, remote work also is good for society because it is a family-friendly policy. Anyone who thinks Americans should be having more babies should also support letting the parents of those babies spend more of their work hours at home.
2. An ‘X-Files’-esque TV rec
I just finished Jordan Peele’s two-season reboot of “The Twilight Zone” on Amazon Prime. It’s good!
I want to recommend one episode, in particular: “A Traveler,” the fourth installment of the first reboot season. It stars Steven Yeun, who shows up as a mysterious visitor to a small Alaskan town, where a police captain (Greg Kinnear) is in the middle of hosting an annual self-indulgent office Christmas party.
The episode is written by Glen Morgan, an “X-Files” alum, who is also an executive producer on the show. Morgan brings a decidedly “X-Files” vibe, which I love as a big fan of the show (although, Morgan seems to have recycled one of his “X-Files” scripts, “Ice,” for a later episode, “8,” which is arguably the worst of the “Twilight Zone” reboot.)
Overall, Peele’s reboot is a lot of fun and extremely underrated. The episode ratings are shockingly low to me. It’s very likely you didn’t know the reboot existed, which is a shame.
If you’re intrigued, “A Traveler,” is a good place to start.
3. What I wrote
I published two columns this week for IndyStar:
Warm up the Mayflower trucks. MLS is coming to Indy.
Mailbag: Don’t leave Indianapolis for suburban schools
4. What I read
Brian Phillips on Gene Hackman:
Hollywood is full of little guys who act big; Gene Hackman was a big guy who knew how to be small. When the moment called for it, when he was playing a bullying cop or a football player turned private eye, he could bludgeon you with physicality every bit as much as Sean Connery could, but Connery was always larger-than-life, and Hackman was a genius at playing life-sized. With Connery, the essence of his charisma was that he always seemed two inches taller than anyone else on the screen. When he played a hapless professor, in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the effect was giddily comic, because you sensed deep down that Henry Jones could take Indiana, and probably all the Nazis, in a fight. When Hackman played a timid egghead—say, the surveillance expert in The Conversation, Francis Ford Coppola’s classic paranoid thriller from 1974—there was nothing funny about it unless Hackman wanted it to be. He knew how to pull back the boundaries of his own presence, like someone turning the dimmer on a light.
Thank you to everyone who read and responded to last week’s post on why I believe in God. That post’s reach far exceeded the number of subscribers to this newsletter, so I really appreciate everyone who shared it. I’m not doing hardly any promotion. Your word of mouth is how this newsletter spreads!