Summer will soon be over – but is anyone coming back to the office?

The number of people working remotely has steadily declined since its pandemic peak.

Remote working – and specifically, working from home – grew rapidly during 2020, as a result of COVID-19, with its lockdowns and travel restrictions.

Once the pandemic restrictions eased, however, there was no mass return to the status quo, with remote working becoming much more widely accepted.

In the US, the number of people working from home, at least part of the week, reached 47% during the pandemic peak in 2020 according to research by investment bank Goldman Sachs.

The figure is now down to around 20-25% of the workforce, which is a fairly significant decline. That said, according to the bank only 2.6% of people worked from home, prior to the pandemic.

In the UK, the return to the office has been even more dramatic. A study by CMD Recruitment found that just 14% of UK employees now work remotely, compared to 38% in June 2020.

The drop in the numbers working remotely on both sides of the Atlantic shows how views on flexible, remote, and home working are still divided.

According to Dan Barfoot, CMD’s operations manager, over half of employees now have a “return to the office” mandate. The firm’s research also suggested that 90% of employers intend to enforce office-based working this year.

CRBE, a global property consultancy, found similar trends in its 2024 European Office Occupier Sentiment Survey. For example, over three-quarters of businesses have an “attendance policy”, although it’s only mandatory in half of them.

That doesn’t mean everyone will be back in the office come September. CBRE found that 60% of firms intend to reduce their office space, although a quarter expect to expand theirs.

As ever, it’s all in the detail. Anecdotally, colleagues report that offices are largely empty. Walk around city centers, and they certainly feel less busy. However, only a minority of job roles are now truly fully remote. Instead, it’s more about flexibility.

Flexible friends

More and more employees view being able to work flexibly as a benefit. In competitive sectors, such as technology, employers are using flexible and remote working as a recruitment and retention tool.

Flexible working also helps employers improve diversity and inclusion and the trend towards flexibility is supported by legislation.

In 2022 the UK government introduced a new right to flexible working, a move backed by bodies such as TechUK. The British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) estimates that three-quarters of firms now offer at least some form of flexible working.

The exact numbers working flexibly does, though, vary from industry to industry. The BCC figures show the highest percentage of flexible working is in business-to-business services, with manufacturing and business-to-consumer services, including retail, rather lower.

Some of this is inevitable. In some sectors, the options for flexible working are simply more limited. Employers can offer different shift patterns, or possibly, the ability to work from a different location. Some particularly progressive employers are looking at four-day weeks. Large-scale home working, however, is just not going to happen.

Remote support

By contrast, the technology sector has long been an industry that has allowed and even encouraged remote work. Although there have been some high-profile examples of tech sector employers asking staff to come back to work, flexible and remote working is now largely embedded in the culture and practice of the IT sector.

While the likes of Google or Apple can push for office work, smaller competitors are more likely to offer flexible work to gain a competitive edge.

Industry analyst Gartner, for example, points out that CIOs need to offer work-life balance and “a flexible location” as part of their employment value proposition, if they are to compete for scarce talent.

Gartner goes further and suggests that IT departments won’t be able to recruit the people they need, unless they embrace “multiple flexible work models”.

It’s worth noting that Gartner is talking about IT workers across all industries, not just within the tech sector. But wherever they work, IT specialists are more likely to want to work remotely; analyst Mbula Schoen found that 58% of IT workers were only looking for remote work, against 42% of non-IT employees.

These and other research figures also raise questions about our definitions of flexible and remote working. Flexible working covers a much wider set of circumstances than whether or not someone comes into the office. But it’s remote working – including working from home – that continues to put pressure on IT departments.

As CBRE’s survey found, there are significant and perhaps long-term, shifts in the way we work. Just 2% of office workers are back face-to-face five days a week. A much larger number – 32% — come in three days a week, and 39%, just two days.

This will change the way IT supports knowledge workers. Flexible, remote working is not the same as working from a permanent desk, or even from a fixed home office.

The technical issues around remote working are documented well enough. Firms need to ensure security, privacy, and data protection. They need applications that work as well remotely as they do in the office; the cloud is a great help here. They also need tools to support remote devices and to ensure they are covered by the enterprise backup and recovery plans.

Above all, remote workers need to be supported with high-quality collaboration and communication tools so they feel part of the workplace community, even when they aren’t there in person. These are all lessons we learned four years ago.

The challenge for IT teams now, though, is to balance support for remote working technology with the needs of those who prefer office-based work and those who would rather have a mix of both.

Business at sandwich shops and coffee bars might still be lower than their owners would like, but the demands on IT teams will only increase, as the summer draws to a close.