A Pew Research Center Survey Indicates Workers Are Resistant To Returning To The Office

Although President-elect Donald Trump is determined for federal workers to return to the office, nearly half of the workers surveyed by the Pew Research Center indicated that they would search for a new job in order to continue teleworking if they were ordered to return to the office.

According to the Pew Research Center, although companies agree with Trump’s stance on curtailing remote work, there are plenty of Americans who are not interested in returning to the office and indicated they would look for a new job if they were forced to return to their offices.

Per their survey, there are three categories of workers who are more inclined to leave their jobs if required to be back in an office full-time. Those workers are women, workers under the age of 50, and workers who are currently full-time teleworkers.

Notably, the survey excludes workers who are self-employed, such as freelancers, but it also indicates that in 2024, more workers say that their employers have required them to work a certain number of days per week or month than they did in 2023.

As might be expected, workers who work primarily or solely from home would not want a hybrid situation, and vice versa; in both cases, a solid majority (over 60%) would not want to exchange their particular work arrangements.

According to The New York Times, companies like Amazon, JPMorgan, and AT&T have been playing up the benefits of office culture in statements announcing their plans for employees to return to work.

For example, JPMorgan wrote in a memo to its employees that it would basically be eliminating its hybrid work option.

“We know that some of you prefer a hybrid schedule and respectfully understand that not everyone will agree with this decision,” JPMorgan wrote. “We feel that now is the right time to solidify our full-time in-office approach.”

According to Harry Holzer, an economist at Georgetown University, the renewed push for a return to work-mandate comes as employers assume they have the leverage in an economy that has less need to cater to the workforce.

“It becomes like another dimension of compensation — in a really tight labor market, employees get their way more, employers might not pressure them to come back because they might want to quit,” Holzer told the New York Times. “In a labor market where there’s more slack, employers might be less worried about that.”

However, Nick Bloom, a professor of economics at Stanford University who studies workplace trends, told Vox in 2024 that a full-on in-office policy could backfire, particularly among young workers.

“[O]ne way this plays out is they have a ton of quits. They find it harder to hire,” Bloom told the outlet. “I know from talking to my own undergrads and MBAs that they don’t want to go in five days a week. So it’s going to be harder to hire them.”

Bloom continued, “It also turns out, if you’re hiring folks remotely, you can hire a lot better employee for your money because you’re not looking locally, you’re looking nationally or even globally.”

Alex DiLeonardo, the chief people officer for Citadel Securities, a Miami-based financial firm, indicated that the tension between in-office and telework allows companies to evaluate their roles in the social contract between an employee and an employer.

“As somebody who spent my entire career in the people space, I think it’s great that all of these different forms of working are causing organizations and societies to ask questions about how best to enable individuals to succeed in their different roles and their different careers,” DiLeonardo told Vox. “But I also think that leaves a ton of room for organizations to choose the kind of environment that they provide and be very clear in the social contract about what it means to work at this company.”

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