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Something about the great return to the office is meaningless.

Over the past few years, all types of adult employees have tightened their rules to work from home.

They decided that the time has come for many of their employees, in Words From the British businessman who turned into television, Lord Alan Schujer, “to return Pomes to the office.”

Not all companies joined Goldman Sachs and Tesla and demanded a full -time return. but Many follow IBM and Deutsche Bank and even zoomingChild poster for a remote work revolution, and bring the most striking homework rules.

But this is the strange thing: so far, at least, statistics indicate the work of the home levels that have been significantly fixed. This is confusing, even for experts who were studying a long time before making the epidemic prevailing. Professor Nick Bloom told me this week: “I really felt confused.”

for him research,, Which includes monthly surveys for thousands of American workers, shows that the work share they do from the house increased from less than 10 percent before Covid to 61 percent at the height of the epidemic in 2020, before returning to about 30 percent in 2022 .

But these levels have been noticeably fixed since late 2023, and have never decreased to less than 26 percent. You can see a similar pattern at office visit levels.

So what explains the gap between this stability is stubborn to work from a distance and all the news that is withdrawn to the office?

It can be the issue of perception. The incomplete news rules mean that the company is doing something that is not popular or disturbing, such as reducing the working days remotely, tends to be more worthy than those that adhere to the usual work.

Perhaps the idea of ​​a distance is always unable with the least exciting reality of many employers who have been calmly connected to the current hybrid work arrangements.

There are reasons to believe this.

Some of The biggest fans Work from home is smaller, smaller than companies, the least well -known, as Bloom indicates, among the fastest growing companies. Their expansion may be compensated for in homework in the biggest business.

Also, the longer the longer hybrid work, the more clearly its advantages will be for some companies.

I sympathize with work critics from the distance who are concerned that home workers who distract their attention can be less productive, less responsive and more separate from their counterparts in the office. It is better to do some library work personally, especially if it requires checks in actual time and fast decisions. But I am not surprised by research that shows the increasingly common hybrid style to work for three days a week in the office and can make two at home both workers and financing managers are happy.

When a large Chinese technology company called Trip.com conducted a six -month experience to compare these workers with full -time colleagues, I found that hybrid work has strengthened job satisfaction, decisively, declining rates of quitting a third. There was no sign of a decrease in performance.

Managers were more positive about hybrid work after the experiment before, to the extent that when the experiment ended, the company decided to extend the hybrid policy to all employees at the same time.

Their logic was simple, according to paper Bloom and his colleagues were published in the experience last year. “Each cost of the company costs approximately $ 20,000 in employment and training, and therefore reducing a third in the depletion of the company would generate millions of dollars from savings.”

Since Trip.com announced its decision, other Chinese technology companies have adopted similar hybrid policies.

Despite all of this, the year 2025 may be the year in which the work of home prices has finally found. Companies like Amazonand PWC and Starbucks Last year’s newspaper headlines topped the tougher bases that were not scheduled to start until January. More strict policies in other works, such as WPPA group of ads, does not start until April. Donald Trump, who I command Federal workers return to the full -time office on the first day of his presidency, can encourage more executives to act. We may approach the end of the long calm before the storm returns to the office.

However, even if this happens, the idea that the patterns of work will return to what they were before the epidemic, at this stage, is extremely difficult to imagine.