Everyone's talking about RTO. Here's why a leading expert thinks remote work is 'here to stay.'
- Amazon's RTO order has people questioning the future of remote work.
- But Nick Bloom, a leading authority in WFH, says it is "here to stay."
The pandemic-prompted right to remote work may be in trouble — Amazon hit headlines last month when it ordered all corporate employees back to the office five days a week from January.
One HR expert told Business Insider that, if Amazon's RTO push works, other companies might follow its lead.
But Nick Bloom, a leading expert in remote work, said working from home was "here to stay" as he shared the latest developments in his 20-year research.
In a presentation published Friday, Bloom shared that surveys in 2021 had shown that, on average, employees regarded the right to work two or three days a week from home as valuable as an 8% pay rise, based on 17,087 responses.
Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University, said this was higher among those working in tech and finance — who ranked remote work as valuable as a pay rise worth just over 11% and just over 10%, respectively.
Meanwhile, those working in manufacturing ranked it at just below 6%, Bloom's presentation said.
Bloom's data also found respondents were living farther from their offices. In 2023, his respondents lived on average 27 miles from their workplace. In 2019, before COVID-19 upended work patterns, respondents lived on average "about 15 miles" away, Bloom said.
Bloom broke his findings down by age group, showing his respondents in their 30s and 40s had moved the farthest from their workplaces — from 15 miles pre-pandemic to just over 30 miles in 2023.
Bloom wrote in the presentation that this was "presumably" due to them having children at home. He said last year that parents of young children "have a much stronger preference to work from home."
Bloom concluded his presentation by saying remote work was "here to stay," citing big steps in technology that facilitate it, such as video calls and virtual reality.
Many people ditched their small apartments in big cities to relocate to bigger living spaces in smaller towns, much farther away from the office they previously worked in.
One elder millennial told Business Insider that he took a $35,000 salary cut to take a more junior job within his government agency, which allowed him to relocate for family reasons and be within two hours of his new office, something the agency required.
He said he wished employers were more sympathetic to working from home, adding, "I've proven that it can be done successfully remotely, and I wish they would allow employees the flexibility to do that."
"We all have lives outside of work," he said.