Whether they're logging on from their house, from the gym, or from the library, some workers don't want to be in the office full time.
Many of their employers have landed on a compromise: hybrid work.
Felicia, a 53-year-old who left her six-figure job over a full return-to-office mandate, previously told Insider that her schedule of three days at home and two in the office was a perfect work-life balance. She said being back in the office full time dragged down her productivity and left her back at the mercy of a long commute.
"I just got to the point where it just wasn't working for me," she said. "And I walked away from over a $100,000-per-year salary to seek positions that have hybrid options so that I can have that work-life balance."
In the return-to-office push, the Goldilocks proposition of hybrid schedules has won out at many major companies, including Microsoft and Google. Gallup defines hybrid workers as anyone who works remotely between 10% and 100% of their working time.
That's a solution workers seem to like: 68% of the 2,367 US adults surveyed by Bankrate in July said they supported a hybrid work schedule over fully in-person work. That support was much higher among members of Gen Z and millennials, while 54% of boomers said they'd rather work hybrid schedules than in-person. Among workers whose jobs are remote-capable, more prefer and expect to work hybrid than exclusively remotely, data from Gallup indicates.
Some are achieving that dream. LinkedIn's Workforce Confidence Index survey, which asked about 93,000 Americans about their work arrangements from August 15 to August 25, found that 18% of surveyed American professionals said they were working hybrid schedules. In a spring 2022 survey of 25,000 Americans by McKinsey, about 58% of surveyed workers said they had the opportunity to work from home at least one day a week. Gallup's Hybrid Work Indicator suggests that 52% of US employees in remote-capable jobs are in hybrid roles.
In total, 16.4% of establishments across the US had their employees "teleworking" some of the time in 2022, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's far larger than the percentage of the workforce who were working remotely full time — they came in at about 3% — and speaks to how hybrid schedules are more widespread. Even so, the data showed about two-thirds of the American workforce rarely or never teleworked.
So, who are the hybrid workers of America? They're likely to work in sectors such as tech, be highly educated, and make six figures.