Meet the typical hybrid worker: millennial men making 6 figures who would never come into the office on a Friday
Juliana Kaplan
- Hybrid work has become the preferred schedule for many companies and employees.
- It's a compromise between the pandemic's remote-work revolution and firms' desire for RTO.
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.
Hybrid workers are more likely to be millennial men
One group that's especially swinging from the office to home and back again is millennial men. Data from the WFH Research Project and the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes, compiled for a working paper and provided to Insider, showed that 27% of surveyed working men worked hybrid schedules, compared with 19.5% of surveyed women.
Millennials are most likely to be working hybrid schedules. About 28% of surveyed working millennials were hybrid workers, that survey data showed, compared with about a quarter of Gen Zers and 24% of those age 40 to 49 years old. Just 16% of surveyed boomers worked hybrid schedules.
LinkedIn's Workforce Confidence Index survey found similar results.
"One key reason for millennials' decisions: they're the generation most likely to be parents with young children," George Anders, an editor at LinkedIn, wrote in a survey analysis. "At that stage of life, enjoying a day or two a week without any commute time is a big plus in terms of fitting school drop-offs or pickups into a day's schedule."
Indeed, millennials might be the reason that remote and hybrid work linger. Nick Bloom, a Stanford economist and a work-from-home expert who helps helm the WFH Research Project, told BI that the millennial cohort especially wants to log on remotely. Bloom's research with José Barrero and Steven Davis found that work-from-home intensity, which tracks the percent of paid full days that are worked from home, is highest among millennials in their 30s and 40s; workers with children are especially likely to work from home.
At the same time, millennials were moving the furthest away from their offices compared to pre-pandemic commutes — suggesting that they've settled into a new, less in-person normal.
Hybrid workers are more likely to make six figures and have a few degrees
Hybrid workers tend to make more money than their on-site counterparts and tend to hold more degrees, showing that the ability to work from home some days is still reserved for certain segments of the workforce.
In a Government Accountability Office analysis of American Community Survey data, nearly 60% of those surveyed in the top 25% of earners — meaning that they earned at least $1,731 a week — did any work from home on an average day as of 2021.
Indeed, the data from the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes indicated nearly 57% of surveyed workers earning over $150,000 were hybrid workers, compared with just 13.2% of those surveyed who were earning $10,000 to $20,000 — which was nearly the same for those earning $20,000 to $50,000.
The hybrid-work wage premium skyrockets once workers start making over $50,000. SWAA data indicated that 30.2% of those making $50,000 to $100,000 worked hybrid schedules, with that rising to 41.5% for those surveyed who made $100,000 to $150,000.
And if you're working hybrid, there's a higher likelihood that you have a few degrees on your wall. About 61% of workers surveyed with a Ph.D. were hybrid, compared with about 37% of those surveyed who had a master's or professional degree, the SWAA data showed. Of those with four years of a college degree, 30.4% worked remotely — and that percentage cascaded down with the less formal education a worker had received. About 12% of those surveyed who just reached a high-school graduation were hybrid, compared with 2.3% of those surveyed with less education than a high-school graduation.
Don't expect to find them in the office on Fridays or Mondays
While hybrid workers aren't absent from their offices, don't expect to find them there on either side of the weekend.
Steven Roth, the CEO of the major New York City private landlord Vornado Realty Trust, said in-office Fridays were "dead forever" and in-office Mondays were "touch-and-go." A little under half of the readers polled by Insider on LinkedIn said they wouldn't go into the office on Mondays and Fridays — and just 29% of poll participants said they'd go in on one of those days but not both.
Beyond that anecdotal polling, office-use data backs up the idea that hybrid workers may be starting or ending their weekends at home.
"Very few people are coming in four to five days per week," Anjali Grover, the head of data analytics at Basking, told Insider. Basking, a workplace-analytics platform, tracked office-utilization data from 121 offices across the world from April to June of 2023. In the US, they found Fridays and Mondays saw far fewer office visitors, with offices afflicted by what Grover named "empty-office syndrome" — people know it'll be empty, and that further discourages them from commuting in. Instead, "what we see here is midweek peaks," with workers across all US regions flocking in on Wednesdays.
And, depending on where they are, you may barely see hybrid workers at all. While workers in the Midwest were the most likely to be in the office four to five days a week, only half of those office visits lasted more than six hours — suggesting that even the most in-person workers are stretching the limits of that flexibility.
Are you passionate about hybrid work, or do you have a story to share about hybrid work? Contact this reporter at jkaplan@insider.com.
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