Future of Work: Why Remote and Hybrid Are Here to Stay

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Kara Swisher: Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher. And I'm Scott Galloway. And this is our special three-part series on the future of work, where we look at the business and technology trends that will shape the workforce, employment, and the very nature of work. Today, we're going to do a deep dive on remote work and what the future of your workspace looks like.

Scott Galloway: Some numbers to get us started. About 20 to 25% of workers in the U.S. work from home at least part of the week, according to Goldman Sachs. The percentage of U.S. companies offering flexible work increased from 51% to 62% during 2023, according to Forbes, though 38% of those businesses still prefer their workforce to be in person.

Kara Swisher: We're going to talk through all of this with our guest who's been studying remote work for the last 20 years. Nick Bloom is an economics professor at Stanford Business School. He's been called the guru of remote work. Nick, welcome, Guru.

Nick Bloom: Thank you for having me on. Great to be here. No problem. I've been doing remote work for the last 20 years, but we can get into that in a minute.

Kara Swisher: You've written that the return to office debate is over. Work from home is here to stay. Why do you think remote work has won the battle, so to speak?

Nick Bloom: Basically, it's profitable for companies. I mean, that is the bottom line. We live in a capitalist economy. Why is it profitable for companies? If you look at hybrid, which is when you come in, say, two, three days a week. Turns out that doesn't really affect performance, but has a big reduction on turnover rates and turnover is expensive. If you look at fully remote, where you're at the office five days a week, turns out that's hugely cost-effective because you don't have to pay for offices. Imagine a back office staff typically in this setup, so someone doing HR, payroll, data entry. You don't have to pay for office space for them, and you can hire them nationally or globally. So in both cases, it's really profitable for firms to go to hybrid or fully remote.

Scott Galloway: Sorry, we hear a lot about the success of the hybrid model. Where does that fit in?

Nick Bloom: Hybrid's about 30% of people. So I'll give you some rough numbers. Of Americans, 60% never work from home at all. So they come in every day, think essential services, retail manufacturing. Another 30% are hybrid. So I'm at Stanford. Most of my students, MBAs, execs are in this hybrid world. You're typically going in three days a week, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, home Monday, Friday. And then there's a final 10% that are fully remote. That is mostly actually back office, you know, data entry, call centers, payroll, but there are some high-end tech coders, folks like that.

Kara Swisher: So let's bring in Scott then, because Scott is a proponent of in-office work. Go ahead, Scott.

Scott Galloway: Nice to meet you. I'm fascinated by this stuff. My sense is this is the change coming out of COVID. Everything's sort of, most everything's return to normal except for this. And I'm fascinated by the knock-on effects. And I'll list two, one economic and one societal. One, it strikes me that there's going to be an enormous transfer of trillions of dollars in value from commercial to residential real estate. And two, I've said for people under the age of 30, I think it's a disaster because while we don't like to talk about it, relationships begin at work and young people need socialization. So I see it as one an enormous economic shift and two really detrimental to the relationships and even the mental health of young people and I'm curious if you agree with those theses.

Nick Bloom: Yes, it depends on what you mean by remote. Young people tend to want to come into the office. I'll just give you an example. I actually polled my undergrads at Stanford. I have a class of 50 of them and polled them. They said basically half of them want to work from home precisely zero days a week when they start their first job. And the other half said one. And the reasons they gave were like, I want to be mentored. I want to be social, as you mentioned, Scott. And also they said, look, my apartment is not going to be very big. There's five of us sharing it together. Where am I going to work from home? I don't want to be in my bedroom. When you look at folks in their late 20s, particularly 30s and 40s. So it's interesting, ask my MBA and exec students this, and you get a very different answer. They typically say- Well, they have kids. Yeah, exactly right. They want to be in the office three days a week, work from home two or two and three, and they say, yeah, I have kids. I have a spouse maybe at home. I live further away. There are also some people that want to be fully remote. They may live far from the office, but the bigger thing is there's just an enormous mix. So it's not true most people want to be fully remote. A third of people do roughly, but most people want to go in typically two, three days a week. And for reasons you say, they want to learn, they want to socialize. They just don't want to go in five days a week. That's where the grind ends up being.

Scott Galloway: Who are the, just a follow-on question there. But when you're talking about U.S. commercial real estate, it's one of the largest asset classes in the world. And when you look like, I mean, this really is a shock to that asset class. If people are coming in three days a week, that's at least mathematically a net destruction and 40% of the demand for certain types of asset, this asset class. What do you think, what are the second-order effects economically of people no longer going to these giant steel structures that like the pyramids we come to marvel at, but maybe, you know, may not use any functional purpose moving forward? What do you think are, if you were advising a hedge fund on the ramifications economically of remote work, what are the second and third order effects here?

Nick Bloom: Yes, winter has come for commercial real estate. It's not quite as bad as you'd think. So the office, the typical office worker is in say three days a week. Turns out they all want to come in on the same three days, which is Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. So this is what's called the hybrid squeeze. But yes, it's still bad. There are some people that are fully remote, and there are some companies that are shifting around. The big impact, what we see is what's called the donut effect. So big U.S. cities, big cities around the world are seeing folks move out and spending move out from the city center out to the suburbs. So take San Francisco, a city I know well as I live nearby. Downtown it's really struggling. People are only going in, say, three days a week. They're spending less on lunch and coffee. A bunch of folks have said, I don't need to live in the city anymore if I don't need to come in every day. So the suburbs are booming. So the suburbs are really up. It's the city centers that are struggling. And there's just been a kind of shift to donut in the sense the center's going off, but the edges have done actually very well.

Kara Swisher: Interesting. So you do think remote work numbers are actually going to increase totally remote in the next few years. You've described the trajectory of work from home as a sort of Nike swoosh curve. There's going to surge after a brief plateau. So certainly in the long run, it's going up. That's a pretty safe bet. The reason is the technology is getting better. So the number of folks working from home is up about fivefold versus pre-pandemic. And so every hardware firm, software firm, think Microsoft, Google, Apple, all the startups, all the venture capitalists I talked to out in the Valley are very focused on better technology. So right now, we're doing this on Riverside, on small laptops, they're so, so audiovisual. If you do five, 10 years from now, that's going to be massively better, maybe holograms, maybe 3D. That is going to make it more appealing and more effective to be hybrid and remote. So in the long run, the trend is very clear. In fact, we have data amazingly going back to work from home in the U.S. back to 1965. So if you go back, looking back about 50 years, what you can see is it's been doubling roughly every 15 years. So it's been on a pretty steep long run upward trend with a huge surge in the pandemic. But I think that trend is going to resume in a few years to just gradual long run growth.

Scott Galloway: A lot of CEOs and company leaders continue to want their employees back in the office saying it's better for productivity and collaboration. Amazon's Andy Jassy wrote in a 2023 memo that collaborating and inventing is easier and more effective when we're in person. JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon has said that remote work doesn't really work for creativity and spontaneity. It doesn't really work for management teams. I talked to a bunch of young people and one of their CEOs did a similar thing and they said, and he was doing it from his house in Hawaii. He was ordering us around from his house in Hawaii. So can you talk a little bit about this? Because if leaders don't want this, is it just there's going to be new leaders that don't care? Or do they have a point?

Nick Bloom: No, they certainly have a point. So to be clear, most people are going to be hybrid. So tell you what Andrew Jassy is doing at Amazon. So Amazon is having folks come in three days a week. And if I owned Amazon stock, I'd probably do about the same. So you just don't need to be in five days a week. So you can get your creativity juices, your connectivity, your mentoring. If you're well-organized and teams come in together for three days, the other two days, you save them the commute, it's quiet, you can concentrate. So that's kind of where things have settled down, actually. If you look at managers, professionals, they're typically now are coming in three days a week.

Scott Galloway: So as a Gen X slash boomer that's run companies, I'll give you a reductive analysis and you tell me where I've got it wrong. My sense is that this is an enormous unlock for what I call caregivers, people taking care of kids, people taking care of seniors. Because it frees up to sometimes two plus hours a day for them to care for other people or just take 15 minutes to go check on dad or the kids or whatever. A huge unlock. At the same time, I do think that, and it increases retention. It opens up a whole swath of people who might otherwise decide to leave or they decide to leave the corporate world later. At the same time, I do think you're really missing an element of productivity. And that is when I was running companies, I would get eye contact with somebody and think, oh, I want to talk to them about something, grab them, pull them into a conference room, talk to them really quickly, as opposed to scheduling a Zoom call. It does strike me that the companies, there will be an outlier group of companies in certain services industries that demand everybody be in the office all the time, that shoot out the rest in front of the rest of everyone because of that creativity and that serendipity of in-person. What do you think of the notion that It increases retention, but there'll be a class of companies, really high-performing companies, that see in-the-office mandate as a competitive weapon.

Nick Bloom: So it's a good hypothesis. I'm certainly on board that you need some days a week in for collaboration, communication. If you look in the data, so if you look at, say, the Flex Index, it's looked at U.S. companies, including the S&P 1500. What you see is companies that are somewhat more remote are actually growing faster. Now, that's a correlation. It doesn't mean causation because, for example, tech firms tend to be more remote. They tend to also grow faster as an industry. But there certainly isn't any evidence that, say, hauling folks back into the office for five days a week. In fact, there's another study that came from Pittsburgh about full return to offices. Company performance doesn't improve after you haul them back in. What seems to happen is employees get upset and you see attrition rates go up. So I'm involved in advising. I'm an investor in a few companies. I'm totally on board with, say, two, three days a week. The thing I'd push back on is five days a week. Why do you need people in on Friday? There's lots of evidence that people benefit from a bit of quiet time, a bit of reflection, a lack of commute at least one, maybe two days a week. And that's where the tension is.

Kara Swisher: Well, let me just follow up on that. I'll take the other side now, or the more progressive view. And that is, I've noticed, not a data-driven, but anecdotal evidence that there's a huge correlation between back-to-the-office mandates and companies run by guys in their 50s who have someone else taking care of their kids and can afford to live near work. So yes, the Pittsburgh study is pretty fascinating. It said, look, we've looked at the RTO mandates for the S&P 500. There are 137 of them that have put them in place. They said three things. Firstly, they tend to happen when the company's doing badly. So it's kind of things that get going wrong, you're casting around for an excuse and you blame it on work from home. They also said it tends to happen in companies with an older male CEO. So you're right on the numbers there. Fact two is they matched it up to Glassdoor data on employee sentiment. And not surprisingly, employees didn't like it, sentiment dives. More interestingly their view on the manager ability also drops. So they tend to be more skeptical of the ability of their manager. And then fact three they found is they looked at performance after the RTO mandate and stock returns. They said it was flat. So it's not worse, but it's not better. So, you know, I kind of read that. And the UPS and a few other announcements recently have felt a bit like this. A company's hit a rough patch, maybe bad luck, maybe bad management. You know, the CEO's had one more roll of the dice. And that roll of the dice is to blame our work from home and haul everyone back in and buy themselves another six months to a year. I kind of read that as probably exactly true. It's an old guy who wants things the same.

Nick Bloom: Let's take a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk about the impact of AI on remote work. And we'll ask the professor, the other professor, possibly the better professor, for a few predictions.

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Scott Galloway: Scott, we're back with our special series on the future of work. We're talking with Stanford professor Nick Bloom, who's been researching remote work for decades. AI is proving to be a double-edged sword when it comes to workforce, both creating and replacing jobs. I talk about it endlessly. Talk about what it means for remote work from your perspective.

Nick Bloom: Yeah, Kara, I think the group most at risk from AI are fully remote workers. So if I think of technology, I mean, I live in Stanford in Silicon Valley, so I see this all the time. If I think of technology, you can break it down into software and hardware, and the hardware to replace people like us is terrible. If you created a Nick robot, it's going to be vast and clunky and cost millions of dollars and terrify everyone because it just doesn't look remotely human. But for the software, for the kind of actions and activities I can do, we're getting pretty good. There's a lot of stuff that can pass the Turing test. So what that means is if you're doing a fully remote job, that is relatively repetitive. Think call center, think data entry, think payroll. That kind of thing is at real risk of being replaced by AI. On the other extreme, if you're a manager, say, coming in three days a week, maybe working remotely for two, I don't think you're at much risk in the near term. Because the kind of things you do, mentoring in person, taking people into side rooms, having team lunches. You know, there's no physical robot that can come anywhere near doing that. And by the way, coders, I've been talking to a lot of coders lately. A lot of this stuff will be done by AI coding itself. It will become, anyone will be a coder from what, that's the big hope, presumably.

Kara Swisher: The Wall Street Journal also had a piece the other week headlined, Americans don't care as much about work and it isn't just Gen Z. The article noted that while the labor market looks like it did before the pandemic, the nature of labor has changed profoundly with career and work, not as central to people's lives. So it's kind of dovetailing into not being able to go into work and then not wanting to go into work and then not liking working.

Nick Bloom: Yes, there's some evidence. I mean, you're reading the tea leaves here, but there's some evidence that Americans are less keen on working. If you look at working hours, they're trending down a little bit. People claim that the pandemic made us realize how mortal we are. I'm not sure how strong that is. It's certainly true Americans work insanely long hours. If you compare us to Europe, we're working- Yeah, compared to Europe. We're becoming Europeans now, right? Yeah. And the crazy thing is Americans and Europeans used to work the same hours in the 60s. I don't know if people realize this, but in the 50s and 60s, we're on the same hours. Americans took all of that growth, all that income and productivity we've had over the last 50 years and used it just to spend more money. We have bigger TVs, faster, larger cars and houses. Europeans instead use that to take a bit more time off. So Europeans are a bit less rich, but they have more holidays. And yes, I could see in the longer run, you know, folks decide that they want to get paid a bit less and work a few hours per week.

Scott Galloway: Do you have kids? Yes, I have four kids spanning, what, eight to 20. So a wide range of ages. When they come into the work world and they said, dad, I've heard you're pretty good at this stuff. What type of culture or company would you advise young people to look for and ultimately deploy human capital when they're young? What are the components of culture that you think young people should be looking at when they choose an employer?

Nick Bloom: I get asked this a lot. I actually have a number of undergrad advisors, as well, it's not just my kids, but students. I am generally steering them away from fully remote companies. So fully remote is great, but I suggest generally do that later in your career. I actually have one undergrad right now. She's doing incredibly well, has a great offer from a fully remote company. I worry a bit. I worry about the ability to learn, to network, et cetera, if you're in your early 20s doing that. If you're in your- Mentorship. Yeah, exactly. Take another extreme in the other direction. You're 35. You have three young kids. You're struggling to live in New York City because it's too expensive. You want to move out. You want to stay with the current employer. They offer you fully right. That's now something that's seen potentially quite appealing. You've learned a lot. You have a lot of connectivity out of work. It's the way to stick with the current job. So it's very much a life cycle stage thing. The other interesting thing, by the way, talking to companies is the tension I've heard from them a lot is they say, look, the 20-somethings want to come in and be mentored, but they need to be mentored by somebody. And the by somebody tends to be the early to mid-30s and 40s. And these are the people that don't want to come in. And they're saying we have this real tension that somebody's He's got to do the mentoring as well as being mentored. Yeah, that's true. The people that don't want to come in are the ones that should help them. It's work flexibility is what you're talking about that people have to get in the mindset of, correct? The idea of being flexible. And work has not been the most flexible of places for most of my career, for sure. Although I have been almost fully remote forever, just because I insisted on it. But is that like an asset for managers going forward being flexible and not having answers or when you talking to managers what is the thing you would tell them One is on working from home I would probably set a schedule for your team. So if you're going to go hybrid, which is standard, I'd make sure that folks come in on the same day. The three of us are working together. There's not much point, Scott in on Monday, Kyra, you in on Tuesday, I'm in on Wednesday, because we don't come in for the bagels or the office. We come in to see each other. So one thing would be just pick the same days, say, I don't know, Tuesday, Wednesday. Intentional. Exactly. What I call organized. The other is focused much more on performance and achievements and outcomes rather than inputs. So, you know, old style in the office management is desk watching. So Scott's my manager, he's watching. I'm at my desk working away. When he walks by is my screen on Word or is on Champions League. You can't do that on a home. So what needs to be much more the focus on working from home is performance. Do I meet my sales targets? Is my output good, et cetera? That is best for the company. It's also, it turns out to be best for the employee because it means if I'm at home on that day, I want to go pick my kids up or go to the dentist. I can do that and make up for it in the evening. So that's the big, so what, when I talk to companies, much more performance management, it's good for both sides and less desk and time watching.

Nick Bloom: I just want to highlight that it would be so, it would be so Champions League. And most importantly, Nick, who's your club? Who's your team? This will give away the date. My club is Tottenham Hotspur. They had a disastrous weekend. First. All right. We're brothers from another mother. Best venue in all of the UK. I'm sorry I interrupted you. Let him finish, Scott Galloway. Go ahead. No, no, no. I was about to say, I just, I watched the Fulham match. It was just too painful. At three nil down, I was like, oh my God. I haven't, you know, it's just too bad. All right. You two have to get back to work now. Stop this. Stop this ridiculous, whatever you're talking about here. But this special episode is all about the future of work. Can you, I would like a prediction from you. What is your prediction where you see remote and hybrid work in five, 10 years or any old prediction you want to make, Professor Bloom?

Nick Bloom: Other than Arsenal wins, then it's top of the table. I'm sorry, go ahead. Whatever that means. Interesting. So for the US, I think hybrid will grow. Hybrid is kind of the future coming in, say, two, three days a week, working from home two, three days a week. fully remote is less obvious. Initially you think, well, wouldn't fully remote also grow? The big threat to it is both offshoring. So if you're fully remote, a bunch of these jobs may move to South America, but also as we've discussed AI. So my guess is we're going to see hybrid growing, five days a week in person shrinking, and fully remote is going to stay at about 10%. A big presence, but definitely a minority. Is there any economy that you think is going to really benefit that has the ratio of skilled workers who are English speaking to low wages should see a dramatic uptick as remote work gives their labor access to the market? I would guess if I had data that South American, Central American coders are doing really well, the number of startups I speak to that are taking Brazilians, Argentilians, Uruguayans to work is they're in the same time zone. They've done really well. and you might think India, Philippines, et cetera, they have very good language skills. Some of those India, Philippines jobs in the long run, I think are threatened by AI, but certainly the ones that are higher end, which has been shipped down to say Brazil, I think is looking pretty positive.

Kara Swisher: All right. Professor Nick Bloom, guru of remote work, we really appreciate your time. Go Spurs. I like this guy. Oh my God, stop. You know, we could, Nick, are you making real money? You know, the Spurs are for sale. Do you want to put together a group of frustrated professors to buy a football club? All we need. I'm in for 10 grand. You're in for 10 grand. All we need is another 3 billion. And boom, American professors own the Spurs. All right. Okay, professors who should be professoring. Go ahead. Sorry, Nick. You have the last word. Well, the funny thing I noticed, Zakara, is somewhat more Spurs has not done particularly well over the last 30 years. Their support group tends to be a little bit older when I've been to matches than some of the success more recent. It's funny. Whenever I've been, it's like a bunch of us, you know, I'm 50. I'm very typical of a Spurs fan. It's harder to find 20 year olds because I haven't had such a- Well, I'm 49, but I still love the Spurs, despite the fact that I haven't won a trip. No, you're not 49. Stop it. He's my new friend. I can be who I want to be. Okay. In any case, they can't have remote work. So lucky them, the Tottenham, whatever the hell. Anyway, thank you so much, Professor Bloom. Okay. Thanks very much, Kyra. Thanks, Scott. Thank you. All right, Scott has usually turned it into a sports situation, which I have no repertoire to respond to you people. Anyway. You gave me a great idea. Literally, if I ever am a musician to buy a sports franchise, I'm going to call it the whatever the hell. The whatever the hell. That's amazing. What the fucks? That's a great name. Mandacious fucks is what we should call it. Anyway, Scott, that's part two of our three-part series on the future of work. We'll be back with one more special episode where we're going to talk all about AI. We touched on it here. We're going to talk about it more. It is very important to the future of work, 100%. Now you can read us out. Today's show is produced by Lara Neyman, Zoe Marcus, and Taylor Griffin. Hernita Tutt is our sound engineer. He does a fantastic job. Also, thanks to Mia Silverio and Drew Burrows. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of audio. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Vox Media. You can subscribe to the magazine at nymag.com/pod. We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business. Trust me as the owner of the whatever the hells, if you are under the age of 30 or 35, before you collect dogs and kids, get into the office. It's a feature, not a bug. following design rules a breeze, and Adobe quality templates make it easy to create pro-looking flyers, social posts, presentations, and more. You don't have to be a designer to edit campaigns, resize ads, and translate content. Anyone can in a click. And collaboration tools put feedback right where you need it. See how you can turn your team into a content machine with Adobe Express, the quick and easy app to create on-brand content. Learn more at adobe.com/express/business.