Job seekers hoping for a remote or hybrid work schedule should try to get hired soon, because the work-from-home winds are shifting.
While the transition to remote work exploded during the Covid-19 pandemic, the number of job postings saying employees can work from home one or more days a week is no longer increasing at the same pace as it was before, according to research from the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass.
The percentage of job vacancy postings in the U.S. that offer the option to work remotely one or more workdays has actually fallen since October, when it was 13.08%, to 12.19% in April, according to the research.
Employers across the country have been trying to coax workers back to the office, with some, such as
Amazon,
Apple,
Goldman Sachs,
Twitter, and
Tesla,
telling everyone to come back.
In some areas, the percentage of job vacancies offering remote work options is down dramatically. In San Francisco, it has dropped to 27% as of April from 31.9% in October, according to the data.
In Boston, it slipped to 21.4% in April, from 25.38% in November. In Wichita, Kansas, the percentage of vacancies offering remote work fell to 6% in April, from 15.6% in September. In Phoenix, it slipped to 15.3% in April, from 20.95% last October.In New York City, the percentage is about the same over a similar time period, around 18.9%.
Researchers analyzed more than 250 million job postings from the U.S. and four other English-speaking countries. The data confirmed the strong surge of work-from-home since 2019, before the pandemic uprooted office life.
U.S. survey data suggests that going forward, workers will spend one quarter of their workdays from home or other remote locations, five times the pre-pandemic rate, the report said.
Professional, scientific, and computer-related occupations are more likely than others to offer hybrid or fully remote work, compared with 2019.
But the frequency of such postings varies widely across job sectors, among counties and major cities, and even among companies in the same industry.
Computer and mathematical, business and financial operations, legal, management, and architecture and engineering jobs had the largest percentage increase in jobs allowing hybrid or fully-remote work, while healthcare practitioners, construction, education, sales, and farming, fishing and forestry jobs saw the smallest percentage increase.
“The percentage of remote work vacancies posted by employers who operate in the same industry, and search for the same talent, can vary widely,” the researchers found.
Among selected US. aerospace firms, for example, both
Boeing
and
Lockheed Martin
allow hybrid or fully-remote work in more than 50% of their management job postings, while
Northrop Grumman
allows less than 25%, and SpaceX allows almost none.
Likewise, among engineering jobs at select auto makers, nearly 45% of Honda’s postings allow hybrid or fully remote work, while nearly 25% of
General Motors
postings allow it. Nearly none of Tesla’s do.
Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla and owner of Twitter, has expressed his disdain for remote work, telling workers they need to be back in the office full-time or it’s assumed they have resigned.
Write to Janet H. Cho at janet.cho@dowjones.com
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