Where in the world are people back in the office?
IN LONDON, a politician wrote not-so-subtle notes to remote workers last year, hoping to persuade them to spend more time in the office: “Sorry you were out when I visited,” Jacob Rees-Mogg, then a government minister, recalled writing in messages left on the desks of Cabinet Office staff members who were working from home.
In Seoul, Jem Kim, who started a new job at a private equity firm, hoped to ask for permission to work some days from home, but quickly learned she had to be in the office full-time.
And in San Mateo, California, executives at Sequoia, a human resources technology company, said that though they had not mandated a return to office for most employees, they had tried to make the office environment so close-knit that people couldn’t help but feel “major Fomo” (fear of missing out) when they joined meetings by video-conference.
When the coronavirus pandemic took hold in 2020, many industries worldwide shifted to remote or hybrid work. It was an immense experiment that yielded different results for different cities – with long-term stand-offs between executives and workers in some cases, and a sweeping return to the office in others.
Levels of remote work have varied across regions based on factors including housing density, length of Covid lockdowns and cultural norms surrounding how much workers can fight for workplace autonomy, according to interviews with nearly two dozen workers and executives, as well as a study that included researchers at Stanford, Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico (Itam) and the Ifo Institute, which surveyed more than 42,000 workers in 34 countries.
Whether a person is more likely to work in a cubicle in a big office tower or on the living room couch now depends on where in the world those cubicles and couches are. Many Asian countries have lower levels of remote work than countries in Europe and North America. Those with the highest levels are Britain, Canada and the United States.
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In the US and UK, workers across industries spent five to six paid days a month this spring working from home, according to the study. Other European countries had slightly lower levels of remote work, with Germans at four days per month across industries. Asia’s work-from-home levels were the lowest, with South Koreans working fewer than two days per month remotely, Japan two and Taiwan under three.
Researchers think housing plays a role in return-to-office patterns. In suburban parts of the US, where people have larger homes and sometimes home offices, workers have been slower to go back to the office. Densely populated cities, particularly in Asia, have tended to see higher return-to-office rates, often because people struggled to be productive in small apartments shared with many family members.
Commute vs productivity
“It’s really hard to work from home if you live with a partner and have a one-bedroom apartment,” said Jose Maria Barrero, an economist at Itam who helped lead the global study. “Tokyo, for example, is a place where apartments are quite modest.”
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Executives managing workforces that sprawl across continents have noticed the regional variability first-hand. Jeetu Patel, an executive vice-president and general manager at technology company Cisco, which has nearly 85,000 employees, travelled to Asia recently and found that his company’s offices there, as well as those of its customers, were more bustling than offices in other countries. Cisco has let its teams worldwide determine their own approach to hybrid work.
Patel, who lives in Los Altos, California, said he preferred to work from home when he did not have in-office meetings so he could spare himself an hour travelling to San Jose and back.
“I can take that 30 minutes going back and forth commuting and I can have more things I get done,” he said. “I like having dinner with my daughter.”
Daan van Rossum, CEO of FlexOS, a company in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, that creates digital solutions for remote managers, thought extensively about employees’ home setups when considering his company’s approach to hybrid work.
“A lot of people here don’t have their own places,” he said. “Working from home at the kitchen table with three generations running around is not the best environment to be productive.”
This year, van Rossum asked his employees to begin working in the office at least two days a week. He tried to make the experience enjoyable by carving out time for levity. Every meeting starts with a non-work-related icebreaker, sucha as a game of telephone.
Beyond housing differences, researchers said, remote work levels are affected by the amount of time a region spent in Covid lockdowns. In areas of the world that lurched in and out of lockdowns repeatedly, including some US cities, workers and employers became more settled in remote work routines. People invested in comfortable setups at home, buying large computer monitors and ergonomic chairs. Companies set up management systems that ensured bosses would measure performance by employee output, not by the amount of time people spent at the office.
Where remote never took hold
In parts of Asia, remote work routines did not become as entrenched. “There were many countries in Asia that controlled early waves of Covid pretty well without extended lockdowns,” Barrero of Itam said. “They didn’t have this experience where they had to hunker down for months on end working from home and get adapted to it.”
In South Korea, for example, many workers never left their offices. “We’ve never implemented work from home,” said Joori Roh, a spokesperson for SK Hynix, a major chipmaker, adding that the company did not like the idea of giving some workers a privilege that was not available to all.
In Japan, workers still routinely use fax machines, and sometimes a personal stamp known as a hanko, which requires someone to be in the office. Some corporate managers in Tokyo said being together in the same space helped them keep an eye on the people who reported to them.
Do employees have a say?
Researchers on the remote-work study believe cultural norms are also at play in return-to-work levels. Plenty of US workers said they felt comfortable asking their managers for more flexibility, or even telling them that they would quit without it.
When Laura Zimm, a public defender in Duluth, Minnesota, was called back to the office last year, she immediately came down with Covid. She worked from home during and after her sickness, and eventually decided with her manager that she would stay permanently remote, which Zimm preferred and which gave her manager more flexibility with office space.
At Microsoft, the return-to-office process has often included “team agreements”, in which managers meet with employees to discuss hybrid work preferences.
Choices that individual employers make are not isolated. In areas of the world where remote or hybrid work has become a norm, employers with strict return-to-office policies worry about retaining talent, said Mark Ein, chair of the workplace security firm Kastle, which has tracked US office occupancy levels with its “Back to Work Barometer”.
“Business leaders as a group have wanted people to come back in much more profound ways,” Ein said. “It really is the labour market’s competitive pressures and some cultural norms that have prevented it.”
“The desire to get people back among business managers is nearly universal,” he added. “It’s the ability to do it that varies across countries.” NYTIMES
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