Companies are pressing people to come back into the office, but it is not all-or-nothing, said Mokhtarian, the professor. “They’re not saying, ‘You need to be here five days a week,’ or even, ‘You need to be here eight hours a day.’ That 9-to-5 straitjacket is gone.”

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Hend Alhakam, who dispatches vehicles for a company near Detroit, goes to the office every weekday. But she leaves at 3pm to pick up her 10-year-old son from school. She finishes the day remotely, sometimes pulling over on the highway to answer an email or take a call.

That is an arrangement she says would have been far less likely before COVID-19 upended long-held norms. “As a single parent, it can be difficult to manage my time, to fit in everything I need to do in one day,” Alhakam said. “But the pandemic opened this door that we, as employees, did not even know was available.”

More fluid work schedules are also reshaping transportation patterns by pushing the morning rush later. Fewer people are commuting between 5am and 8am than they were in 2019, while the proportion of people hitting the road after 9am has picked up, according to an analysis of INRIX transportation data by Nicholas Bloom and Alex Finan at Stanford University.

“It’s not just that people are travelling less, it’s that they’re spreading out their travel,” said Bloom, an economics professor. “If you want to take a morning call from home and go in a bit later, pre-pandemic, people would make jokes, asking whether you’d been out late drinking, but now it’s completely fine. As a result, we’ve reduced peak loading on freeways and public transport. We’re reducing congestion, which is a very good thing.”

But just because people are swiping in later or heading home earlier does not mean they are working less. Instead, white-collar employees with hybrid schedules are increasingly working around-the-clock and on weekends, according to a 2022 study. On average, professional and business services employees worked 36.5 hours a week in July, up from 36.1 hours four years ago, according to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Economists caution that it is especially difficult to capture the effect of hybrid work on productivity, especially with so many employees working from multiple locations in a single day. Even so, overall labour productivity in the US rose at an annual rate of 3.7 per cent in the second quarter, the fastest pace of growth since 2020, the data shows.

Annie Tsai, chief operating officer of Interact, a software company in San Francisco, said its 11 employees work at all hours of the day or night, depending on what works best for them. Tsai, who has two children, sometimes spends the afternoon painting murals at her son’s school and catches up on work after bedtime.

“I truly do not mind logging into work after my kids go to sleep,” Tsai, 44, said. “What I do mind, though, is someone judging me for having to take my kid to a doctor’s appointment at 2 o’clock.”

‘They’re not saying, “You need to be here five days a week,” or even, “You need to be here eight hours a day.” That 9-to-5 straitjacket is gone.’

Patricia Mokhtarian, Georgia Institute of Technology

The number of people who work from home tripled between 2019 and 2021 to an all-time high of nearly 28 million workers, according to US census data. In all, about 1 in 3 private-sector workers telework at least sometimes, US Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows, but they also tend to be the highest-paid office workers.

Now, as white-collar employees reacclimatise to the office, it has become clear they want the option to work around their personal lives. In a survey of desk workers worldwide, 93 per cent said they wanted to set their own hours, compared with 81 per cent who wanted location flexibility, according to a February report by the Future Forum, a consortium led by workplace communication platform Slack.

Working parents are generally leading the charge, according to Benjamin Granger, chief workplace psychologist at data analytics firm Qualtrics. After working from home during the pandemic, often with little childcare, many parents have begun prioritising school drop-offs and pickups, as well as other obligations.

Most employers, Granger said, have so far been happy to accommodate them. “The pandemic changed a lot of peoples’ expectations about what flexibility actually means,” he said. “And now companies are having to shift their approach to keep up.” But some employers are starting to push back against the notion that workers can flow in and out as they please.

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Last month, after several failed attempts to get people back into the office, Redfin chief executive Glenn Kelman implemented new rules: Corporate employees must show up for a “full day” on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. It was an uncomfortable decree, he said, but a necessary one if the company were to preserve its tradition of collaboration and free-flowing gatherings.

“What we were trying to avoid is a drop in, where someone comes in for a few hours, has lunch and goes back home,” he said. “I’m not one to take attendance or mark people for tardies, but we really want people to settle in and do their work here.”

Kelman insisted he is not keeping tabs on employees but also said he believes the plan has generally worked. People come in on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and crucially, stick around even after chowing down on free lunches of tacos, sushi or fried chicken.

“We didn’t do this because we thought everyone was secretly going to Disney World during the workweek,” Kelman said. “We just felt our culture wasn’t working as well as it could have. But of course, if you have a dentist appointment at 3 or 4 in the afternoon, or a parent-teacher conference, by all means, go.”

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These new patterns in work hours are changing the equation for downtown businesses that rely on the rhythm of office workers. As workers settle into new commutes, their spending habits change accordingly: They are grabbing their morning coffee later, or their post-work beers earlier.

The shift in hours worked in the office portends a broader change in the way people think about work, particularly in the tech industry, where free meals, lavish game rooms and an arsenal of around-the-clock snacks and drinks were meant to keep workers in the office at all hours. Now those perks have lost their lustre, with many employees realising they would much rather eat and play video games and yes, work, at home.

“All of those cheap Band-Aids, the pool tables, arcade games and beer fridges, that were supposed to chain us to this building, they don’t matter anymore,” said Sarah G, 36, a copywriter for a big tech firm in Los Angeles who asked to be identified by her first name and last initial because she fears losing her job. “This place feels very much like a ghost town.”

When she does head in, it is either for free food, when the company offers bagels on Wednesdays and catered lunches on Thursdays, or air-conditioning, which her studio apartment lacks. But even then, she never sticks around for a full day.

“Do I stay until 5? Absolutely not, no way,” she said. “I go in for a few hours, stay for lunch, then come home and check on my dog. We’re both happier this way.”

The Washington Post

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