Nearly half of U.S. office workers had no in-person meetings — CNBC

In the United States, 48.8% of surveyed workers with higher education said that on their most recent day in the office they had no in-person meetings — either with members of their team or with other colleagues. These are the findings of a Federal Reserve Bank of New York study reported by CNBC.

In September, researchers surveyed 1,835 workers with higher education. They chose this month because, after the end of summer, companies typically more actively require employees to be present in offices, while the period between Labor Day and Thanksgiving in the United States has a lower share of remote work than holiday periods.

Office work via Zoom and Slack

Companies that introduce mandatory office attendance three, four, or five days a week explain this by the need for collaboration, productivity, and mentoring. At the same time, study participants described office days that mainly consist of Zoom calls, Slack correspondence, and little direct communication with colleagues.

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According to the survey, 70.6% of workers had at least one team member who was not in the office on days when they worked from the office. About half of respondents had no in-person meetings at which all participants were physically present, while more than one-third took part in neither in-person nor hybrid meetings.

Remote teams and non-compliance with requirements

Thirty-seven percent of respondents reported having at least one virtual meeting even though all its participants were in the same office that day. The study’s authors — Natalia Emanuel, an economist at the New York Fed, and Emma Harrington, a professor of economics at the University of Virginia — noted that for many workers, commuting to the office effectively only changes the background for Zoom calls.

Among the reasons for this experience, the authors cited the spread of fully remote work, the geographic dispersion of teams, the use of digital tools, as well as cases where employees do not comply with office requirements or employers do not monitor compliance. At the same time, the researchers do not call on companies to abandon such rules: in their view, compliance with attendance policies can provide workers with the in-person interaction they seek.