One of the half-dozen businesses in which I have an interest shut its headquarters early on and is still operating 100% remotely, with no plans to bring employees back together under one roof. The others kept their offices open, and then, when the lockdowns were lifted, encouraged their employees to return, but without issuing Elon Musk-type mandates.

The soft push hasn’t worked very well. I walked through six buildings last week when I was in Baltimore. Quiet. Empty. Eerie. The workspaces were 80% to 90% unoccupied.

Is this a good or a bad thing? 

My partners and I have been debating this since the lockdowns began. As publishers, 95% of our employees work on keyboards. Which means that, in theory, 95% of them can do their work remotely.

There are indisputable advantages to working remotely. For both employees and employers. Employees spend zero time commuting to and from the office. They can work from pretty much anywhere. And most of them have flexibility as to their hours.

For employers, remote working means a significant savings. Not just in rent and/or mortgage payments, but in taxes, utility bills, and a hundred other expenses associated with having dozens or hundreds of employees in the same location.

In these debates, I’ve been mostly on the “Let them work remotely” side. My argument is based on my experience. For one thing, I am more in contact with my partners, colleagues, and employees now through Zoom than I have ever been. Plus, I am saving countless dreary days each year by not flying back and forth to Baltimore and around the rest of the world.

Although I can’t say with certainty that my experience is reflective of most, I have that prejudice. And so, I’ve been resisting any suggestions that we insist on employees getting back to the office five days a week. My gut tells me that one or two mandated office days per week is enough. It allows for some human contact, which is good for building personal trust, without taking on all the extra time and costs of a running a full office.

It’s too early to know for sure how this remote working experiment will turn out, but there is already a fair amount of data that supports it. For example, a recently published report on vacationing Americans found that:

* 60% of professionals are working more on vacations than they did prior to 2020.

* 63% are taking shorter-than-usual vacations.

* 37% are logging on multiple times per day during vacations, up from 19% in 2021.

Another report, this one by Microsoft Teams, saw a 42% rise in chats per person after normal work hours. Yet another one showed that people are saving nearly six hours weekly by commuting less. But they’re also spending half of that saved time… doing more work. (That ties in with my own experience. I’ve been working more hours than I did before. (And this is not a feeling, but a fact. For 20 years, I’ve kept a daily log of my activities.

I think the five-day workweek is done for office workers in most industries. I think we’ll be seeing executive employees at their desks on average three days a week. And for employees in the lower ranks – accountants, bookkeepers, customer service reps, salespeople, and data processing people – we’ll be seeing them in the office just once a week.