Do We Know How Many People Are Working From Home?

“It’s clear that the work-from-home trends induced by the pandemic have transformed the food and drink scene in the city,” said Ara Kharazian, an economist at Square.

The Partnership for New York City’s data indicated that financial service firms were back in the office in greater numbers than many other companies. Financial service firms reported 59 percent daily office attendance in late January, according to the partnership. The tech industry, by contrast, was at 43 percent.

All this data is emerging as hundreds of companies formalize their policies on hybrid work, with many trying to persuade their employees to spend more time at the office.

Amazon told corporate workers last month that they had to be in the office three days a week starting in May, and Starbucks called its 3,750 corporate workers back three days a week as well. Disney asked employees to return to the office four days a week. Its chief executive, Robert A. Iger, cited the need for in-person creative collaborations.

Other chief executives have also begun to question the merits of remote work. Even Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce, which told all its employees that they could go permanently remote, began voicing concern this year that productivity among some employees has been lower.

As executives clamp down on in-person work, worker resistance has become more vocal. At Amazon, more than 29,000 employees joined a Slack channel, called Remote Advocacy, protesting the shift to in-person work. At Starbucks, more than 40 corporate employees signed an open letter opposing the new return-to-office policy.

Wherever people are doing the jobs they already have, mostly in person per the Labor Department or over a quarter of the time at home per others, one metric does indicate that hybrid work is here to stay: job postings.

A study from researchers at Stanford, Harvard and other institutions analyzing over 50 million job postings last month found that postings explicitly mentioning remote work are at 12.2 percent — a fourfold increase since before the pandemic.