Another Truth About Remote Work
A misconception about the prevalence of working from home explains a lot about confirmation bias in America.
Updated on September 22 at 12:30 p.m. ET
About six months ago, a colleague asked me to guess what percentage of Americans were still working from home. I was still spending eight hours a day making calls just a few feet from my fridge. So were most of my friends. Maybe 40 percent? I guessed. I was off by half. Twenty-one percent of employed Americans were still teleworking as of March 2021; the other 79 percent were leaving their home like the old days.
This was commissioned a poll from Leger, asking Americans to estimate how many people had worked from home during the pandemic. The results weren’t entirely surprising: Those working remotely tended to overestimate how many other people were doing the same.
