Commentary: Work life will never be the same. We need some in-person days and some remote

Before the pandemic, few people took remote work seriously. Researching the phenomenon for almost 20 years, I frequently heard disparaging comments like “working from home, shirking from home” and “working remotely, remotely working.”

This all changed in March 2020, and we are never going back to the workplace of 2019. Even firms that aggressively pushed in spring 2021 for workers to return to the office, such as Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, postponed their mandates.

Working from home surged twelvefold between 2017-2018 and May 2020. The pandemic is the biggest shock to American working life