We trust our people. We think they’re less productive at home. We don’t really check either way.
That, in essence, is the picture painted by a major new working paper analysing firm-level data on remote work in the US. Authored by economists Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom and Steven J Davis among others, the study draws on more than 150,000 business responses gathered via the Business Trends and Outlook Survey (BTOS) between August 2024 and January 2025.
The BTOS WFH supplement surveyed 1.2 million businesses across six biweekly panels between November 2024 and January 2025. Each wave sampled around 200,000 businesses, with an average response rate of 13%. This produced approximately 151,000 firm-level responses used in the main analysis, making it one of the most robust datasets to date on employer views of remote work. The analysis is based on a representative cross-section of business types and sizes and focuses on both the extensive margin (whether firms have any WFH employees) and intensive margin (how many days employees work from home).
What emerges is a more nuanced, and sometimes contradictory, view of how businesses are navigating the post-pandemic world of hybrid and remote work.
We assume, we speculate but we rarely verify
Among businesses that expressed a view 6.6% said WFH reduced productivity while only 2.1% said it improved it. The majority – 15.6% – reported no difference. But the more telling figure is that around 75% of businesses said they either didn’t know or that the question wasn’t applicable.
In other words, businesses are more likely to speculate than to measure. There is no firm consensus, just a fog of assumptions. And most organisations have no internal data to verify what’s actually going on.
Monitoring and policy: light-touch and inconsistent
Despite all the noise about accountability most firms are running on trust and assumption. Monitoring is minimal. And when performance is evaluated it’s more often gut feel than grounded data.
Overall 70% of firms reporting they do not track employee days in the office and 75% reporting they do not monitor employees when they work from home
Only 4.1% of firms have a policy setting minimum in-person attendance. Among these tracking compliance is rare and often reliant on badge swipes or manager checks to see if the employee is on site when they are mandated to be. In the Information sector 18.7% of businesses track onsite compliance. In Accommodation and Food Services 40.8% do, driven by operational necessity.
Monitoring remote workers is rarer still. Even in the tech-savvy Information sector, where nearly 70% of businesses support some form of WFH, only 14% track output, 11% monitor online meeting attendance and 8% computer activity.
Onsite monitoring also varies: 45.8% of businesses report no explicit monitoring. The most common method is arrival/departure tracking, used by 39.5% of firms, especially in sectors like food and accommodation. In the tech-heavy Information sector just 18.6% track arrival/departure times.
These patterns suggest that remote work hasn’t prompted a revolution in management. Instead, most firms are still applying old tools to new models – and often not applying them at all.
One in three businesses allow WFH, but only just
The headline figure – 31% of firms supporting WFH – obscures major differences by size and sector. In the Information industry nearly 70% of firms support some WFH. In Accommodation and Food Services, it’s just 7%.
Larger employers (250+ employees) are far more likely to have remote-capable roles than microbusinesses where fewer than one in four do. But even where WFH exists the norm is light-touch: just over one day per week, on average, with no major shift expected by 2029.
That finding aligns with other sources. For example, the Census Bureau’s 2023 American Community Survey shows WFH rates stabilising around 13.8% of workers, down from the 2021 peak of 17.9%. Meanwhile, the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes (SWAA) found that in early 2025, 28% of paid days in the US were WFH days. Hybrid models (1–4 days remote) remain the most common.
The real constraint? It’s feasibility not performance
When asked why they don’t offer more remote work 61.2% of businesses cite infeasibility – roles that simply can’t be done offsite. Productivity concerns came second at 11.7%, followed by teamwork and mentoring (9%) and monitoring challenges (5.3%).
Even in the Information sector, where jobs are more easily digitised, 36.7% of firms still said remote work was infeasible for at least some roles. That rises to 70% in Accommodation and Food Services, where physical presence is often non-negotiable.
The message here is subtle: most businesses aren’t resisting remote work out of fear. They’re simply working within operational constraints. But it’s also clear that many haven’t explored how far they could go.
Surveillance isn’t the answer but clarity is
Some might look at these findings and conclude that tighter oversight or employee monitoring is the answer. But that’s a misread.
Surveillance can erode trust, morale and performance. What’s needed instead is clarity about expectations, outcomes and accountability in a hybrid world. That means helping managers define good performance in ways that don’t rely on physical presence. And it means using digital tools to support, not control.
Return-to-office: performance theatre without metrics
This all brings fresh context to the ongoing debate around return-to-office (RTO) mandates. As The People Space explored in Return to office mandates: what’s the impact?, many such mandates appear more cultural than operational.
The BTOS data adds weight to that argument. If most firms don’t monitor remote productivity, and have no clear evidence of performance loss, what exactly are they hoping to fix?
The answer may lie less in data and more in discomfort. Many senior leaders still equate visibility with value. But in a hybrid world, that’s no longer a reliable guide.
Locality-based pay remains rare
One revealing data point from the BTOS is that only 3.9% of businesses that answered yes or no say they offer locality-based pay for fully remote workers. Most respondents either didn’t know or said it wasn’t relevant to them, likely because remote work is still relatively limited.
Even in the Information sector, where WFH is more common, only about one in five of those who answered definitively said they use locality-based pay. As the researchers note, more precise analysis may be possible once microdata becomes available. For now, it suggests that geography-adjusted compensation has not become mainstream.
Why this matters for HR and people leaders
It’s tempting to treat remote productivity as a settled debate. It isn’t. Most businesses don’t have the tools or the appetite to properly evaluate it. That presents both a challenge and an opportunity.
Hybrid work is here. So is the evidence gap. What’s missing is a coherent management response that makes distributed work effective, fair and sustainable.
The opportunity for HR is to shape that response. This means rethinking how performance is assessed, how hybrid policies are justified and how culture and trust are maintained without resorting to surveillance.
Most of all, it means designing work for the future we’re actually in not the one we imagine we’ve lost.
Five practical questions for HR teams
- Are we making assumptions about productivity or measuring it? Define clear, fair, role-specific indicators that apply across work environments.
- Do we have visibility into how work actually happens remotely? If not, talk to managers and teams. Gather qualitative insight before reaching for software.
- Have we trained leaders to manage distributed performance? Hybrid work requires new habits, especially around goal setting and feedback.
- Is our culture based on proximity or trust? If productivity is equated with presence, WFH will always seem suspect.
- What’s our long-term plan? If WFH is here to stay, it needs to be governed, not improvised.
Facts at a glance
- 31% of US firms had at least one employee working from home during the six-month study period
- Information sector: 70% of firms had WFH employees
- Accommodation and Food Services: Just 7%
- Large firms (250+ employees): 73% had WFH staff
- Small firms (under 20 employees): Only 25%
- 15.6% said there was no difference in productivity between remote and onsite
- 6.6% reported lower productivity for WFH employees
- 2.1% said remote employees were more productive
- 61.2% say the nature of the job makes WFH impractical
- 11.7% mention productivity
Other cited challenges include:
- Teamwork and mentoring (9%)
- Monitoring difficulties (5.3%)
- IT and security risks (4.5%)
- Legal or regulatory barriers (2.1%)
Citation: Tapping Business and Household Surveys to Sharpen Our View of Work from Home June 2025 The authors stress that the findings and conclusions are their own and do not represent the views of the US Census Bureau.
Related: Flexibility fatigue in the UK
New research from the CIPD finds over one million UK workers have left their jobs in the past year due to a lack of flexibility, with younger workers disproportionately affected.
Despite this, more than half of employees feel pressured to return to the office more often, mostly driven by senior leaders. And while 91% of employers now offer some form of flexible working, 14% plan to increase mandated office days.
The professional body for HR and people development warns that rigid return-to-office policies risk undermining trust, wellbeing and retention. It calls for a “balanced approach” – one that combines collaboration and clarity with meaningful flexibility.
“There’s a clear mismatch between what some employers are pushing for and what many employees value,” says Claire McCartney, policy and practice manager at CIPD. “There’s no one size fits all and for many organisations, it’s about finding the right balance that supports people's performance and wellbeing, while meeting the needs of the business.”
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