Judging by the number of high-profile CEOs getting increasingly strident about enforcing return-to-office mandates, it might seem remote and hybrid work are destined to decline while fully in-person work picks up. But most U.S. executives expect the opposite to happen, a new survey suggests.
According to the latest Survey of Business Uncertainty—jointly run by the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank, the University of Chicago, and Stanford—executives expect 72.6% of full-time employees to be fully in-person/on-site in 2028, a decline from 75.7% today and 91.6% in 2018. When it comes to hybrid, they anticipate 16.3% of full-time employees will be in that category in five years, compared to 14.1% today and just 4.1% in 2018. As for fully virtual/remote, respondents expect 11.2% of full-time employees to fit that description in 2028, up from 10.2% today and just 4.3% in 2018.
