Half of In-Office Workers Say Their Jobs Still Feel Remote, New Fed Survey Finds

A New York Fed survey of 1,835 college-educated workers finds that showing up to the office hasn't brought back the collaboration companies promised when they rolled out return-to-office mandates.

Half of workers who show up to the office are doing jobs that still feel remote. A new survey from the New York Fed finds that 48.8% of in-office workers had no in-person meetings at all on the day they most recently went in, according to research economist Natalia Emanuel and University of Virginia economics professor Emma Harrington. They commuted in, sat down at a desk, and spent the day on Zoom and Slack instead of talking to the people around them.

The numbers get worse the deeper you look. On top of the 48.8% with zero in-person meetings, 70.6% of in-office workers had at least one teammate who wasn't even in the building that day. Over a third had neither an in-person nor a hybrid meeting of any kind. And 37% reported sitting in a meeting that was fully virtual even though everyone in it was in the same office. People are driving in, parking, badging in, and then dialing into a call with someone sitting forty feet away.

Why Return-to-Office Mandates Aren't Delivering the Jobs Companies Promised

Companies that rolled out three-, four- and five-day mandates sold them on creative collaboration, mentorship and better business results. The Fed researchers write that 'days in the office often lack human contact,' which is the opposite of what those mandates were supposed to fix. Part of the problem is structural: teams are spread across more offices than before the pandemic, and employers aren't enforcing the mandates strictly enough to get everyone in the same room on the same day. The result, in the researchers' words, is that workers 'commute in just to take Zoom calls and answer Slack messages from their cubicles.'

For the job market, this matters because it undercuts the main argument employers use for calling people back in the first place. If a mandate doesn't actually produce more face time, it's just added commute cost and lost flexibility with none of the stated benefit. That's a bad trade for workers, and over time it shows up in retention and in how hard people push back on in-office rules. The researchers tie this to separate Gallup polling that put worker sentiment at a 15-year low.

What This Means If You're Thinking About Starting Your Own Business

If your day job already feels remote while you're stuck commuting for it, the calculation on leaving to start something of your own changes. You're already working through a screen most of the day. The question becomes whether you're doing that for a paycheck tied to someone else's mandate, or for something you control. I've said before that the lack of company loyalty to employees is part of why more people will end up building their own job instead of waiting for one. A survey like this is one more data point: the office isn't delivering what it promised, so the trade-off between a steady job and starting your own thing is closer than it looks.

What I'd Watch If I Managed the Building

I spent years managing commercial properties, and occupancy that doesn't translate into actual use is a landlord's problem as much as an employer's. If workers are badging in just to sit on Zoom calls, companies are paying full office rent for space that isn't doing the job it's rented for. That's the kind of mismatch that eventually shows up at lease renewal: tenants start asking why they're paying for square footage they could cut, and landlords start fighting to keep occupancy numbers from sliding. The Fed researchers note a Fortune 500 company's own badge-swipe data backs this up: nearly half of employees have at least one teammate out of the office on their in-office day. That's the kind of number that gets raised across the table in a lease negotiation.

The Hidden Cost to People's Time and Income

Beyond the office itself, this has a real cost to people's time. The researchers point to Bureau of Labor Statistics time-use data showing Americans now spend more time physically alone on the days they go into the office than they did before the pandemic. That's lost commute time, plus lost family or personal time, in exchange for sitting alone at a desk instead of at home. The Fed researchers are careful to say they don't think employers should drop the mandates. They argue 'ensuring adherence to the policy helps deliver the face-to-face contact that workers crave.' The issue isn't the goal, it's that the policies on the books aren't enforced in a way that gets there.

What to Do If Your 'In-Office' Day Looks Like This

Here's the practical test: if you want to know whether your office mandate is really working, don't look at badge swipes alone. Look at whether the people you need to collaborate with are actually there on the same days you are.

• Count your actual in-person meetings for a week before you accept or push back on a mandate; the data says you may already be remote in practice.
• If you're negotiating a return-to-office policy, ask how the company will coordinate schedules so teams overlap, not just that everyone shows up.
• If you manage people, pull meeting and attendance data before assuming a mandate is working. It's usually already sitting in your calendar and badge system.
• If the office isn't delivering the collaboration it promised, treat that as leverage, whether you're asking for more flexibility or weighing whether to go out on your own.