Home, office or hybrid? How Americans want to work is slowly shifting

The Ipsos Consumer Tracker asks Americans questions about culture, the economy and the forces that shape our lives. Here's one thing we learned this week.

Why we asked: We’ve had a couple more firms decide, nearly five years after the pandemic accelerated some work-from-home trends, that it’s time to pull people back to the office. The most notable of these is JPMorgan Chase’s fresh mandate that most of its 300,000 employees return, shortly before also announcing record profits. Now, Fortune reports, there is growing talk of unionization, as happened at Wells Fargo. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Labor Statistics just released a study looking at productivity that found that for industries with the largest increases in remote work, most had substantial increases in output. That wasn’t true for all industries (including some in financial services) but was generally true.

So where do Americans WANT to work?

What we found: People who want to work mostly or all at the office gains some ground as “evenly split” drops — but a strong group still want to be mostly or all at home. Compared to last January, the number who want to be home at least most of the time remains a solid constant at one in four. But the number of people who want to be evenly split has dropped to 14%, and those increases are shown in the people who want to be mostly or all at the office.

It’s worth noting that the “in office” numbers have bounced wave to wave more than “at home,” which has been pretty stable. As with all things, we see the middle class (hybrid) falling aside. One theory is that this could represent more people being brought back to the office by policy and settling into that. But one aspect that we’ve talked about since the beginning with hybrid policies is that having a “home” routine and a “office” routine is really taxing on people, especially when it comes to child care, pet care or any other dependency.

More insights from this wave of the Ipsos Consumer Tracker:

Most think tariffs will increase prices, but aren’t doing anything about it

More people want brands to stay out of political and social issues

New signs show Americans are worried about budgets

Here's what Americans actually did during the holidays

The Ipsos Care-o-Meter: What does America know about vs. what does America care about

Americans think 2025 will be a pretty flat year