How’s work?

For many people, how you work now might seem unusual to your 2019 self, with hours spent in online meetings. Or maybe it’s back to exactly how 2019 was, in an office cubicle. Or maybe, you never had the ability to work remotely during the pandemic.

At companies across the country with employees who still work remotely some or most of the time, executives are slowly falling in line and sending the same message to their workforces: return to the office — sometimes for a few more days per week, sometimes for all five.

Data for office occupancy across major U.S. cities shows that on average, about 50 percent of office seats are occupied. More workers are heading in during the middle of the week, and some cities in the South have more employees working in person compared to the Northeast, Silicon Valley, and Washington D.C.

Nearly five years after the start of the pandemic and the beginning of remote work for many U.S. workers, how are most employees working now? And for companies changing their remote work policies this year, what’s causing the rethink?

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