'The office increasingly fails to deliver this benefit': Most in-office workers now describe their desk jobs as ‘remote' despite bosses promising to boost in-person teams

• Report finds many in-person office workers are still spending too much time on virtual meetings
• Workers are required in the office 3.74 days on average, but they attend just 2.59 days
• Defining a clear purpose to maximize in-person days could improve productivity

After the pandemic drove most workers home, recent years have seen many businesses go all-in on renewed office-working mandates, with managers and business leaders citing higher levels of productivity from in-person working.

But years later, it seems those benefits are yet to be realized, and almost half (49%) of employees who commute to an office don't even have fully in-person meetings still.

The data, provided through a Federal Reserve Bank of New York report, found that many workers actually end up spending their office days either working independently or collaborating with colleagues through online platforms – much the same as had they just stayed at home.

Is it worth working from the office?

Even when all colleagues were in the office, more than a third (37%) of workers have attended at least one fully virtual meeting, implying that digital communication has now become the default.

Nearly half (45%) also said that their company followed a so-called 'One Zoom, All Zoom' approach, where the absence of one single attendee caused the entire meeting to go online despite the other workers being together in-person.

The result of a rise in digital tools is that workers are now spending 6.3 hours in a typical day working in the presence of colleagues, down from 7.1 hours before the pandemic. Workers in jobs that can't be made remote also went from spending 1.5 alone hours per day to 2.4 hours.

Workers aren't adhering to their office attendance mandates

The 'return-to-office' movement was somewhat of a phenomenon in the years that followed the pandemic, with companies all rushing to secure worker attendance at three, four or even five days per week. Today, the average is somewhere between three and four (3.74 days), per the New York Fed data, but employees still only report actually being in the office 2.59 days per week – a shortfall of more than one day.

At one unnamed Fortune 500 company, the report found that just 63.6% of workers complied with the enforced four-day policy.

It's clear that a lack of coordination is making in-office days ineffective despite companies' best efforts to enforce a set amount of attendance days. Looking ahead, defining a clear purpose for office working could help workers get the most of making the commute.

While the New York Fed paper doesn't go into detail, other reports have previously highlighted the need to improve the office environment for new ways of working – cutting unnecessary noise through reducing digital distractions and keeping the environment to purely in-person could help improve the efficiency of in-person working.