Wisconsin and National Remote Workers Declining

Wednesday, June 7th, 2023 -- 12:00 PM

(By Gaby Vinick, Wisconsin Public Radio) There are more than 400,000 remote workers in Wisconsin.

According to Gaby Vinick with Wisconsin Public Radio, three years after the COVID-19 pandemic supercharged the shift to remote work, especially among office workers, there are those for whom the change appears to be permanent.

Nationally, the number of people working from home between 2019 and 2021 tripled from 5.7 percent to 17.9 percent, according to estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. More recently, though, there are signs that the number of people working from home is slightly declining, in Wisconsin and nationally.

A Morning Consult poll in April found nearly half of U.S. employees prefer working in-person. But attempts to bring workers back to the office also face challenges, and at least some companies are planning to keep hybrid or work-from-home options around indefinitely. 

In Wisconsin, remote work could make the relatively low-cost state more competitive as people with higher incomes boost rural areas, experts say. But some worry that with people working for companies outside the state, local services that might benefit from their expertise could lose out.

Some are fully remote, but a majority of workers, nationally, are fully in-person, about 60 percent, according to WFH Research. That's in part because most people are employed in sectors such as manufacturing and services, which cannot always be done through a computer screen.

Yet for many workers across many industries, there has been a substantial shift to a hybrid working mode, where about 28 percent of workers work remotely some of the time.

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