Report: Remote is How Two-Thirds of US Professionals Now Work

The pandemic has changed not just how we live, but also how we work. As lockdowns began, many workers left their offices to work from home, a trend that has continued as pandemic restrictions have eased. Not only do 51% of consumers in the United States now split their workdays between working remotely at home and working at the office, but 44% work from a location other than home.

Simply put, connected consumers can be on the clock whenever, wherever they need to be, making way for a new, omnipresent “whenever, wherever” office environment. The world is the new workplace.

This shift has also changed the way consumers want to connect, as connected devices are necessary in the remote work world. More consumers now want their online lives centralized into a single digital ecosystem — the “super app.”

In The ConnectedEconomy™ Monthly Report: Working In The “Whenever, Wherever” Office, PYMNTS surveyed roughly 2,500 U.S. consumers as part of our ongoing research into how the digitization of the U.S. and global economy is reshaping consumers’ lives. We found significant changes in how and where employees conduct their professional lives and a growing interest in consumers consolidating more of their lives online to help them be more efficient on and off the clock. 

Key findings from our research include the following:

• Work is no longer defined by going to an office five days a week. Forty-five percent more consumers — or 70 million more people — now work in a so-called “hybrid” environment, rather than in a traditional office space.

• Ridesharing to work is just as common as taking the train or the bus. Eighteen percent of the consumers who do work in a physical location hitch a ride via an aggregator app, while 14% take public transportation.

• The more hours people work, the more connected they want their digital lives to be. The more hours consumers work per week, the more aspects of their digital lives they want to integrate into a single “super app” that they can use to manage their digital activities.

These are just a few of the key ways in which the rise of the “whenever, wherever” work environment has reshaped working professionals’ relationships with their employers, their schedules and their lives online. This edition of the ConnectedEconomy^TM Monthly Report delves into the details of this new working environment.

To learn more about the rise of the connected office culture, download the report.