For millions of us that used to mean heading to the office until the pandemic hit, forcing those who could to work from home.

As David Pogue shows us, it's an option many workers continue to embrace, even demand.

Until the pandemic, most office workers went into the office five days a week.

Furing the pandemic, they mostly worked from home so as the pandemic eased, you might have expected that they'd go back to the office 5 days a week .

That's certainly what Jamie Dimond expected. He's the CEO of America's largest bank.

We want people back at work and my view is sometime September, October, it'll look just like it did before.

As it turns out, the workers rushed back to the office full time never happened.  

What they really like, most people, is working from home two or three days a week because that saves on the commute time,

it gives them more time with kids and family; it gives them more personal autonomy and how they organize their day.

Even things as small as I can have the temperature at the temperature I like.

Steven Davis is a senior fellow at the Hoover institution at Stanford.  

He and his co-authors surveyed 30,000 Americans about work and what they said is hybrid hits the sweet spot.  

Most people really, really like it so that kind of broke the norm.

Of course, not all kinds of workers can work remotely even so, at this point, about a third of Americans are working on a hybrid schedule and that number is expected to grow as more employers go hybrid.

We believe that the future of work is hybrid for sure and that's going to be the modern work style.

Kelly Steckelberg is the Chief Financial Officer of Zoom.

Yes, that Zoom, the company whose video chat software helped make remote working a thing in the first place.

The company now expects its own local workers to come  into the office two days a week.

So we have product engineering for example comes on Mondays and Wednesdays.

Sales and marketing come on Tuesdays and Thursdays because we don't have enough space any longer to host everyone at the same time.

Oh, so you are in effect saving money on office space.

We are saving money, we have actually downsized our space during the pandemic.

We closed some of our offices.

Bringing the company's workers back after the pandemic, even two days a week was an adjustment at first.

We're all human, right? We don't like change.

Once they've been doing it for a few week, they remember how great it is to see their friends and colleagues in the office and and they like it more

Of course, less time in the office means less time for new hires to learn the company culture and less time to mentor younger workers.

You have to be a little bit more deliberate about that, then that's what we had to do during the pandemic.

I would just schedule a 15-minute like catch-up, "Hey, how are you? How is your life going?"

Those I make sure that I continue to schedule those video check-ins on a regular basis.

So if hybrid work is so great how come we weren't using it before?

One big reason: technology.

Video programs like Zoom; messaging programs like Slack and collaboration tools like Google Docs.

If the pandemic had struck 20 years earlier it would have been infeasible to have the same kind of shift to work from home.

Wow, I mean there aren't many things to be grateful for with the pandemic but that it waited and 2020 that's that's one of them.   

That's one of them.

Before the pandemic there was also a stigma about working from home. How could bosses know that their workers weren't just goofing off?

The boss can't observe what the workers are doing. To what degree are managers installing monitoring software on their remote workers machines?  

Most workers dislike the intrusive quality that I every key stroke and where I'm looking on my computer screen and how often I'm sitting down is being monitored.

They dislike that. - They dislike that, yes.

So what works better is evaluating people on their performance, rather than trying to watch exactly what they do.

So this was something that we developed over the last two years.

At Zoom headquarters, workspace executive Alana Collins showed me some of Zoom's new products for hybrid work.

There's an off-site receptionist who can cover multiple floors or even buildings.  

Are you the building wide receptionist?

I am. How can I help you?

Oh, I'm expecting a huge crate of Skittles. Can you arrange to have that delivered to my desk?

I absolutely can. - Thank you, love your work.

And there's a system for reserving a desk on the days you come to work or a conference room.   

Yeah, that's my kind of meeting. Two people, all right.

You could select the time right here. - Oh, okay.

Oh, yeah, oh, no. I I believe in long meetings.

And this will immediately change to red, letting everybody know that I have that meeting room all day.

But hybrid doesn't always mean two days a week. There are many flavors of hybrid work.

We identify 22 weeks a year and we say we would like folks to try to be in person those weeks.

It's 3 days a week but only every other week, kind of?

Generally, we would like them to be in person a minimum of about 25%.

At the Ohio headquarters of Smuckers, the company famous for jams and jellies, CEO Mark Smucker has developed a hybrid version of hybrid.  

Attrition is down and our productivity has improved and folks really seem to like it.

We have been able to retract new talent from multiple geographies.

Geographies like San Francisco.

I have my dream job, it's based in Ohio, working with people that I really like working with but I'm I have my dream life and you know my family in California.

Smucker's marketing executive, Nicole Massey, works from her West Coast home most days but spends 6 days a month in Ohio.

You have to really think about what am I going to do this week when I'm in the office or versus what am I going to do when I'm remote,

because in order to get the best of both, you have to you have to be intentional about it .

So let's see. The hybrid employer gets improved morale, better productivity, lower real estate costs and the ability to hire from beyond the local area.

The hybrid employee gets more time with family and community, less time commuting and the ability to control the thermostat.   

And the planet gets cleaner air because less time commuting means less polluting.

This is starting to sound like a win-win for all parties. I mean who loses in the hybrid arrangement?

Oh there are some losers. If you go to downtown San Francisco, you'll see you'll see the losers.

It's true. In the top 10 US cities, office attendance is about half of what it was before the pandemic.

With so few people coming downtown, everything is collapsing. The price of real estate, tax revenues and transit ridership.

And think about all the restaurants bars and hotels, many have shifted schedules or even closed.

The last time America's work life shifted so dramatically was during the Great Depression when Franklin Roosevelt signed the 40-hour work week into law.

Now, after the upheaval of the pandemic, Stanford Steven Davis is confident that the 5-day in-person work week is history.

I think we're close to the new normal. There's more choice for people now and that's why I think it's a good thing.

People have more flexibility, more personal autonomy in how they want to organize their lives.