At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the working world went through a revolution.

Workers, particularly white-collar office workers, were ordered to work from home to stop the spread of the virus, and it seemed like a permanent change.

Hybrid working has remained incredibly popular years after the COVID lockdowns were lifted.

But now, more and more companies are ordering employees back to work.

And many employers have slammed working from home as inefficient and bad for the bottom line.

So is the work-from-home revolution over now?

Joining me from London is the BBC's employment correspondent, Zoe Conway.

Hello.

And also with me, Nick Bloom, an economist at Stanford University in the US, who has studied the effect that all of this is having on productivity.

Hey there.

Great to have you both with us today.

Now, before we go any further, I just want to establish the status here.

Are you working from home or in the office?

Nick, you first.

I'm actually at home, although I have to say, for me, it's eight in the morning.

So I am going in later.

But right now, yes, this is this is the spare bedroom.

But ordinarily, you're in the office full time?

Well, I teach.

So I teach obviously students because I'm a Stanford.

That's definitely in person.

Big meetings is in person.

But I do spend a couple of days a week on Zoom, you know, taking calls, working from home.

And what about you, Zoe?

I'm definitely at the BBC today.

I like coming into the office, actually.

I work with a team of incredibly clever, interesting and funny people.

And I like the camaraderie of the office.

But I travel around the UK for work quite a lot as well.

So I don't really work from home.

OK, so we've established where you both stand on the working from home.

I obviously I'm not working from home, can't be a presenter and work from home, unfortunately, although I did suggest it from time to time during the pandemic.

But before the pandemic, I was working here in the US.

And I mean, it was really very rare in this country that you would have encountered anyone really working from home.

Nick, are there certain countries or certain industries that have always had this tradition of remote working or working from home?

Yes.

So tech has always been pretty work from home friendly.

So you can think of, you know, if you're on a keyboard using computers, you often don't need to be in the office.

You know, it's also actually interesting that a lot of English speaking countries, it's not clear why, but you're right.

Northern Europe, you know, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand have been pretty high.

We tend to see the lowest levels are in Asia.

So there are big international differences.

So Asian, you know, typically back in the office pretty much full time.

But Northern Europe, US, we still see tech, some finance working from home two, three days a week.

But of course, everything changed for everyone, didn't it?

In the spring of 2020, with the arrival of this thing we'd never heard of before, COVID-19 and the pandemic and how that changed everything at that time.

Governments rushing to announce stay at home orders, lockdowns to try and keep everyone away from each other, limit the number of infections.

It was a crucial step.

We were told at the time to keep the hospitals from getting overloaded and to get everyone safe.

And suddenly employers had to adapt to a situation where their employees could not come into work.

Zoe, tell us a little bit about that transition.

Who was working from home and who wasn't?

What did it all mean for people?

It was the most incredible adjustment for so many of us.

There were all these forms of technology we'd never used before, whether it's Zoom calls or team chats, that some of us are still fairly useless at using, certainly in my unit.

Everyone always seems to be on mute.

And so it was an incredible adjustment.

And I think what we're seeing in many cases in the UK are people who have learnt that they can be very productive at home and that they can juggle it very successfully with, you know, perhaps raising a young family or looking after elderly relatives.

And so there's a lot more flexibility that we're seeing.

But I think there's still a huge amount of uncertainty here in the UK about whether we're going to see a big switch back.

Because as well as having more time with your family and your children, I mean, there are other benefits for people from working from home as well, financially, commuting time.

Tell us a bit about those.

We went to Bank Underground Station.

Now, that is right in the heart of the city in London.

It's the sort of place where you're going to see a lot of people very smartly dressed, walking incredibly fast to get to their law firm or their bank where they work.

And we went on a Thursday morning and we went again on a Friday morning during rush hour.

And there was a big drop in numbers.

And the data shows that now on a Friday, if you go to Bank Underground Station, you'll see that the commuters are roughly at just just over half what they were before the pandemic.

So a big drop.

And on that point, I mean, individuals might save because they can make their lunch at home.

They're not spending on fuel for their cars, train tickets and so on.

But what's been the economic impact on businesses from this situation where people are working from home?

Well, there's two ways to look at it.

Mostly for businesses, hybrid, which is when you come in, say, two, three days a week and work from home two, three days a week.

It's actually pretty profitable.

And it's why it's stuck.

It's why if you look at the Fortune 500, so these are the largest 500 companies in the world. 80% of them are on hybrid because it makes them a lot of money.

And why is that?

Well, if you look at the research, if you work from home a couple of days a week, it doesn't really seem to damage productivity.

So, yes, you know, you need to be in for mentoring, for connectivity, for building culture, for innovating.

But by the time you're coming in three days a week, it looks like you kind of have your fill.

And the other two days are good for quiet time and for recharging without a commute.

So productivity is not affected.

What businesses gain is turnovers a lot lower.

So in one study we published actually last year in Nature, you see quit rates fall by about a third.

And, you know, you can see why, like folks are like, I really like working from home a couple of days a week.

I'm less likely to change jobs.

And for businesses, that saves them an enormous amount of money because every person that quits, you've got to go out, you've got to reinterview, rehire.

And has that passion been replicated across the world?

This move from a full time working from home to that hybrid model you're talking about?

If you look at Southern Europe and Asia, take Tokyo.

There's very little working from home going on.

So Tokyo is kind of unchanged.

It's a weird world.

You know, in 2019, these cities look similar.

Suddenly, five years later, you know, six years later, we've now seen a surge of work from home in much of Europe and the US and pretty much everyone's returned to the office in Asia.

And Zoe, what has that meant for how people might move between jobs now if you can potentially be working from home for a company that is no longer based in your town or in a nearby city, as may have been the case in the past when you sought employment adjacent to where you live?

I think there has been a shift in terms of the balance of power that when you apply for a job, it has become the norm to ask for flexible working, or certainly more normalised, and to expect it.

Zoe's exactly right.

It's funny, talking to recruiters, they said, look, pre-pandemic, if you're recruiting folks, you tell them about the salary and obviously the role, but they're always going to ask about the perks.

And, you know, there's the big two, which is pension, and is there any kind of healthcare plan?

Now they said, look, it's the big three, pension, healthcare plan, and work from home.

And so, yes, it's become a critical part of recruitment.

The normal numbers that I hear from recruiters, I see in research, is 8%.

So folks say, look, if I can be hybrid, you know, I'll accept basically 8% less pay to be hybrid versus come in the office five days a week.

So you can twist it around and say, if you're a boss and you want your folks in five days a week, you're going to have to pay people basically 8% more.

Zoe, what are the major negatives that have been reported to you from employers?

We went and interviewed the CEO of a record label in East London, and he set up this company himself.

It's his baby, and he has a lot of young staff.

And it's interesting because he's been allowing his young workers to be at home, coming in for two days a week.

And he's now asked them to come back in for three days a week.

I can't help but have this nagging feeling that sort of continual remote working has affected our bottom line.

It's his business, and he feels that it's the kind of industry where people should be networking, should be part of this team, not just in spirit, but physically together, sharing ideas.

And I think he also wonders about what effect it's having on the mental health of his young workforce to be at home too much of the time.

I firmly believe that the music industry is all about relationships.

And so the one single way to really, for any of us, to be able to build those kind of meaningful relationships is to do it in person.

Perhaps for him, it's a bit of a slight sense of loss of control.

He just doesn't quite know what everybody's up to, which I think he might feel is a bit of a disadvantage.

And he found it difficult to just be communicating via video conferencing.

So I think there are some disadvantages that he would say.

And do those arguments extend out to the point where the whole economy would benefit from everyone being back at work?

What did you find?

For an in-depth bit of reporting for the BBC that I've been doing in recent weeks, we spoke to Lord Stuart Rose, and he used to run two of the biggest retailers in the UK supermarkets called Marks and Spencer's and Asda.

And he came out very strongly in favour of people coming in for most of the time.

People who drive trains have to go to work.

People who work in operating theatres have to go to work.

People who work in service industries like retail have to go to work and others don't.

Well, you know, what's different?

They have children.

They have problems.

They have issues.

You deal with it.

And what he said to us was that he just thinks it's really bad for productivity in the UK.

It's really bad for economic growth in the UK if people are spending too much time working from home.

Do you want to jump in there with your stats and research?

There's a number of folks who can only work if they're allowed to work from home.

So we've seen the data that employment of folks with a disability, people looking after young kids, folks close to retirement has been surging post-pandemic.

And this is, you know, hundreds of thousands of millions of people literally who can work.

And if they're working, they're paying taxes, providing goods and services for the rest of us.

And that's a win-win.

So actually, I think these are typically, you know, kind of older in their career CEOs, typically men, if you look in the data, who are very against work from home.

You know, they're judging on their experience.

You know, that might have been right 20, 30 years ago, but in 2025, it's actually good for the economy.

And that's interesting that there are certain jobs that can only be done in the workplace, but there are certain people who can only work if they're at home.

And it's sort of setting up a bit of a divide between workers.

I mean, just to broaden it out a little bit, we heard Elon Musk, of course, aid to President Trump and billionaire businessman tell CNBC recently that not only did he think working from home made people less productive, he also thought it was a symbol of class division between white collar and blue collar workers, to use those terms.

Nick, what do you make of that argument?

Well, you know, Musk's views are really problematic.

So I'll give you an example.

There was someone I was speaking to last week who, you know, a couple of years ago, broke their neck in an accident.

And so he used to be, you know, a pretty senior exec.

Poor guy is now basically disabled from the neck down.

And he said, look, if I've got to go into work, it takes me about three hours.

And it's like three hours.

He said, yeah, my carer has to get me up, wash me, get me dressed, take me to the car.

And then, you know, my dad would normally drive me into work.

He said, if I can work from home, it's about 20 minutes.

Now, this is someone that's highly productive.

If you force someone like that to come into work every day, he said, to be honest, I'll probably stop working.

And so the Musk view of trying to turn it into a crusade to force everyone back to the office is going to lose folks like that, people with young kids, folks close to retirement, and is a loss to all of us.

You know, if there are more people working and paying taxes, it's less taxes for the rest of us to pay.

Nick, why do you think this has become such a politically charged issue?

I mean, it's almost a culture issue here in the US.

And obviously, as we've been talking about, it's a huge issue in the UK at the moment now as well.

Politics comes into everything eventually, unfortunately.

And politics is coming to work from home.

It's pretty natural in a sense, because if you look who can and who can't work from home.