While 83 percent of CEOs want employees to return in person, only 10 percent of employees want to come back full time, according to a study by the Best Practice Institute. 
—Newsweek, 4/13/21

The coronavirus produced an epidemic of working from home. This has revealed a sharp split, between business leaders who want their workers back in the office, and a workforce that would rather stay home. My bet is that the return to the office that many CEOs anticipate will not take place. Building security firm Kastle Systems' Workplace Occupancy Barometer probably will not return to 50 percent anytime soon. And I expect to see soft demand for office construction to last for many years. 

It is natural for the head of a company to feel fully engaged with the business. As a CEO, your identity is almost completely wrapped up in your job. The office is the arena in which you enjoy a sense of fulfillment and power. 

But for most ordinary employees, being in the office is less thrilling. They are more detached from the business, and a larger share of their emotional commitments are to their friends, families, hobbies, or other outside interests. 

Of course, many workers do not have a choice about where they work. Retail clerks, hair stylists, landscapers, truck drivers, and factory workers must be present to do their jobs at all. But most white-collar office jobs can be done away from the workplace, which raises the issue of how much time employees really need to spend in the corporate office.

The corporate office is a relic of a time when electronic communication links were at best expensive and unreliable. Just twenty years ago, a video conference required tens of thousands of dollars of equipment using dedicated networks. Most communications within offices used landline telephone systems.

But with today's technology, I would argue that the corporate office is a solution in search of a problem. In fact, for most workers, the office is a source of problems. Commuting wastes time and money. Being far from home creates many inconveniences. Workers may find the office environment itself to be an unpleasant or uncomfortable space in which to work.

There are solutions to most of the challenges posed by remote work:

• Bosses want to be able to access their employees during regular work hours. But with smart phones and virtual meetings universally available, remote access is feasible. 
• In the office, workers can bond with one another as they gather informally to chat. To replicate this in a remote setting, companies may have to periodically arrange events where workers get together. 
• In some cases, the home environment may be too noisy or chaotic for workers to be productive. For employees who need to escape such distractions, the company might negotiate for office space for those workers without requiring them to commute to a central office. Each worker's quiet space could be located within a short distance from home.

If workers do not return to the office full-time, this will have many broader consequences. Survey researcher Nicholas Bloom says,

This upsurge in working from home is largely here to stay, and I see a longer-run decline in city centers. The largest U.S. cities have seen incredible growth since the 1980s as younger, educated Americans have flocked into revitalized downtowns. But it looks like that trend will reverse in 2020—with a flight of economic activity out of city centers.

He adds,

instead of building more office skyscrapers—which has been the dominant theme over the past 40 years—I predict that COVID-19 will dramatically shift the trend to industrial parks with low-rise buildings. 

If I were a company right now planning the future of my office, I would be looking to the suburbs.

I do not share Bloom's view that suburban office parks are a panacea. For a typical worker, the opportunity to commute to an office park rather than a downtown high rise is hardly compelling. In fact, young people who want to go out after work might prefer the latter to the former.

In fact, the opportunity for remote work may segment the population. Parents with young children seem particularly interested in working from home. 

More than half of parents with children under age 18 said that COVID-19 has made them more likely to prefer working from home, either most of the time (33%) or half of the time (20%), according to a new Institute for Family Studies/Wheatley Institution survey by YouGov. 

Going forward, people may base their choices of where to live less on work and more on other factors. Some will want to live near relatives. Others may want to live near natural amenities, such as ski slopes or beaches. Some may choose “recreation clusters” that offer particular sports or music. 

Demographer Joel Kotkin foresees an accelerated shift away from large urban centers.

The big winners in the changing geography of work are the suburbs, and particularly exurbs of major metropolitan areas. These areas have seen job growth expand at 2.5 times the national rate, and have thus attracted the foreign born, younger families, and minority voters faster than the national average.
. . .the big metros are not dying so much as dispersing. Mostly located in counties within two hours commute time of a major urban core, exurbs are ideal for employees who work only one day per week or a few days per month in the office.

There are a lot of bets one could make about the extent and consequences of what Kotkin terms “the great office refusal.” For example, in 2022, what percent of the workforce will be full-time remote, what percent will be full-time in the office, and what percent will be part-time in the office? 

For hard numbers that we know will be collected on a regular basis, I recommend the Commerce Department's figures for total expenditures on office construction, published monthly by the Census Bureau. The October 1 release showed that office construction in August of 2021 was $81.163 billion. Will office construction rebound, or will it continue to fall? What will office construction average in 2022? My prediction is that there is at least a 10 percent chance that construction will fall below $77 billion next year (a five percent drop). What do you say?

Another interesting indicator is the Kastle Systems Workplace Occupancy Barometer, which stood at 36 percent in early October. Will it reach 50 percent by the end of 2022?