Just Say No To Remote Work

By Michael R. Strain, Project Syndicate | July 7, 2026

Even during the immediate post-pandemic period, when evidence on the labor-market effects of remote work was scant, there was a strong case to be made for going into the office, especially for younger workers. And now, multiple new studies have vindicated this intuition.

WASHINGTON, DC—My advice for the two million young people who graduated with bachelor’s degrees over the last few months and are just starting their careers: Go to work—not just figuratively, but literally. If you have a job that allows hybrid work arrangements, do not use them. Instead, be at your desk five (or six!) days per week. And if your job is fully remote, start looking for a new one.

I was giving the same advice back in 2021, when millions of white-collar workers had decided that remote work was one feature of the COVID-19 lockdowns they wanted to keep. At the time, we didn’t have much evidence on the labor-market effects of working from home. But we do now.

In a new study, economists Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington, the authors of In Person: How Working Together Fuels Creativity, Productivity, and Growth, and Harvard economist Amanda Pallais calculate that the unemployment rate among college graduates under 29 years of age was 1.3 percentage points higher in 2025 than in 2019 (just before the pandemic and the four-fold increase in people working remotely). Among older college graduates, the unemployment rate increased by 0.4 percentage points over the same period.

To explain this divergence, the authors compare the unemployment rates of workers in jobs that are easily done remotely (for example, software engineers) with jobs that are hard to do remotely (such asmechanical engineers). They find that remote work is responsible for nearly two-thirds of the unemployment gap between college graduates under 29 and older graduates. Moreover, their results hold up even when they control for each occupation’s exposure to automation by generative AI tools.

These findings jibe with a second new study. Economists Peter John Lambert and Yannick Schindler examined four Anglophone countries, including the United States, and found that the rise of remote work after the pandemic led to a shift in both hiring and vacancies that favored more senior workers over those with just a few years of experience. Moreover, they show that the arrival and increased use of AI tools have had no effect on the decline in the demand for junior talent.

I hope these findings will serve as a source of motivation for young, college-educated workers. It is very much in their interest to go to work—physically. Employers are increasingly turning away from inexperienced workers for remote roles because such arrangements require relatively more supervision and greater effort to build new knowledge and skills. Meeting these needs is much harder—and therefore costlier—when a newly hired worker is at home on the couch, interacting with colleagues over Zoom.

With an in-person setting, by contrast, newly minted graduates will be faster to develop their emotional intelligence, which is crucial for success in many occupations. Reading body language and changes in facial expressions and tones of voice are crucial skills that cannot be easily learned over Zoom. Collegiality and group cohesion is best created through repeated physical interaction. For inexperienced workers trying to build professional networks and learn about new opportunities for advancement, unplanned meetings at the espresso machine or in the parking lot can be invaluable.

Yet many people in their early professional years are depriving themselves of these advantages. Some are doing so to maximize their leisure time or out of an exaggerated sense of the value they provide to their employers. But I suspect that the trend can largely be explained by something more prosaic: Employers often offer hybrid work as a benefit, so young workers take it. They should resist this temptation. Just because remote work is on offer doesn’t mean it has to be used.

What about workers with more than a handful of years of experience? Here, the right solution for most may not be to revert to the world of 2019. In my judgment, the costs to workers of a hybrid arrangement can be substantially mitigated by strong existing workplace relationships built on sustained in-person interactions.

Unlike workers in their early 20s, more experienced workers often have actual responsibilities in their personal lives—caring for children or aging parents, for instance—that they must balance against their professional responsibilities. This is partly why people value remote work in the first place.

From the perspective of employers, hybrid work does seem to damage productivity less than fully remote work; and in some circumstances, it may even boost productivity. Remote work also has been very beneficial for people with disabilities. Employment rates for this group are much higher than in the years prior to the pandemic. The economists Nicholas Bloom, Gordon B. Dahl, and Dan-Olof Rooth find that the post-pandemic increase in work from home explains over two-thirds of the increase in full-time employment for people with disabilities. The rise of remote work is analogous to the adoption of a new technology that allows businesses to benefit more fully from the creativity, effort, and skills of people with disabilities.

Still, even for more experienced professionals, remote work has gone too far. The balance will shift back toward in-person arrangements if the labor market softens and the unemployment rate starts to rise.

Given the many risks and drawbacks, the message younger workers need to hear is not nuanced: Be physically present. Work hard. Knock on doors. Get to the office before your supervisor arrives, and don’t leave work before he or she does.

First impressions matter, and like the background on a Zoom call, they can be blurred and distorted unless you are standing face to face.

Michael R. Strain, Director of Economic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author, most recently, of The American Dream Is Not Dead (But Populism Could Kill It) (Templeton Press, 2020).

Copyright Project Syndicate