CNBC reported on 2 November 2026 that a Federal Reserve Bank of New York staff report found a wide gap between office attendance and face-to-face work. In a September survey of 1,835 college-educated workers, roughly half of in-office days were spent entirely on video calls or solo work.
The finding matters for employers that have justified three-, four- or five-day office mandates on the basis of creative collaboration, productivity and mentorship. The report suggests that attendance rules alone do not determine whether workers meet colleagues in person.
A commute to video calls
The New York Fed staff report, Remote Work from the Office, was written by Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington and published in October 2026 as Staff Report 1211. The authors argue that existing measures of remote work, which focus on working from home, may miss up to three quarters of its true prevalence.
The survey found that 48.8% of respondents had no in-person meetings, with teammates or non-teammates, on the days they were most recently in the office. On in-office days, 70.6% had at least one teammate who was not in the office.
Half had no in-person meetings where all participants were present. More than a third had neither in-person nor hybrid meetings. The report also found that 37% of respondents had at least one virtual meeting even though all participants were in the same office that day.
The authors selected September for the survey to produce what they describe as a conservative estimate. Many employers push office attendance after summer, and the period between Labor Day and Thanksgiving has less remote work than holiday periods.
Why office days remain remote
The report identifies geographic distance as the largest driver. Teams are often spread across multiple offices, and some colleagues are fully remote. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics data cited in the report puts fully remote workers at roughly one in four.
Other factors include non-compliance with office policies, weak coordination of office days and limited employer enforcement. The authors also point to work habits created by communication tools, including the choice to take Zoom calls rather than book meeting rooms even when participants are in the same building.
The report adds evidence from a Fortune 500 employee base where the authors had personnel and badge swipe data. In that data, nearly half of corporate employees had at least one teammate out of the office on their in-office days. Data from the American Time Use Survey also showed that Americans now spend more time physically alone on office days than they did before the pandemic.
The sample is US and college-educated, so the figures should not be read as a European benchmark. The pattern is still relevant for workplace technology and adoption teams because it separates office attendance from actual interaction.
Implications for policy and tooling
The report does not conclude that employers should abandon office mandates. The authors write that ensuring adherence can help provide the face-to-face contact workers want.
They also argue that post-pandemic organisational structures may not be well suited to making mandates work. If teams are split across locations, a local office day may only change the background behind a video call. Poor coordination can produce the same result even when colleagues could have met in person.
For IT and workplace teams, the finding puts meeting defaults and tool behaviour back into the policy discussion. Room booking, meeting etiquette, channel use and coordinated team days decide whether office presence changes how people work.
Worker sentiment forms part of the context. Other polling cited in the article found worker sentiment at a 15-year low, while the New York Fed authors note possible repercussions such as mental health issues when the experience of remote work is more widespread than standard measures show.
When an office mandate still produces days of video calls, messaging threads and solo work, the practical questions are meeting practice, adoption and governance, which ECS's M365 + Copilot topic addresses alongside Copilot, Teams, SharePoint, Viva, governance and adoption. Sessions and workshops give attendees room to compare how policies, room use, meeting defaults and collaboration tools affect working patterns. Bring the tenant and workplace scenarios where the policy exists but the behaviour has not followed.
Photo: MarkJaysonAranda, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
This article was written by the ECS editorial team with the assistance of Amal Agent, run.events' AI assistant, which supported the research, drafting and proofreading.