Half of office days are still remote. They just happen inside the office.

ISSUE #39 • THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2026 • 5 MIN READ

Good morning. Thanks for reading Still Monday. Please forward it to the coworker you can see from your desk but still message on Teams because standing up now feels unnecessarily aggressive.

Companies have spent years arguing about remote work versus office work. A new New York Fed paper suggests the categories are becoming less useful.

You can apparently work remotely from the office.

A new Federal Reserve Bank of New York staff report estimates that roughly half of in-office days among college-educated Americans are spent entirely on Zoom calls or solo work. The researchers call it exactly what it feels like: remote work from the office. Federal Reserve Bank of New York

The finding explains a familiar workplace experience. You wake up earlier, commute, find parking, badge in, open your laptop and spend the next six hours talking to people who are somewhere else.

The biggest driver is geography. Teams became more distributed during the remote-work era, so returning one employee to an office does not bring the rest of the team back into the same room. Other factors include poor coordination on office days, employees not following attendance policies consistently, and a habit of taking Zoom calls even when the people involved are physically nearby.

The researchers argue that standard work-from-home measures may miss a large share of remote work's true prevalence because they define remote work by location rather than interaction.

That distinction matters for companies because the business case for office attendance usually depends on interaction: faster learning, stronger relationships, informal problem solving, mentoring, trust and serendipitous conversations.

A desk does not create any of those by itself.

If a team is geographically scattered, one employee sitting in Chicago and another sitting in Dallas are still remote from one another even if both are inside expensive corporate real estate.

This is where many return-to-office policies become operationally weak. They specify how many days employees should appear but not what should be different about those days.

A useful office day should have an interaction architecture. The people who depend on each other should overlap. Coaching should happen. Decisions that benefit from a room should be saved for the room. Work that is better done alone should not require a commute merely to prove that the employee owns pants.

The office can still be valuable. But attendance and collaboration are separate metrics. If leadership wants the second one, it has to design for it.

The New York Fed researchers identify geographic distance between teammates as the largest driver of in-office remote work. Hybrid policy cannot recreate proximity when the team itself no longer lives in one place.

The paper also finds workers sometimes default to video calls rather than reserving a room even when participants are physically in the same office. Habits survived the return.

A badge swipe proves somebody entered a building. It says very little about whether they collaborated, learned from a colleague or spent the day alone wearing better shoes.

For each office day, identify one activity that genuinely benefits from being together: a review, workshop, coaching session, difficult decision or relationship-building conversation. Schedule that first. Let the rest of the day organize around it.

If there is no reason the team needs to be together, you have useful information about the policy.

Companies pay for space. Employees pay with commute time and transportation. If the workday still consists entirely of solo tasks and virtual calls, both sides absorb location costs without receiving much of the intended benefit.

Real estate can support collaboration. It cannot substitute for coordination.

MANAGER: Great to have everyone together again.

EMPLOYEE: Absolutely.

MANAGER: See you on the 10:00 Zoom.

EMPLOYEE: You're twenty feet away.

MANAGER: I know. I'll send the link.

Presence is easy to count. Interaction is harder, which may be why so many companies count presence.

Vote below and tell us what actually happens on your office days: more collaboration, the same Zoom calls, or a sophisticated combination of both.

Technically Thursday. Emotionally commuting to the internet.

— The Still Monday Desk