Almost half of American office workers had no in-person meeting with anyone at all on their most recent day in the office, according to research published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The figure is 48.8%. It comes from a survey of 1,835 college-educated workers carried out in September 2026 for a New York Fed staff report by Natalia Emanuel, a research economist at the bank, and Emma Harrington, an economics professor at the University of Virginia. The findings were reported by CNBC.
September was chosen deliberately as a conservative month to measure. Many companies tighten attendance once summer ends, and the stretch between Labor Day and Thanksgiving carries less remote work than the holiday periods on either side of it.
The survey found 70.6% of respondents had at least one teammate absent from the office on their in-office days. About half had no in-person meeting at which every participant was present, and more than a third had neither an in-person nor a hybrid meeting.
Then there is the finding the researchers themselves flagged. "Amazingly, 37% of respondents reported that they had at least one meeting that was virtual" even though all of the participants were in the same office on the same day.
The authors have a name for this. They call it in-office remote work, and write that "a staggering share of the workforce experiences this form of in-office remote work".
Their summary of the typical office day is blunt. "Days in the office often lack human contact," they write, describing workers who commute in to join video calls and answer messages from their own desks.
The causes they identify are mostly structural. Teams now include fully remote colleagues, they are spread across more locations than before the pandemic, the available tools are isolating, some staff do not comply with mandates, and some employers do not enforce them strictly.
A separate strand of the work used personnel and badge-swipe data from a Fortune 500 company and found nearly half of corporate employees had at least one teammate out of the office on days they were in it. Federal time-use data show Americans now spend more time physically alone on office days than they did before the pandemic.
The researchers' recommendation follows from that: "ensuring adherence to the policy helps deliver the face-to-face contact that workers crave". They also note the limit of the case for the office, observing that "if the debates in the office are also happening over Zoom, the benefits of the office may not be so large".
The backdrop is not cheerful. Around one in four American workers is fully remote, on federal labour figures, and Gallup polling cited in the research puts worker sentiment at a 15-year low.
At this point it is worth reading the mandates themselves rather than the commentary about them. A three-day mandate requires three days. A four-day mandate requires four. A five-day mandate requires five. Each of them specifies attendance, and attendance is what is being measured.
On that specification, the policy is performing without fault. The staff are in the building. The badges are being swiped. Nothing in the instrument requires that anyone in the building speak to anyone else in it.
The 37% figure is therefore not a failure but the purest available form of compliance: a worker who has travelled to a specified location in order to attend a video call with colleagues who have also travelled to that location. Both parties are present. The meeting is remote. The requirement is satisfied twice.
Our analysts regard the commute as the one component of the arrangement that is now reliably conducted in person, and the only part of the working day in which an employee is certain to encounter other human beings.
The office has not failed. It was asked for attendance and it has delivered attendance, in full, on time, five days a week where required. The collaboration was never on the form.