Bosses leading remote teams have been worried that their employees are watching Netflix or running errands on the clock—and their intuition may be right.
Employed people who work at the office on a typical day averaged 7.79 hours on the job, while work-from-home employees only clocked in about 5.14 hours, according to new data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s a 2.65-hour daily difference. And it all tallies up to office staffers doing nearly 1.65 more days of work a week, compared to their stay-at-home counterparts.
Men are the worst offenders of this, working around 0.2 hours less daily than their female counterparts from home. Yet when it comes to working in the office, they show face for 0.3 hours longer every day than women do.
When it comes to occupation, the study found that remote construction workers are the most likely to dodge work, only logging in 2.17 hours every day from home. Other flexible jobs in transportation, professional services, the service industry logged the lowest amount of hours daily. The remote staffers in these industries work up to nearly 6 hours less per day than their in-office counterparts.
Remote workers are binge-watching TV
It’s no secret that many people want flexible schedules; it allows caretakers to be more present for their loved ones, imparts a sense of trust from bosses, and cuts down on commuting time and costs. But some are taking advantage of it.
On top of working fewer hours, fully remote work is associated with 10% to 20% lower productivity than fully in-person work, according to another 2023 study by Stanford’s Institute for Economic Policy and Research. And it may be for all the reasons managers are so concerned about—young workers hanging on the couch watching TV, or employees quietly slipping away for a midday shower.
In fact, about 84% of Gen Z workers fessed up to streaming shows and movies while working at home, according to a survey this year from streaming TV service Tubi. And it may be cutting into their job hours, as 53% of employed Gen Z said they’ve put off work to finish a show they’re binge-watching.
“As hybrid-work models continue to be the norm, the boundary between work and entertainment becomes more fluid across the board,” Cynthia Clevenger, senior vice president of B2B marketing at Tubi, told Fortune. “It’s not just passive background noise—it’s part of how they take breaks, stay stimulated, or even manage their focus throughout the day.”
Millennials and Gen Z are the biggest culprits, with 30% of the two young generations admitting to faking working, according to a 2024 survey from Workhuman. Companies like Wells Fargo have caught employees with this kind of behavior red-handed, firing a handful of staffers for “simulating keyboard activity” on the job.
Fortune 500 companies have tried to wrangle productivity issues through a wave of RTO mandates, rained down from companies like Amazon, Google, and JPMorgan over the past few years. But despite concerns about dampened efficiency and faked keyboard activity, it looks like work from home isn’t going anywhere. The share of employed people working at home on the average day was about 33% in 2024, compared to 35% in 2023, according to the BLS data.
