Hybrid work wins a few more fans, as 22 industries split into two camps

Could we be settling into a new vision of full-time employment, with a lot of freedom to choose, week by week, between the traditional workplace and personal setups somewhere else? Jobholders are saying “yes,” while employers are feeling much more conflicted.

That’s the picture emerging from a major pair of LinkedIn surveys. As reported July 26, the freedom to shuttle back and forth won a big thumbs up when LinkedIn’s Glint unit surveyed more than 300,000 employees around the world. Some 56% of full-time workers voted for this hybrid option.

Everything is harder for employers, though. In a new, 22-industry analysis conducted by LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence team, software and information technology turned out to be the only sector where more than 50% of workers said their employers were offering permanent hybrid arrangements to full-time workers.

By contrast, fewer than 40% of workers in industries such as retail, education, recreation and travel said their employers had officially opened the door to such hybrid arrangements.?

The chart below highlights diverging attitudes in a dozen notable industries. It reflects surveys of 22,189 LinkedIn members from May 22 to July 30.?

Could employers’ attitudes be softening as jobholders’ preferences become more widely known? Some intriguing clues are surfacing. Because LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence team conducts its polling at a steady tempo throughout the year, it’s possible to see how aggregate responses varied throughout the 10-week sampling period.

Sure enough, the earliest responders (May 22 to June 18) reported the greatest hesitancy in employers’ attitudes toward hybrid work. Only 41% said their employers were offering a permanent hybrid option. That figure climbed three percentage points, to 44%, among the most recent respondents, surveyed from July 3 to July 30.?

Such inch-by-inch progress is a reminder that in many fields, clearing the way for sustained hybrid work involves more than a snappy all-hands memo. Everything is more complicated than inviting knowledge workers to take their laptops home -- and then reconnect to the office network from whatever coffee shop, resort town or kitchen table suits their fancy.?

Take healthcare, for example. At one extreme, hands-on specialties such as dentistry or knee surgery seem profoundly ill-suited for hybrid work. Everybody needs to be in the same room. A few other specialties, such as reading X-rays or CT scans, are far better suited to remote or hybrid work. Radiologists and health systems have been gravitating toward out-of-office work for years, and the legacy of 2020’s work-from-home dictates are likely to increase that trend .?

Smack in the center of healthcare’s gray zone are fields such as counseling and therapy. Traditionally, most work has been done in person. The pandemic-related restrictions of 2020 compelled a lot of patients and therapists to give virtual consultations a try. Now, as The New York Times reports , many caregivers are open to the idea that remote sessions might be here to stay.

In education, the role of hybrid or remote instructors is likely to be especially contentious. Parents, education officials and teachers all have strong feelings about the merits (or shortcomings) of last year's sudden migration to “Zoom school.” Students themselves might have something to say, too.?

For now, it’s no surprise that education (34%) is near the bottom of fields where employers are offering a hybrid work option. Still, lots of innovators are working to make remote learning more effective at all age levels. If they succeed, opportunities for hybrid work are likely to expand.

Wellness and fitness (37%) is still recalibrating as instructors return to in-person teaching after 2020’s efforts to build online practices. Both employers and instructors feel they can teach better -- and build stronger personal connections -- by being on site. But there's also a growing awareness that online or archived video instruction can bring in more money than people realized.??

For energy and mining (50%), big budgets and harsh geography have sparked surprisingly strong employer interest in hybrid work. Digital connectivity allows the creation of virtual control towers far from actual operating sites, as McKinsey & Co. consultants summarized in this report . Even massive machines can be operated electronically, from afar.

As for software (55%), the notion of far-flung engineers working wherever they want is a longstanding cultural touchstone. Leaders such as Darren Murph , GitLab ’s head of remote, keep this model very much in the public eye via articles , posts and podcasts .?

If larger companies buy into only a fraction of what remote-work evangelists like Murph champion -- but don’t reject the idea entirely -- that steers them into hybrid work as a pragmatic compromise. And that now defines a substantial slice of the tech sector.

Methodology

LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence Index is based on a quantitative online survey distributed to members via email every two weeks. Roughly 5,000 U.S.-based members respond to each wave. Members are randomly sampled and must be opted into research to participate. Students, stay-at-home partners and retirees are excluded from analysis so we can get an accurate representation of those currently active in the workforce. We analyze data in aggregate and will always respect member privacy. Data is weighted by engagement level, to ensure fair representation of various activity levels on the platform. The results represent the world as seen through the lens of LinkedIn’s membership; variances between LinkedIn’s membership & overall market population are not accounted for.

Alexandra Gunther ?from LinkedIn Market Research contributed to this article.