Meet the typical hybrid worker: millennial men making 6 figures who would never come into the office on a Friday

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• Hybrid work has become the preferred schedule for many companies and employees.
• It's a compromise between the pandemic's remote-work revolution and firms' desire for RTO.
• Hybrid workers are more likely to be highly educated and make at least six figures.

Whether they're logging on from their house, from the gym, or from the library, some workers don't want to be in the office full-time.

Many of their employers have landed on a happy medium: hybrid work.

Felicia, a 53-year-old who left her six-figure job over a full return-to-office mandate, previously told Insider that her schedule of three days at home and two in the office was a perfect work-life balance. She said being back in the office full-time dragged down her productivity and left her back at the mercy of a long commute.

"I just got to the point where it just wasn't working for me," she said. "And I walked away from over a $100,000-per-year salary to seek positions that have hybrid options so that I can have that work-life balance."

In the return-to-office push, the Goldilocks proposition of hybrid schedules has won out at many major companies, including Microsoft and Google. Gallup defines hybrid workers as anyone who works remotely between 10% and 100% of their working time.

That's a solution workers seem to like: 68% of the 2,367 US adults surveyed by Bankrate in July said they support a hybrid work schedule over fully in-person work. That support is much higher among members of Gen Z and millennials, while 54% of boomers said they'd rather work hybrid than in-person. Among workers whose jobs are remote-capable, in the long term, more prefer and expect to work hybrid than exclusively remotely, according to Gallup.

And some are achieving that dream. LinkedIn's Workforce Confidence Index survey, which asked about 93,000 Americans about their work arrangements from August 15 to August 25, 2023, found that 18% of surveyed American professionals were working hybrid schedules. According to a spring 2022 survey of 25,000 Americans by McKinsey, about 58% of surveyed workers said they have the opportunity to work from home at least one day a week. Gallup's Hybrid Work Indicator found that 52% of US employees in remote-capable jobs are in hybrid roles.

In total, 16.4% of establishments across the US had their employees teleworking some of the time, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's far larger than the percentage of the workforce who work remotely full-time — they come in at 3% — and speaks to how hybrid schedules are more widespread. Even so, about two-thirds of the American workforce never telework.

So, who are the hybrid workers of America? They're likely to work in sectors such as tech, to be be highly educated, and to make six figures.

Hybrid workers are more likely to be millennial men

According to the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes, about a quarter of surveyed working men work hybrid schedules.

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Millennial men are one group that's especially swinging from the office to home and back again. According to data from the WFH Research Project and the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes, or SWAA, compiled for a working paper and provided to Insider, 27% of surveyed working men work hybrid schedules, compared to 19.5% of surveyed women.

And millennials are most likely to be working hybrid schedules. About 28% of surveyed working millennials are hybrid workers, according to that survey data, compared to about a quarter of Gen Zers and 24% of those aged 40 to 49 years old. Just 16% of surveyed boomers work hybrid schedules.

LinkedIn's Workforce Confidence Index survey found similar results.

"One key reason for millennials' decisions: they're the generation most likely to be parents with young children," George Anders, an editor at LinkedIn, wrote in a survey analysis. "At that stage of life, enjoying a day or two a week without any commute time is a big plus in terms of fitting school drop-offs or pickups into a day's schedule."

Hybrid workers are more likely to make six figures and have a few degrees

Hybrid workers tend to be higher earners.

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Hybrid workers tend to make more money than their on-site counterparts and tend to hold more degrees, showing that the ability to work from home some days is still reserved for certain segments of the workforce.

According to a Government Accountability Office analysis of American Community Survey data, nearly 60% of those surveyed in the top 25% of earners — meaning that they earn at least $1,731 a week — did any work from home on an average day as of 2021.

Indeed, according to the SWAA data, nearly 57% of surveyed workers earning over $150,000 are hybrid workers, compared to just 13.2% of those surveyed who are earning between $10,000 and $20,000 — which is nearly the same for those earning between $20,000 and $50,000.

The hybrid-work wage premium skyrockets once workers start making over $50,000; 30.2% of those making between $50,000 and $100,000 work hybrid schedules, with that rising to 41.5% for those surveyed who make between $100,000 and $150,000, according to SWAA data.

And if you're working hybrid, there's a higher likelihood that you have a few degrees on your wall. About 61% of surveyed workers with Ph.D.s are hybrid, compared to about 37% of those surveyed who have a master's or professional degree, according to the SWAA data. Of those with four years of a college degree, 30.4% work remotely — and that percentage cascades down with the less formal education a worker has received. About 12% of those surveyed who just reached a high-school graduation are hybrid, compared to 2.3% of those surveyed with less education than a high-school graduation.

Some industries have more people working remotely at least some of the time than others

When it comes to hybrid work, not all industries are created equal. Educational services was the industry that had the highest percentage of employees teleworking at least some of the time, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That industry comprises roles such as education administrators and, of course, teachers and instructors.

The information sector, which comprises roles such as data processing, digital publishing, and tech, comes in a close second among industries with some employees teleworking.

Don't expect to find them in the office on Fridays or Mondays

Hybrid workers don't want to come in on Monday and Friday.

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While hybrid workers aren't completely absent from their offices, don't expect to find them there on either side of the weekend.

Steven Roth, the CEO of the major New York City private landlord Vornado Realty Trust, has said that in-office Fridays are "dead forever," and that in-office Mondays are "touch-and-go." A little under half of the readers polled by Insider on LinkedIn said that they wouldn't go into the office on Mondays and Fridays — and just 29% of poll participants said they'd go in on one of those days but not both.

Beyond that anecdotal polling, office-usage data backs up the idea that hybrid workers might be starting or ending their weekends at home.

"Very few people are coming in four to five days per week," Anjali Grover, the head of data analytics at Basking, told Insider. Basking, a workplace-analytics platform, tracked office-utilization data from 121 offices across the world in April through June of 2023. In the US, they found that Fridays and Mondays saw far fewer office visitors, with offices afflicted by what Grover calls "empty office syndrome" — people know it'll be empty, and that further discourages them from commuting in. Instead, "what we see here is midweek peaks," with workers across all US regions flocking in on Wednesdays.

And, depending on where they are, you might barely see hybrid workers at all. While workers in the Midwest were the most likely to be in the office four to five days a week, only half of those office visits lasted more than six hours — suggesting that even the most in-person workers are stretching the limits of that flexibility.

Are you passionate about hybrid work, or do you have a story to share about hybrid work? Contact this reporter at jkaplan@insider.com.

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