How remote work in Indiana has evolved since the pandemic

Five years after the pandemic reshaped how and where we work, Indiana’s workforce continues to navigate the balance between home offices and traditional workplaces. Despite return-to-office (RTO) policies implemented by prominent employers with an Indiana presence, such as Salesforce, Microsoft and Amazon, remote work, or at least a mix of remote and in-office work (known as hybrid work), seems here to stay.¹

In September 2024, Indiana full-time workers reported working from home 23% of paid working days, according to the U.S. Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes.² This is down from a mid-pandemic peak of 56% in July 2020, but much higher than before the pandemic (around 7%), according to the 2019 American Time Use Survey.

Regardless of their feelings about remote work, Indiana businesses and workers are still grappling with the long-term effects of the work-from-anywhere culture. This article explores how Indiana is adapting to this culture shift, examining its impacts on industries, workplaces and the broader economy—and what it means for the future of work in the Hoosier State.

Workers’ desires and employers’ plans for remote work

WFH Research and the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes (SWAA), founded in May 2020 in response to the dramatic impact of COVID-19 on working arrangements, provide much of the data used in this article. The SWAA is a monthly online survey of between 2,000 and 10,000 U.S. residents ages 20 to 64 who earned at least $10,000 in the prior year; as a result, respondents exhibit some attachment to the workforce.³

WFH Research uses survey results to compile time series data that track the extent of remote work and employer plans for it moving forward. The data set contains more than 200,000 observations since the survey began in May 2020.⁴ Most of the data for this article, however, focuses on survey respondents who live in Indiana.

The left panel of Figure 1 shows Indiana employers’ plans for remote work after COVID. It’s a response to the question, “Looking one year ahead, how often is your employer planning for you to work full days at home?”

You can see that, early in the pandemic, employers doubted the “stickiness” of the work-from-home (WFH) trend, as evidenced by the lower planned WFH days early in the time series. In 2020, employers planned for an average of 0.9 WFH days per week for all workers. This number inched up to about 1.2 days per week in 2024.

Workers have relished the flexibility that remote work allows and consistently desired more WFH days per week than their employers had planned (see the right panel of Figure 1). Interestingly, desired WFH days had decreased in fits and starts since late 2020, but started to pick back up again in spring 2024, reaching a post-pandemic peak of 2.6 days per week in July.

Figure 1: Indiana employers' plans and workers' desires for post-pandemic WFH days per week (three-month average), May 2020 to September 2024

Note: September 2023 data is excluded because of a data collection error.
Source: WFH Research U.S. Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes

The current landscape of remote work in Indiana

As mentioned previously, Indiana respondents worked from home 23% of paid working days in September 2024, the latest month available at the time of this writing. This is relatively lower than the U.S. figure of 28%, perhaps reflecting Indiana’s higher-than-average manufacturing employment, an industry where most workers can’t work remotely. Figure 2 compares Indiana workers’ WFH days to all U.S. workers since before the pandemic.

Figure 2: Percent of paid working days WFH, March 2020 to September 2024

Note: Solid lines are actual observations. Dashed lines are LOESS curves, which smooth out fluctuations to reveal underlying trends in the data.
Source: WFH Research U.S. Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes

For those able to work from home, defined by WFH Research as someone who currently works from home one or more days a week (or did so at some point since the start of the pandemic), the most common working arrangement in 2024 was a hybrid schedule (see Figure 3). This aligns with workers’ desires and the policies of many major Indiana employers, including Indiana University,⁵ Cummins, Rolls-Royce, Eli Lilly and others.⁶

Figure 3: Working arrangements for those able to WFH, January to September 2024

Note: Respondents who didn’t work during the reference week are excluded (<1% of sample).
Source: Author’s calculations, WFH Research U.S. Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes

Indiana workers reported more in-office work than the nation overall. Though the share of fully remote workers is about equal, Indiana workers are more likely to be fully in-office and less likely to be hybrid.

Since the sample referenced in Figure 3 only includes workers who can work remotely, it weeds out workers in industries like manufacturing or transportation and warehousing—which comprise a higher share of employment in Indiana than the U.S. overall. This suggests that employers and/or workers value in-office work more in Indiana across industries.

The industries with the most employees working from home include arts and entertainment, finance and insurance, information and professional and business services. Those with the least include wholesale trade, utilities, mining, transportation and warehousing and manufacturing.

Table 1 shows the percentage of paid working days per week that were worked remotely by industry for all employees (not just those able to WFH) in Indiana and nationwide, averaged over the first nine months of 2024.

Table 1: Percentage of paid working days worked remotely by industry, January to September 2024 average

*Real estate did not have enough Indiana respondents for a figure to be calculated.
Source: WFH Research U.S. Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes

Workers in almost every industry in Indiana reported working fewer days per week remotely than in the U.S. overall. While sample sizes are much smaller in Indiana, it’s a notable finding that supports the proposition that in-office work may be valued more highly in Indiana than the nation.

Remote work’s potential impacts on the real estate workforce

The pandemic-induced WFH boom has resulted in winners and losers that, five years on, are coming into sharper focus. Much ink has been spilled about remote work’s impacts on central business districts in major cities, with many articles blaming downtown declines on remote work.⁷ In truth, the relationship between remote work and downtowns is far more complex and nuanced than “remote work spells the end for cities.”

However, vacancy rates in downtown office buildings remain stubbornly high. According to Moody’s, the office vacancy rate in the 79 largest U.S. metros reached a record 20.1% in the second quarter of 2024.⁸ Office vacancy in Indianapolis is even higher, at 22.3%, an increase of 2.2 percentage points (pp) since the fourth quarter of 2019. But Indy is far from the worst performer in terms of office vacancy increases since 2019. San Francisco has increased from 8.8% in 2019 to 21% in 2024 (+12.2 pp); Austin, TX from 13.3% to 25.2% (+11.9 pp) and Charleston, SC from 16.6% to 27.3% (+10.7 pp).

How might this be shaking out in the workforce? If commercial real estate is struggling, are we observing employment declines in this industry? To some extent, yes, but it’s far from cut and dry. Table 2 shows state and national employment in the real estate rental and leasing sector (NAICS 53), as well as select industries within the sector related to real estate brokers and residential and nonresidential leasing, from 2019 to 2024.

Table 2: Total employment and employment in select real estate industries

Indiana

United States

Source: Lightcast

While Indiana’s total sector employment is up 2% since 2019, employment in nonresidential property managers is down 8%, while residential property managers is up 9%. Compare this to the nation, with growth of 7%, 5% and 17%, respectively. Employment in lessors of residential buildings is down 4% and lessors of nonresidential buildings is up 5% in Indiana, while these industries are growing nationwide at rates of 2% and 5%, respectively. Offices of real estate agents and brokers, which includes residential real estate, is up 14% in Indiana and 9% nationwide.

So, while we’re seeing some employment shifts in commercial and residential real estate, there’s not a clear and obvious story we can tell from the data. However, it’s notable that the sector overall and most of the highlighted industries are not growing as fast in Indiana as they are nationally—two of them are even shrinking.

A potential upside of the work-from-home culture’s impact on real estate is office-to-residential conversions. Due to changing work and living habits since the start of the pandemic, developers, property investors and cities are looking to convert aging and underutilized office buildings across the country into new uses, like multifamily residences. A CoStar and CBRE study found that there were about 100 such conversion projects underway across major U.S. cities in 2023, a major spike compared to the annual average of about 40 between 2016 and 2022.⁹

However, conversions aren’t always feasible. Complicated financing, environmental challenges and the physical attributes of the buildings themselves—irregular floor plans, design constraints, aging systems that are expensive to reuse, etc.—can scuttle many conversion plans. For these reasons and more, the cost of converting an office building into a new multifamily one can average about 20% more than ground-up development, according to CoStar. As a result, developers usually seek top-of-market rents and robust public incentive packages for such projects to work. Despite these challenges, the rising frequency of these conversions demonstrates how creative solutions are gaining traction in reshaping underutilized downtown spaces.  

The outlook for remote work: Hybrid work as Goldilocks?

All the evidence suggests that hybrid work is the new normal for most white-collar and knowledge workers. It has been increasingly challenging to get these types of workers in the office five days a week. Even as the labor market has loosened considerably since 2022, most organizations’ RTO policies have tended to settle on between two and four days a week in the office.

Hybrid work is the “Goldilocks” of work-life balance. Being fully remote can feel isolating, fully in-office can be inconvenient, but hybrid work is the sweet spot that marries the benefits of in-person collaboration with the flexibility of working from anywhere. For this reason, companies will continue pushing RTO, but face the delicate task of balancing employee preferences for flexibility with the need to maximize productivity and, crucially, justify costly office space.

Office amenities such as free snacks and gyms are nothing new, but real estate firms are watching a new push into “highly amenitized” and well-located offices to entice workers to the office. Real estate services firm JLL found that the pandemic has boosted the popularity of spaces that recreate the benefits of working from home, such as designs that integrate collaboration rooms, lounge areas and private call booths with dedicated dining and entertainment options.¹⁰

It remains to be seen whether amenity-rich offices will soften the blow of RTO for white-collar employees used to their home offices, but it may, at least in the short term, raise the prospects of commercial real estate developers building these new offices.

The future of work in Indiana and across the country is still evolving, with hybrid arrangements emerging as a middle ground. As businesses adapt to worker preferences and economic realities, the interplay between remote work and industries such as real estate will continue to reshape the state’s workforce and urban landscapes. Whether through innovative office spaces or commercial-to-residential conversions, Indiana is navigating a transformation that promises to define the post-pandemic era.