But compared with the national average, that's a relative bargain.
After polling 3,000 remote employees across the country, website marketing firm Authority Hacker found it would take an average of $12,188 in a lump-sum payment to persuade workers to permanently return to the office. In Texas, the average respondent said it would take $11,637 to return to the office every day. That's more than double the lowest result in the survey — West Virginia at $5,626 — but far below the $18,226 that South Dakotans would demand to give up regularly working from home.
Nearly three-quarters of respondents said returning to the office full time would negatively affect their mental health, and 63 percent said they would unionize to fight a forced return to office, according to the survey.
In Houston, however, some data suggests a higher rate of employees is returning to the office of their own volition. The city last month again was first in the nation for weekly office occupancy at 61.2 percent of pre-COVID levels, according to Kastle Systems, a technology firm that tracks security card swipes in 10 large markets. The 10-city average occupancy rate for the week ended June 28 was 49.8 percent.
Austin (59.4 percent), Dallas (53.7 percent), and Chicago (53.1 percent) also did better than average. Cities with the lowest occupancy rates were San Jose, Calif., at 39.1 percent, Philadelphia at 40.6 percent and San Francisco at 46.5 percent.
The Authority Hacker results coincide with fewer workers moving for new jobs. A quarterly survey by Challenger Gray & Christmas, a Chicago-based job search firm, found that less than 2 percent of job seekers relocated for new positions in the first quarter of 2023, down from 4.6 percent in the first quarter of 2022, and much lower than the 7.5 percent of job seekers who moved for new jobs in the second quarter of 2020, just as the pandemic had started.
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