Source page: McKinsey & Company
Commentary
Homeward bound
Economy | Remote work | Workplace
September 6, 2023 – In early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic caused office attendance in the world’s top metropolitan areas to drop up to 90 percent. Since then, in-person attendance has stabilized at 30 percent below prepandemic levels but varies according to industry and company size. McKinsey Global Institute partner Jan Mischke, senior partner Aditya Sanghvi, and colleagues find that workers in the knowledge economy—the professional services, information, and finance industries—spend fewer days at the office than those employed in retail, transportation, or agriculture and mining. In addition, workers in big companies spend less time at the office than those who work in firms with fewer employees.
To read the report, see “Empty spaces and hybrid places: The pandemic’s lasting impact on real estate,” July 13, 2023.
customizer here
Visual form
Two-panel attendance dot plot. It compares office days by industry and by company size.
Layout / body structure
The chart stacks two horizontal dot plots one above the other: industries in the first panel and employee-count bands in the second. Reader scans each row across the same 0-to-5 office-days scale and then compares the upper and lower panels.
What is being compared
It compares reported days per week worked in the office across industries such as professional services, information, finance, retail, transportation, education, government, and agriculture, and then across company-size bands from very small firms to employers with 25,000 or more workers.
Measurement system
The horizontal axis is days per week worked in the office. Each row is a category, and the dots show average office attendance for that category.
Visible structure inside the graphic
The top panel orders industries on horizontal rows, while the lower panel repeats the same design for company employee counts. That split layout makes it easy to see that both sector and firm size shift office attendance patterns.
Main takeaway from the visual
Knowledge-economy workers and employees at the largest firms spend fewer days in the office than other groups. The two-panel design shows that the attendance gap is structural across both industry mix and employer scale.
Key standout values or extremes
Professional services, information, and finance sit toward the lower-attendance side among industries, while agriculture, mining, and similar in-person fields sit higher. In the size panel, the biggest companies are visibly lower than the smallest firms on the same office-days scale.
Controls / sequence, when applicable
This is a static chart image with no in-chart controls to operate.
Companion media, when applicable
There is no separate companion audio or video; the chart image is the full visual on this page.