Employers have been urging workers to return to the office with increasing urgency this year, while workers have been demanding flexibility, resulting in a squabble that has yet to be resolved as 2023 approaches.

Hybrid arrangements, in which workers come into the office part of the week, have gained widespread acceptance as a workable solution. However, many workers are refusing to return to work, despite the fact that some employers require a full-time return.

In New York City, for example, state government data show that subway use has increased in wealthier and business districts, particularly since this summer, indicating that more white-collar workers are going to work. Nonetheless, it had only reached 67% of pre-pandemic levels in October.

In recent months, weekend subway use has been closer to pre-pandemic levels than weekdays. Separate data show that tube journeys in London had reached just over 80% of pre-pandemic levels.

The landscape for other businesses that served office workers has changed, too. In New York, while more new businesses have opened over the past year than were lost during the pandemic, their geographical distribution has changed, said Kathryn Wylde, chief executive of the Partnership for New York City. Manhattan, where the bulk of offices are, lost businesses, while boroughs like Queens and Brooklyn, where a lot of people live, gained them.

Companies could save on real estate, but hybrid work could come with other costs -- from worries about lost productivity and collaboration to mentoring and the organization's culture. In regulated sectors such as finance, remote settings could also be detrimental to compliance. The model employers choose would determine their attractiveness to workers, especially younger generations who demand more flexibility.

The nature of the workplace could also exacerbate inequalities that were exposed by the pandemic: racial and ethnic minorities were over-represented in frontline tasks where remote working was not possible and faced a higher health risk. Not much has changed for them.

White-collar workers are working hard. A Microsoft report in September said the number of meetings per week had increased 153% globally for the average Teams user since the start of the pandemic – and 42% of workers multi-tasked during those meetings. Still, 85% of the leaders it surveyed felt they did not have confidence employees were being productive in a hybrid workplace.

The coming year could determine who ends up having the upper hand in determining what work looks like in the future. A booming economy and labor shortages have given workers more say; a recession might take some of that away.

“It's not going to be so easy to give up your job,” Wylde said. "That will probably mean that people are less resistant to the requirement they are back in the office at least three days a week -- which is where it feels like it is headed.”