Minneapolis Fed report: Remote work is proving sticky
Andrew Cholakian has worked in remote jobs for more than a decade. Even the coffee he drinks is a product of working from home, he said.
During the pandemic, he took a deep dive into making espresso and enjoys the complexities of maintaining his fancy Italian espresso machine.
“It’s one of those things that lets you kind of get out of the flow of your workday and just have something extra to do… and put yourself in a different headspace,” he said.
Cholakian lives in Minneapolis, where he works remotely as a technical lead for a software company in Europe. His fancy coffee helps bridge conversations across time zones.
“Frequently I have meetings pretty early in the morning, often with people in Europe, and for those it’s great to be able to work from home because I can just basically roll out of bed and in 10 minutes be in a meeting,” he said.
Despite a number of employers calling employees back into the office, “remote work has nonetheless remained sticky,” writes Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Regional Analyst Haley Chinander in a new report.
Chinander analyzed data from the U.S. Census Bureau and found that, over the past two years, the share of workers who work from home at least some of the time has stayed steady at about 22 percent.
And the report states that Minnesota ranks 12th in the nation for its share of workers (24 percent) doing their jobs at least part of the time from home.
Chinander, who broke down the data by state and sector, said professional services, finance and healthcare and social services, which have high shares of remote workers, are big employers in Minnesota.
“In Minnesota, in particular, we have a higher concentration of workers in these sectors than in some other states,” she said in an interview.
For example, “healthcare and social assistance” employs the most people of any industry in the state, according to the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development.
Chinander noted that though healthcare may involve a lot of in-person care, a number of jobs can also be done remotely.
“In the healthcare sector, you…have a lot of administrative positions,” she said. “You also have a lot of telehealth happening and things like medical coding and transcribing that are often remote jobs.”
A few sectors showed a drop in their share of remote workers in Chinander’s analysis. Remote work decreased by six percentage points in the public administration sector from 2024 to 2025. The federal government and some state governments, including Minnesota, have mandated that workers return to the office either fully or some of the time.
Remote work also declined in the information sector, which is a broad category that includes publishing, telecommunications, data processing and more.
Espresso machine or water cooler?
In the past year, Minnesota-based companies like General Mills, Target and Best Buy have increased the amount of time they expect workers to do their jobs in person.
Many employers would prefer that their workers spend their time together near a water cooler instead of connecting virtually, said Minneapolis-based recruiter and career coach Julie Desmond.
“They want people to be face to face,” she said. “They want them to be friends and develop relationships, and to have the one-off conversations that lead to innovation, that lead to camaraderie…and more productivity, too.”
But even as companies ask employees to come back into the office, many workers have gotten used to working from home and have adapted their lifestyles to remote work, said Desmond.
“It’s expensive to work in the office,” she said. “You need new clothes, you need to pay for gas, you need after-school care for your school-age children that you don’t need if you’re working from home.”
For Cholakian, the tech worker, sometimes the excellent coffee at home doesn’t quench his thirst for social interaction, and he will leave the house to work. But with no physical office to go to, he visits coworking spaces, where people from different companies go to work in the same space as each other.
He said that’s a good bridge between the loneliness of remote work and the inconvenience of office work.
But overall, remote work is where he feels most at home.
“I sometimes do miss working in an office for about two and a half seconds,” Cholakian said. “And then I remember all the other stuff I don’t miss.”
Chinander, the Minneapolis Fed analyst, noted that remote work policies might change with shifts in the labor market.
“In an economy where there are few workers and more jobs, employers may use remote work as a benefit to attract labor,” she said. “And in the opposite situation where there’s fewer jobs and more workers, they may not feel the need to offer that.”
