remote executive communication statistics
Abstract
Remote work is common enough that executive communication needs explicit operating measures. In 2025, 34.5 percent of employed people did some work at home on days they worked, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey. [1] A separate BLS survey counted 35.389 million people teleworking or working at home for pay during an average week in 2025. [2] Neither figure measures communication quality. Workplace studies show changes in communication patterns but do not supply a universal response-time or meeting target. Executive support teams should use national figures as context and calculate their own decision, handoff, and schedule measures.
Methodology
This review uses the newest available national work-location estimates and original studies with disclosed methods. BLS published its 2025 time-diary results on June 25, 2026. [1] The 2025 Current Population Survey annual table uses a reference-week measure of paid telework. [2] Census uses the 2024 American Community Survey one-year estimate for a worker's usual commute. [3] Communication evidence includes telemetry for 61,182 U.S. Microsoft employees during the first half of 2020, [4] 20 million meetings among 310,000 Microsoft employees from January through July 2022, [5] and a November 2024 study using eight interviews, 165 survey responses, and telemetry from 211,000 workers. [6] These company studies are not national administrative data. A Nature paper published April 27, 2022 used laboratory and field experiments to compare virtual and in-person idea work. [10]
The national baseline depends on the question
BLS time diaries show that 34.5 percent of employed people worked at home for at least some time on days they worked in 2025. Among workers age 25 and older with a bachelor's degree or higher, the share was 51.4 percent. [1] The measure includes scheduled and unscheduled work at home. One person can work both at home and at a workplace on the same day, so it does not count fully remote jobs.
The BLS Current Population Survey answers a weekly question. Its 2025 annual averages count 35.389 million people who teleworked or worked at home for pay during the survey reference week. They averaged 26.5 remote hours out of a 39.9 hour workweek, or 66.4 percent of worked hours. [2] The denominator excludes people absent for the entire reference week.
Census reported that 13.3 percent of workers worked from home in the 2024 American Community Survey, down from 13.8 percent in 2023. [3] The commuting question asks how a worker usually got to work. A hybrid worker who usually traveled to an office may appear as a commuter in ACS while reporting some home-based work to BLS. Compare the figures by definition rather than averaging them.
What the evidence can support
A Nature Human Behaviour study analyzed email, calendar, message, call, and workweek records for 61,182 U.S. Microsoft employees during the first six months of 2020. Researchers used employees who were already remote as a comparison group. They found that the companywide shift made collaboration networks more static and siloed, reduced synchronous communication, and increased asynchronous communication. [4] The study covered one technology company during an abrupt transition. It did not study executive assistants as an occupation.
An ACM CHI study examined 20 million scheduled meetings among 310,000 Microsoft employees from January through July 2022. [5] Calendar telemetry and an employee survey connected cross-time-zone meetings with early and late meeting hours. The dataset describes behavior inside one organization. It cannot establish a safe meeting load or preferred coverage window for every distributed team.
The 2024 ACM CSCW study used eight interviews, 165 survey responses, and telemetry from millions of meetings scheduled by 211,000 workers. It found gaps between stated scheduling preferences and observed practice, with differences related to meeting load, time zones, job function, and title. [6] This supports checking calendars against declared working agreements. It does not prove that one cadence improves performance. The national estimates and virtual-idea experiment set the surrounding context. [1][2][3][10]
Video calls do not suit every task equally
The 2022 Nature experiment compared pairs working in person with pairs using video. Across laboratory and field settings, virtual pairs generated fewer creative ideas, while researchers found no evidence that they were worse at choosing which idea to pursue. [10] Eye-gaze and recall measures linked the result to narrower visual focus on the screen. The finding concerns a defined creative task, not every executive update.
A difficult strategy discussion may benefit from a richer live setting. A routine status update, decision log, or handoff can often be written. The remote EA communication workflow guide explains channel and escalation rules. The remote executive assistant tools guide covers systems that can hold those records.
Four local benchmarks worth calculating
Response latency is elapsed working time from a message entering the agreed channel to acknowledgment by the responsible person. Report a median and a 90th percentile by urgency class. Do not treat an automated receipt as acknowledgment, and pause the clock outside the documented coverage window. The published studies provide no national target for this measure.
Decision cycle time runs from a complete decision request to the recorded decision. Track requests returned for missing context separately. Handoff acceptance is the share of handoffs explicitly accepted by the next owner before the outgoing coverage window closes. An item is not a successful handoff merely because someone posted it.
Meeting burden should count attendee hours, not just calendar events. Multiply meeting duration by required attendees, then separate hours outside each participant's local coverage window. Review this alongside decision completion and reopened decisions. A falling meeting total can hide worse coordination if clarification traffic or missed handoffs rises.
Build a benchmark without inventing an industry norm
Choose a representative four-week period. Record timestamps, ownership, urgency class, coverage window, and outcome. Exclude message bodies unless a specific review requires them. Use medians and percentile bands instead of one average that can hide long delays.
Separate routine, urgent, and sensitive work, then split same-time-zone communication from cross-time-zone communication. Compare a baseline with a second period after changing one rule. Keep volume and quality measures side by side so that a faster response does not conceal more rework.
The cited sources do not establish a universal executive support service level. [1][2][3][4][5][6][10] Teams that want help designing a measured remote support model can contact ExecutiveSupportStaff after reviewing the evidence and their own records.
Limits of these remote communication statistics
The main limitation is that government estimates describe broad worker populations and use different reference periods. They do not isolate executives or executive assistants. The communication studies draw heavily on technology-company datasets, and the 2020 study captures an unusual transition. Survey responses describe perceptions, while telemetry describes recorded behavior. Neither directly measures the meaning or quality of every exchange.
Use the figures to define the measurement problem, not to grade an individual. A local benchmark should support process review without reading private content, rewarding constant availability, or shifting inconvenient meeting hours to the least powerful participant.
Key findings
- In 2025, 34.5 percent of employed people did some work at home on days they worked. [1]
- BLS counted 35.389 million people doing paid telework during an average survey week in 2025. [2]
- Census measured 13.3 percent of workers as usually working from home in 2024. [3]
- A study of 61,182 Microsoft employees found less synchronous and more asynchronous communication after the 2020 remote-work shift. [4]
- No cited source establishes a universal response-time, handoff, or meeting-load target for executive support.
Sources
- American Time Use Survey: 2025 Results, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
- Average Weekly Hours of Work and Percent of Hours Teleworked, 2025 Annual Averages, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
- United States Commuting at a Glance: American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates, U.S. Census Bureau
- The Effects of Remote Work on Collaboration Among Information Workers, Nature Human Behaviour
- Challenging but Connective: Large-Scale Characteristics of Synchronous Collaboration Across Time Zones, ACM CHI
- Rhythm of Work: Mixed-Methods Characterization of Information Workers Scheduling Preferences and Practices, ACM CSCW
- American Time Use Survey User Guide, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
- American Community Survey 2024 Subject Definitions, U.S. Census Bureau
- Challenging but Connective Research Publication Page, Microsoft Research
- Virtual Communication Curbs Creative Idea Generation, Nature