Most NYers Working From Home Never Met Their Coworkers, Study Finds

NEW YORK CITY — Water cooler chats. After work drinks. Birthday celebrations and holiday office parties. Face to face time.

Those are the aspects of New York City office life that the vast majority of city dwellers working from home workers never do, according to a new study by GreenBuildingElements.com.

The study found 57 percent of New Yorkers working from home have never met their colleagues.

The results are sure to rankle Mayor Eric Adams, who has tried and struggled to convince city offices to bring their workers back.

"You can't stay home in your pajamas all day," Adams said, as Business Insider first reported.

"That's not who we are as a city. You need to be out, cross-pollinating ideas, interacting with humans."

To be fair, the study does show that New Yorkers who work from home have more literal face-to-face contact with their colleagues than residents of some states.

Take Nebraska: 89 percent of that state's work-from-home contingent haven't met their coworkers in person. That's the most out of any state in the GreenBuildingElements.com study, which surveyed 4,121 employees across the nation.

Washington state wasn't far behind — 81 percent of their at-home workers never met their colleagues, the study found.

For people who want to live in a state where they meet their work-from-home colleagues, consider Kentucky or Montana: only 17 percent have never met their coworkers, the study found.

But the study did point out some upsides to avoiding occasional annoying office mates.

A majority — 58 percent, to be precise — of work-from-home employees surveyed said their relationships with their work colleagues are actually better. And 66 percent said they're more likely to keep in touch with coworkers socially outside working hours.

The study dovetails with a more New York City-focused recent survey by the Partnership For NYC that found 38 percent of Manhattan office employees are in their workplace on an average workday.

Just 8 percent of the borough's one million office workers are going back to their workplaces five days a week, the poll found.

Most employers, however, indicated that some in-person office work is in their workers' near future.

"Remote work is here to stay, with 78% of employers indicating a hybrid office model will be their predominant post-pandemic policy, up from just 6% pre-pandemic," the survey states.

See a GreenBuildingElements.com map of work-from-home meetup percentages.