US fighting a remote work ‘tug of war’ as employees look for ‘compromise,’ expert says

With more than 40 million U.S. workers expecting to do their jobs fully remote by 2025, one labor expert warned that a "tug of war" between businesses and employees to make the transition could add extra stress to the market.

"We've got this kind of interesting tug of war that's happening right now between workers and the employers," RedBalloon CEO Andrew Crapuchettes said on "Varney & Co." Friday, "because the employers want people in the office, and workers, we learned through the pandemic that, hey, you can be productive for a little bit when you work at home."

A future workforce report published by Upwork found strong remote work projections, predicting that 40.7 million American workers will have fully remote positions in the next five years, up 22.9% from its previous study in 2020, when the pandemic forced many jobs into a strictly digital space.

Additionally, a Stanford University study found that remote workers were 5% more productive than in-office workers in the summer of 2020. By the spring of 2022, remote workers became 9% more productive as companies learned how to better work offsite with investments in remote-friendly technology.

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"You don't have the water cooler, you don't have all the distractions," Crapuchettes noted of remote productivity, "but all of a sudden, you find out you're not doing the same collaboration and innovation that you have when you're in an office environment."

Wall Street execs like BlackRock CEO Larry Fink and Ernst & Young Global Chairman Carmine Di Sibio have argued for bringing their employees back into the office, citing the need for more productivity and learning opportunities.

"I'm a big proponent of people being in the office, at least for some periods of time," Di Sibio said from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, during a special episode of "Mornings with Maria" Wednesday.

"I'm not saying they have to be in the office five days a week, but three days makes sense, [maybe] four days," the chairman added.

Larry Fink said in an interview with FOX Business’ Liz Claman last September that "we have to get our employees back in the office," arguing doing so would result in "rising productivity that will offset some of the inflationary pressures."

But according to RedBalloon’s CEO, many remote workers were able to spend more time with family and friends, thus discovering a greater work-life balance during the pandemic and with remote work at large.

"You see places like Tulsa, Oklahoma, actually paid people to come to their city and move out of the Bay Area and New York and some of these big metro areas. So now they're there, they're happy, and I think that the trend is going to be where employers are going to realize we're in this tug of war, and we're going to have to compromise at some level," Crapuchettes explained.

The labor expert further argued that employers have also seen an improvement in work culture by migrating to "micro-offices" and leaving "big behemoth" cities like San Francisco or New York City.

"That's the trend that we're seeing today, where employers are going to have to compromise and they're going to have to let employers live their values out loud," Crapuchettes said. "But this is what we're seeing in the market right now, is these micro offices where employers have to compromise because they simply can't get everybody back to the large, central office."

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The remote work transition could indeed impact office and residential rents, work wages or even a company’s hiring retention.

"It's going to affect rents, it's going to affect that work-life balance because people don't want to go back," RedBalloon’s CEO said, "and I don't think that trend is going to change any time soon."

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FOX Business’ Taylor Penley and Gleb Tsipursky contributed to this report.