The era of baking bread on a weekday morning or wearing pajama bottoms below an ironed shirt for video office meetings appears to be on the wane in the Bay Area.
Lockdowns during the early stages of the COVID pandemic wrought seismic, lasting changes to the way people work, with full-time at-home employment leading to widely adopted hybrid mixes of remote and in-office work that remain popular among many workers and employers.
But a new poll suggests remote work is fading, and even hybrid models are losing ground. This year, nearly two-thirds of employed respondents say they worked fully in-person, compared to fewer than half last year, according to the poll by Bay Area News Group and Joint Venture Silicon Valley, a regional think tank.
“It’s a surprising result,” said Russell Hancock, Joint Venture’s president and CEO. “We have seen many employers say, ‘The game’s up, we need you back in the office.’ I’m hearing that most of all in the intensive areas of our economy like AI and the startup environment. This has become a hard valley … as opposed to the soft valley when everyone was enjoying their perks, having their work-life balance.”
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The poll results are based on 1,743 interviews conducted Aug. 12 to Aug. 19 with adults in Santa Clara, Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo and San Francisco counties from August 12-19, 2025, with a margin of error of approximately 2.6%.
Google, Meta and Apple, which maintain hybrid work environments, did not respond to questions about their future in-person plans. In September, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy cited the pursuit of innovation, collaboration and connection in ending the company’s three-days-in the-office hybrid model and ordering employees — including those at the company’s Bay Area offices — back in five days a week.
Remote and hybrid work schedules have played a villain’s role in the struggles of Bay Area downtowns, also hollowed out by society’s shift from in-person to online shopping.
“Without these workers coming downtown, the service sectors and the retail sectors are really going to struggle,” said Abby Raisz, vice-president of research at the Bay Area Council, which represents Bay Area businesses.
At Berliner Cohen law offices in downtown San Jose, the approximately 125 attorneys and staff were called back to the office full time in mid-2021.
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“It was to rebuild our sense of community and culture,” said firm partner Christine Long, who wasn’t among those polled.
Still, while polls and other measurements produce varied results, office-based work clearly remains below pre-pandemic levels. Bay Area office vacancy rates are among the highest in the U.S., at 24%, compared to 19% nationwide, according to researcher CommercialCafe. Demand for office space will probably not return to pre-pandemic levels, said Santa Clara County Assessor Greg Monteverde, since working from home “seems to be at some level something that is going to be fairly permanent.”
Badge-in data from building-security giant Kastle indicates South Bay office occupancy has sluggishly bounced back to barely over half what it was before COVID, while the San Francisco region falls even shorter at around 42%. A survey by Stanford University, the Hoover Institution, and Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México found days worked fully at home in the Bay Area dropped only 2% this year, to 30%.
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“It’s been really tough,” said Rod Timoteo, who opened Mystéreiux hair salon in downtown San Jose in 2022 and wasn’t among the Bay Area poll respondents. “From 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., it’s almost a ghost town.”
“However, “some businesses want their employees to come into the office more,” Timoteo said, and with new enterprises opening nearby, “we’re now starting to get more traffic.”
Meanwhile, the number of visitors coming to downtown San Jose for all purposes rose 7% this year to 3.3 million, compared to 3.7 million during March of 2019 before the pandemic, according to cell phone data analyzed by market-intelligence company Placer.ai. Downtown Oakland saw just a 2% increase this year, to 3.6 million visitors, while downtown San Francisco received a 5% bump.
The San Jose region’s faster bounce-back may be attributable in part to an easier commute to work than in San Francisco and the East Bay, and tech campuses with free parking, making in-office work more appealing, the Bay Area Council’s Saisz said.
In downtown San Jose, one of Berliner Cohen’s lawyers, Maria Palomares, 33, who wasn’t among those polled, has resumed her pre-pandemic habit of buying lunch nearby most every day.
“We used to go to San Pedro Square all the time,” she said.
Employers remain divided on which employment models work best. Offering options to work from home can help recruitment and worker retention, and employee-monitoring technologies can promote productivity, said Anis Uzzaman, CEO of San Jose venture capital firm Pegasus Tech Ventures.
At other companies, leaders and managers said communication among workers, teams and managers improves when all are together on site, Uzzaman said. With layoffs prevalent in tech, employers have more leverage to mandate in-office work, Uzzaman said.
Since the start of the pandemic, Juanita Alvarez — a paralegal, business student and budding entrepreneur — has worked from home in San Jose for Amazon in Sunnyvale, then commuted to Cupertino three days a week on a hybrid schedule for Apple, then worked a fully remote job for a San Francisco cybersecurity firm after moving to Oakland.
“Let’s say that I’ve got a few job opportunities, and two of them are remote, and one’s hybrid — then I just take the remote role,” said Alvarez, 45, a poll respondent.
Still, Alvarez has hedged her bets: She located herself in West Oakland to cut rental costs, and also to get close to BART.
“If I find myself in a position where I have to go back to the office for five days a week, I would rather be in a place where it’s not going to be too hard on me,” Alvarez said.
Downtowns haven’t been the only casualty of remote and hybrid work: transit ridership plunged, especially on BART and Caltrain. But over the past year, Bay Area transit use has generally trended upward, while burgeoning, post-pandemic highway congestion has stabilized, said Sebastian Petty, a senior adviser for transportation policy at public policy research nonprofit SPUR.
With traffic back, transit has become more appealing, especially for those with time-consuming commutes and costly parking fees, Petty said.
Petty noted that local transit services are facing funding troubles that could mean service cuts and worse traffic.
More congestion would provide an even greater deterrent for customer-support engineer Hamilton Wu of Pleasanton to commute. His employer in San Jose officially wants him in the office two to three times a week, but he manages to keep it to once every couple weeks, said Wu, a poll respondent.
“I don’t mind being there,” said Wu, 27. “I just mind having to commute.”