The work-from-home evolution over the past three years has had more twists and turns than a rollercoaster. So much so that some might forget employees have allowed remote work in some form since the 1960s. A recent whitepaper from the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research titled The Evolution of Working from Home pushes back against the notion that remote work is declining. According to the paper’s authors, Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis, data suggests that the amount of time people spend working from home in the U.S. will likely increase with technological advancements—much like in prior decades.
In the 1960s, most Americans who worked from home were in agriculture or roles revolving around craft activities. U.S. workers spent about 0.4% of their time working remotely in 1965. That percentage increased to 0.6% of workers’ time in 1985, and by the 1990s, remote work had expanded to include white-collar workers. However, it was still limited due to telecommunication hurdles. Remote work often required physically driving or mailing paperwork between home and office locations, write the report’s authors.
Nonetheless, the percentage of people working remotely grew steadily. Work-from-home rates “roughly doubled every 15 years going back to the 1960s,” according to the report. By 2016, about 4% of workers in the U.S. reported working remotely, and the amount of time employees spent occasionally working remotely rose as well. In 2019, about 5% of workers’ time was spent at home, quintupling to about 25% by 2023.
Despite this increase, 60% of Americans are required to work in person, a divide that’s largely driven by educational attainment.
“The biggest single predictor of whether someone gets to work from home is education, with college graduates doing more than twice as much as workers who only have a high school degree,” according to the report. But as technology advances, researchers anticipate “work-friendly innovations” will fuel a new phase of remote work adoption in the next two decades.
During that time, workers can expect to spend 30% to 40% of their weeks working from home. The pandemic has already proven this trend, jumpstarting “a surge in research and development into new hardware and software products to support working from home,” the report says.
If history tells us anything, don’t get too caught up in the work-from-home debate. Instead, prepare to tighten up your remote or hybrid work policies because the practice is here to stay.
Amber Burton
amber.burton@fortune.com
@amberbburton
Reporter’s Notebook
The most compelling data, quotes, and insights from the field.
CHROs may soon have another role funneling into them as more companies hire executives to help oversee employees’ mental health: the chief wellness officer.
“Faced with the prospect of employee burnout and widespread mental health impacts of COVID, companies are turning to the new role as a way to retain workers and help employees,” writes Fortune’s Trey Williams.
Around the Table
A round-up of the most important HR headlines, studies, podcasts, and long-reads.
– A New York City law went into effect on Wednesday regulating employers’ disclosure and use of automation and A.I. in hiring decisions. Wall Street Journal
– The federal government is the latest institution to cut back the size of its office footprint after embracing remote work arrangements. Insider
– Mass layoffs in Big Tech have hit temporary and contract workers like janitors and cooks the hardest, who also receive lower severance packages than their white-collar peers. Washington Post
Watercooler
Everything you need to know from Fortune.
Layoff philosophy. Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky says conducting multiple rounds of layoffs takes a significant mental toll on surviving employees. “If you’re going to cut, you need to cut once, and therefore you better cut deep enough,” he said. —Orianna Rosa Royle
So long, from Soros. George Soros’s philanthropic foundation laid off 40% of its staff just months after Soros’s son, Alexander, was named chair of the board. —Chloe Taylor
Remote work heaven. While many workers in major U.S. cities are returning to offices, digital nomads are still thriving in slightly smaller markets like Columbus, Ohio; Portland, Ore.; and Kansas City, Mo. Check out the top 10 places where remote work is still widespread. —Orianna Rosa Royle
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A digital commerce expert and the co-founder at Kinex Media Inc, a creative digital agency in Toronto.
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Are you aware that more than 2.14 billion people are shopping online nowadays? As this number continues to grow, even more e-commerce companies worldwide will be competing to capture people’s attention and convert them into devoted customers. Your brand’s success hinges on how effectively you can wow potential customers online. One of the most effective and economical ways to do this is by creating compelling content that helps your website rank high on the search engine results page.
E-commerce content marketing is all about creating valuable, sales-driven content for your digital audience that can help you create brand awareness and boost your product sales. More importantly, it’s about developing content that can engage and convert your target audience. This could include content such as e-mails, blog posts, videos and infographics. The choice usually depends on your offerings and audience preferences.
Here are some of the effective content marketing strategies to boost your e-commerce business in 2023.
Create Content That Evokes Emotions
What makes content go viral? According to research conducted by Jonah Berger and Katherine L. Milkman, professors at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, content that evokes emotions like awe, amusement, anxiety and anger is shared the most. Gone are the days when content was written primarily to appeal to Google and other search engines. When your ideas are emotionally resonant, they are more likely to be spread the most by your audience.
When you also want to connect with your audience through words, emotion is the secret behind it. It will help you create compelling content to keep your audience engaged.
Here are some ways to create content that evokes emotions:
• Tell a story using powerful words that readers can connect with emotionally, such as words describing fear, joy, etc. You can even incorporate a surprise element into each piece of your content to keep readers interested and make them read more.
• Use memes, images and infographics to accompany your words to make them more meaningful and interesting.
• While promoting a product, try to convey the “fear of missing out” through words. Nobody wants to miss a great deal, and your content is the best way to encourage them to take action immediately.
• Aim to impart a positive feeling to your readers through your content.
See Which Topics And Headlines Get The Most Social Shares
For the best-performing articles, you need powerful and engaging content as well as headlines. To get some ideas, try using tools like BuzzSumo, which allows you to search for keywords and phrases and see the articles with the highest engagement on social media. You can then model your headlines after the most viral ones for your topic. For example, if one of the top articles you see is titled “Best tactics to grow your online sales,” your headline could be “Powerful tactics to grow your online sales in 2023.”
You also can use tools like HubSpot’s random topic generator to get good ideas for articles and blog posts.
Write In-Depth Articles
Google loves in-depth articles—these are articles that give careful consideration to all the aspects and details of a subject. I’ve found that articles that are 2,000 words or longer tend to perform quite well in the search results.
To write in-depth articles, immerse yourself in the topic and invest time studying credible and authentic case studies. Use bulleted or numbered lists, tabular data, examples and case studies to make your article easy to read and understand.
Use Effective Calls To Action
Content marketing is incomplete without the right placement of call-to-action buttons. Use these for sales messages like “Call now,” “Click here” and so on. This is the most important element for content marketing because it pushes sales. Make sure that every article, blog post, video or e-book that you publish has a CTA button.
Here are the key CTA takeaways to consider:
• Use a single call to action per page to make sure it stands out.
• Make your CTA button color the opposite of the background color. If you have a bright blue background, then make your CTA button bright orange-yellow.
• Personalize your CTAs. Personalized CTAs perform 202% better than generic CTAs.
• Include action verbs like “visit,” “discover,” “see,” “hear” and “explore.”
• Use benefit-rich phrases such as “download your free guide today.”
The Bottom Line
When customers purchase online, they don’t touch or hold your products, so it’s crucial to communicate the value and benefits of your products to them in an interesting way. This is where content marketing can make or break you. When you’re creating your content, remember to make your customers’ goals your top priority—this will help your business stand out from the rest.
Forbes Agency Council is an invitation-only community for executives in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies. Do I qualify?
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There were plenty of reasons to be bearish on the stock market (SPY) coming into 2023. This is especially true with inflation still too hot leading the Fed to increase their hawkish behavior. And then came along the specter of a potential banking crisis that only increases uncertainty…and that only increases odds of bear market. Read on below to discover Steve Reitmeister’s updated market outlook, trading plan and top picks to stay on the right side of market action.
The S&P 500 (SPY) has been downright bludgeoned of late giving back nearly all of the hard fought gains from the start of the year. That selloff ended Tuesday with a welcome relief rally.
However, if we are being honest…there is not much real relief in sight.
Let’s review where we stand now, what lies ahead for stocks along with our trading plan to outperform.
Market Commentary
We have to talk about the elephant in the room first. Of course, I am referring to the serious concerns over the recent bank closures that evoke “Ghosts of Financial Crisis Past“.
Now let me insert an important disclaimer.
I AM NOT A BANKING EXPERT!
And the sad fact is that 99% of the articles you have read this past week are not written by banking experts either. So please do appreciate that what I share comes from the perspective of an Economics major with 43 years of active investing experience.
This seems like more smoke than fire…but there likely will be small brush fires here and there.
Meaning that after the financial crisis of 2008 that there is much more bank oversight than the past. Combine that with the fact that there is not an equity bubble like last time in real estate…nor have we created new INSANE financial debt instruments that could implode the financial system.
Add that all up and it doesn’t sound like we are on the brink of systemic failure of the banking system. However, there are isolated incidents of balance sheet weakness and mismanagement that needs to be cleaned up. Especially true for banks with too much crypto exposure.
Will there be more bank failures?
Most likely yes. Unfortunately, there is great incentive on the part of hedge funds that short stocks to find any weakness and exploit it to their benefit.
Heck, even Cramer has openly joked about how easy it is for a hedge fund to short a stock then circulate rumors that crush the share price. Easy pickens.
This creates great headline risk in the mean time as each new bank failure will lead to more uncertainty. And that uncertainty is on top of all the previous concerns about inflation + Fed Hawkishness creating a recession and deeper bear market. So now is a good time to transition to that conversation.
Stocks were already selling off in February and early March as the road signs read: Caution Ahead!
Meaning that inflation was still too hot leading the Fed to heighten their hawkish rhetoric that rates would likely go higher and stay in place longer than previously stated. And what was previously stated was that rates would get to at least 5% and be on the books through end of 2023.
The previous notion was plenty ample enough to grind the economy down to recessionary levels. Thus, the odds of even more hawkishness is why we have spent the last six sessions under key psychological support at 4,000. And the last four sessions under the 200 day moving average at 3,940.
Now let’s ponder an interesting notion mentioned in this article:
Goldman Sachs no longer expects the Fed to hike rates in March
Rolling back a month ago it was assumed that the 3/22 Fed meeting would come hand in hand with a 25 basis point increase in rates as we saw in February. Next came more hawkish posturing by Fed officials and the odds started to move towards a 50 point hike to more aggressively get inflation under control.
So, what would happen if the Fed paused rate hikes because of the banking crisis?
I actually suspect that investors would take that as a negative. That is because it would be a signal to investors that the Fed is SERIOUSLY worried about the stability of the banking system that they have to deviate so significantly from their hawkish plans.
Meaning that investors SHOULD NOT consider such a move as a dreamed of “dovish pivot“. Rather this would be the Fed hitting the panic button that the stability of financial system is now more important than fighting inflation (which they have dubbed as Public Enemy #1 for over a year).
For as funny as it sounds…let’s all pray that the Fed continues to hike rates aggressively at the 3/22 meeting as pressing pause could be much worse for stocks.
Note that on Tuesday morning the Consumer Price Index report came out. Yes, it was a notch better than expected at JUST 6% year over year vs. 6.4% previously. Please don’t lose sight that the inflation target is still 2% and we are a long way off the mark.
For those that want to say that inflation was really a problem in the Spring of Summer of 2022 and not really that much of an issue today…unfortunately that notion is hogwash. The proof is the 0.4% increase month over month which still points to a 5% annual increase pace. (AGAIN remember that the target level is 2%).
Wednesday 3/15 brings the more forward looking Producer Price Index report along with Retail Sales. And then after that all eyes will be on the 3/22 Fed rate decision. than actually becoming dovish.
Adding it altogether, this is still a bearish environment. Even if the banking issues were not on the docket I would still be pounding the table on how the Fed’s actions open the door to a recession and natural deepening of the bear market.
However, when you sprinkle the uncertainty of the banking issues into the mix, and the serious headline risk that lies ahead…that is just a nail in the coffin for early 2023 bullish aspirations.
Meaning that the 2022 bear market took a mini-hibernation break to start the new year. Now it is awake and hungry to devour stock prices even lower.
Not lower every day, week or month. But as we look out over the next several months you should expect much more downside. And yes, I suspect we will go even lower than 3,491 level from October.
That is why the Reitmeister Total Return portfolio is built to profit as stocks descend further into bear market territory. Gladly it is not too late to apply that strategy if you have not already.
What To Do Next?
Discover my brand new “Stock Trading Plan for 2023” covering:
- Why 2023 is a “Jekyll & Hyde” year for stocks
- How the Bear Market Comes Back with a Vengeance
- 9 Trades to Profit Now as Bear Returns
- 2 Trades with 100%+ Upside Potential When New Bull Emerges
- And Much More!
Wishing you a world of investment success!
Steve Reitmeister…but everyone calls me Reity (pronounced “Righty”)
CEO, StockNews.com and Editor, Reitmeister Total Return
SPY shares . Year-to-date, SPY has gained 2.43%, versus a % rise in the benchmark S&P 500 index during the same period.
About the Author: Steve Reitmeister
Steve is better known to the StockNews audience as “Reity”. Not only is he the CEO of the firm, but he also shares his 40 years of investment experience in the Reitmeister Total Return portfolio. Learn more about Reity’s background, along with links to his most recent articles and stock picks.
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