Back in February the Atlantic published a story about the changing trends in office work. Author Derek Thompson suggested we might have reached “peak office,” i.e. the point when the average number of hours spent in the office peaks and begins to permanently decline.

What Thompson found was that a lot of employees had gotten used to working from home and over Zoom and weren’t ready to completely give it up. The result was that a lot of employers were giving a green light to hybrid work, meaning part of the week in the office and part of the week at home. As I pointed out at the time, this change isn’t solely a concession to employees. Employers have also realized that the 2nd biggest expense on their balance sheet, the cost of commercial office space, can be cut pretty substantially if they move to hybrid work and office sharing.

But it turns out not all workdays are equal when it comes to which days employees prefer to be at work and which ones they prefer to spend at home. Not surprisingly, the most popular day to take off is Fridays:

As white-collar workers across the country settle into hybrid work routines, one thing is becoming clear: Nobody wants to be in the office on Fridays.

The last day of the workweek, once synonymous with long lunches and early departures, has increasingly become a day to skip the office altogether. The trend, which was already brewing before the pandemic, has become widely adopted, even codified, in recent months and is creating new challenges for employers.

Just 30 percent of office workers swiped into work on Fridays in June, the least of any weekday, according to Kastle Systems, which provides building security services for 2,600 buildings nationwide…

“It’s becoming a bit of cultural norm: You know nobody else is going to the office on Friday, so maybe you’ll work from home, too,” said Peter Cappelli, director of the Center for Human Resources at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “Even before the pandemic, people thought of Friday as a kind of blowoff day. And now there’s a growing expectation that you can work from home to jump-start your weekend.”

Some employees are embracing the trend. The story mentions one company in San Francisco that simply decided things worked better when everyone had Friday off. Employees aren’t working at home on Fridays they just aren’t working. Other companies have realized they can counter the trend with a little bit of incentive. One thing that seems to work is free lunch Fridays. As one woman from the Society of Human Resource Management told the Post, “If you feed them, they will come.”

Of course not everyone is going to go for Fridays at home or a free lunch to bring people in. Elon Musk recently said he expected employees to be in the office 40 hours a week.

“Anyone who wishes to do remote work must be in the office for a minimum (and I mean *minimum*) of 40 hours per week or depart Tesla. This is less than we ask of factory workers,” Musk wrote…

“Tesla has and will create and actually manufacture the most exciting and meaningful products of any company on Earth. This will not happen by phoning it in,” Musk added.

I’m sympathetic to the idea that the pandemic shouldn’t gradually turn us into France. On the other hand, office workers are so used to working over Zoom and email now that forcing them back to the office only to have them resume work over Zoom and email doesn’t make a lot of sense. If there’s going to be a compromise here it looks like Friday is that day most people will wind up working from home.