hi! please translate this text to russian:
Looking back to 1965, full days worked from home were less than half
a percent of all paid workdays in the United States. As shown in Figure 1,
the work-from-home share rose slowly over the next few decades. In the
1970s, work from home often meant briefcases stuffed with paperwork. By the
1990s, it meant phone calls and floppy disks. In the twenty-first century, the rise of
the internet facilitated collaboration at a distance. By 2019, the work-from-home
share had reached 7 percent, and it seemed reasonable to anticipate a gradual rise
in the years ahead.
Then came the pandemic. Social-distancing mandates and fear of COVID-19
drove a sudden, massive shift to work from home. Much of that shift has endured.
According to data from the US Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey (2022–
2023) and our own Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes (Barrero et al.
2020–2023; https://wfhresearch.com/), full days worked from home account for
28 percent of paid workdays in June 2023—four times the estimated share for 2019.

The pandemic catalyzed the big shift to work from home, but earlier devel-
opments made it possible. Critical tools for remote work include web-based tools were ready for adoption and use at scale. Some of these tools function poorly
without high-speed broadband. As it turns out, the share of American adults with
broadband service at home rose from zero in 2000 to more than 70 percent in
2018 (Pew Research Center 2021). Thus, the infrastructure that supports home use
of remote-collaboration tools also developed greatly before the pandemic struck.
These developments created a foundation for the possibility of a big shift to work
from home.
A different issue is why the shift persisted after distancing mandates ended and
after COVID death rates receded.1

Why have working arrangements not reverted
to the prepandemic status quo? To turn the question around: If the big shift was
possible (and apparently has been highly valued by many since it happened), why
did it not happen sooner and more gradually?
In considering an explanation, start with the obvious: The pandemic triggered
a mass social experiment in working arrangements. Now consider two hypotheses.
First, all of that experimentation generated a flood of new information, altering

perceptions about the practicality and effectiveness of work from home. The simul-
taneity of experimentation across suppliers, producers, customers, and commercial

networks also yielded information and experience that were hard or impossible to
acquire before the pandemic. Second, employers and workers reoptimized over
working arrangements in light of the new information. In particular, those with
favorable experiences in the work-from-home mode opted to stick with higher
work-from-home rates after the pandemic than before it struck.
To assess these two hypotheses, we surveyed tens of thousands of workers across
many countries. In Barrero, Bloom, and Davis (2021b), we find that most American
workers were favorably surprised by their ability to work from home productively
during the pandemic. Similarly, in a sample of 27 countries, Aksoy et al. (2022) find
that the average worker was favorably surprised by his or her ability to work from

home during the pandemic. Both studies also find that the number of work-from-
home days that employers plan after the pandemic ends rise strongly with employee

assessments of work-from-home productivity surprises. In short, many workers were
favorably surprised by their ability to work remotely, and those favorable surprises
led to a large, lasting shift to work from home.
The pandemic also spurred other developments that helped drive a lasting
shift to work from home: new investments at home and inside organizations to

facilitate remote work and improve its performance, learning-by-doing in the work-
from-home mode, pandemic-induced advances in products and technologies that

support remote work, much greater social acceptance of work from home, and
lingering concerns about infection risks that lead some people to prefer remote work. Aksoy et al. (2022) review the evidence for these developments. They also
find higher levels of work from home as of mid-2021 and early 2022—and higher
planned levels of work from home after the pandemic ends—in countries and
regions with longer, stricter lockdown mandates during the pandemic. Thus, the
full story of how the pandemic led to a large, lasting shift to work from home has
multiple, reinforcing elements.