73% of Americans Still Haven’t Bounced Back Financially From the COVID-19 Pandemic; Remote Workers Are Losing Out On Promotions, New Data Shows, and other C-Virus related stories

73% of Americans still haven’t bounced back financially from the COVID-19 pandemic:

Credit scores rise despite Americans’ financial struggles in the aftermath of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to have lasting effects, and not just on the health of Americans. Almost three-quarters of Americans (73%) are struggling financially, mainly due to the aftermath of COVID-19, according to a Real Estate Witch study conducted by Clever.

This lack of financial stability has led many Americans to forgo saving, causing 44% of working families to live paycheck-to-paycheck, the Clever study cites. The pandemic heightened this need, as 75% of Americans reported living paycheck-to-paycheck during the pandemic.

Any savings the average American had are becoming obsolete. Thirty percent of those surveyed in Clever’s study pulled from their emergency savings to cover bills and other basic costs.

Even more Americans have no savings to pull from in the first place. Forty-five percent of those surveyed have no current savings while 29% never had any to begin with.

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Although student loan forgiveness is a hot topic that many Americans are currently discussing, not many believe that would solve their financial problems.

Clever’s study found that the general cost of living dropping is the number one way Americans could see their finances recovering. Seventy-four percent of Americans claimed that costs like mortgage payments and groceries dropping would help them most financially. —>READ MORE HERE

Remote Workers Are Losing Out on Promotions, New Data Shows:

For a while, remote workers seemed to have it all: elastic waistbands, no commute, better concentration and the ability to pop in laundry loads between calls.

New data, though, shows fully remote workers are falling behind in one of the most-prized and important aspects of a career: getting promoted.

Over the past year, remote workers were promoted 31% less frequently than people who worked in an office, either full-time or on a hybrid basis, according to an analysis of two million white-collar workers by employment-data provider Live Data Technologies. Remote workers also get less mentorship, a gap that’s especially pronounced for women, research shows.

Of employees working full time in an office or on a hybrid basis, 5.6% received promotions at their organization in 2023, according to Live Data Technologies, versus 3.9% of those who worked remotely.

“There’s some proximity bias going on,” says Nick Bloom, an economist at Stanford University who studies remote work and management practices, of the challenges facing remote workers. “I literally call it discrimination.”

In the four years since the Covid-19 pandemic upended the way Americans work, forcing companies and employees alike to grapple with what it means to collaborate, leaders and rank-and-file employees have engaged in a tug of war over return-to-office efforts. While many workplaces have adopted hybrid policies or reverted to a fully in-person approach, nearly 20% of all employees with college degrees or higher still work on a fully remote basis, according to December data from the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. —>READ MORE HERE

Follow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:

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