Many workers are back in the office most of the time, but they still feel cut off from colleagues, according to CNBC. The outlet reported on a new paper from researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

"Days in the office often lack human contact," the researchers write. Some 48.8% of people in the survey said they had no in-person meetings on the day they were most recently in the office, CNBC reports.

The paper is by New York Fed research economist Natalia Emanuel and University of Virginia economics professor Emma Harrington. The survey was done in September among 1,835 college-educated workers. The researchers say they chose September to get a "conservative estimate," since many firms push office attendance after the summer.

On office days, 70.6% of workers had at least one teammate who was not there, the survey found. "Amazingly, 37% of respondents reported that they had at least one meeting that was virtual, even though all the participants were in the same office that day," the authors write.

Teams are now spread across more offices, many workers skip office days, and some employers do not enforce the rules strictly, the researchers say. The result, they write, is that "they commute in just to take Zoom calls and answer Slack messages from their cubicles."

The authors caution that the study does not capture time with people outside a worker's team or with clients, CNBC reports. They do not say employers should drop office rules. Instead, they write, "ensuring adherence to the policy helps deliver the face-to-face contact that workers crave."

Only CNBC has reported this so far, and NewsHabit hasn't seen independent confirmation.

What we know: A New York Fed paper found many office workers have little face time with colleagues.
What we don't: Whether employers will change how they run office days in response.