For years, companies and governments found all kinds of reasons for not embracing work from home, virtual meetings, telemedicine, online learning, and other online applications. But, the pandemic forced us to accelerate the digital transformation of the economy and society to help us cope with the crisis. And, not only have these digital applications worked remarkably well, but they offer a number of important benefits, like not waiting for a straightforward doctor diagnosis in a room full of sick people, and not having to travel for hours to participate in a 60 minute meeting.
For example, about a year ago I participated in an online panel. To start with, the moderator asked each panelist to introduce ourselves and to briefly say something positive about our lives over the past year despite the obvious challenges of coping with Covid. I truly struggled to find something positive to say about the highly frustrating pandemic-induced limitations of the previous year.
But finally, I did find something positive to say. I’ve been able to attend a number of meetings, including weekly lunch seminars, that pre-pandemic required me to drive for a few hours or catch a plane. In response to the pandemic, these meeting first changed from physical to online, and more recently to hybrid. In other words, my ability to attend such meetings from home was my one pandemic-induced benefit, a major one the more I thought about it.
Work from home (WFH) has been around for decades, modestly growing in the 1990s with the rise of the internet. The share of WFH three or more days per week was under 1% in 1980, 2.4% in 2010, and 4.0% in 2018. Then came Covid-19, forcing tens of millions around the world to work from home and triggering a mass workplace experiment that broke through the technological and cultural barriers that had prevented its adoption in the past.
Even before the pandemic, “a movement was brewing within knowledge-work organizations,” wrote Harvard professor Prithwiray (Raj) Choudhury in Our Work-from-Anywhere Future, a December 2020 Harvard Business Review article. “Personal technology and digital connectivity had advanced so far and so fast that people had begun to ask, ‘Do we really need to be together, in an office, to do our work?’”
“We got our answer during the pandemic lockdowns,” said Choudhury. “We learned that a great many of us don’t in fact need to be colocated with colleagues on-site to do our jobs. Individuals, teams, entire workforces, can perform well while being entirely distributed - and they have. So now we face new questions: Are all-remote or majority-remote organizations the future of knowledge work? Is work from anywhere (WFA) here to stay?”
These are the questions that economists Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Stephen J. Davis have been investigating since May of 2020 with their monthly Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes. In Why Working from Home Will Stick, a research paper published in April of 2021, they wrote that Americans workers “supplied roughly half of paid workhours from home between April and December 2020, as compared to five percent before the pandemic. This seismic shift in working arrangements has attracted no shortage of opinions about whether WFH will stick.”
Their monthly surveys ask a number of questions about working arrangements and personal experiences with WFH during the pandemic, as well as worker preferences and employer plans after the pandemic ends. At the time their April 2021 paper was published, they had collected over 28,500 valid responses to their surveys from 20-64 years old US workers between May 2020 and March 2021, of which 43.8% were female. The typical respondent was 40 to 50 years old, with one to three years of college, who earned $40 to $50 thousand in 2019.
In May 2020, two thirds of respondents were working and one third didn’t work. Of those that were working, 61% were already doing so from home. In March 2021, 45% of those working were doing so from home. Close to 50% of all working days from May 2020 to March 2021 were from home, about 10 times the pre-pandemic share.
Overall, productivity when working from home had exceeded respondents’ expectations. Nearly 60% said that they were more productive than expected, 14% said they were less productive than expected, and 27% said that WFH worked out as expected.
The latest survey update was published in October 2022 and was based on over 92,700 valid responses between May 2020 and September 2022. Overall, the findings of the monthly surveys over the past year have been pretty much the same. The percentage of working days from home was about 35% when including all respondents, and around 50% when only including the 70% of workers able to work from home.
These percentage varied by educational attainment. The percentage of working days was about 40% for the 61% of respondents with a 4-year college degree or more; it was about 30% for the 22% of respondents with 1 to 3 years of college; and it was around 20% for the 17% of respondents with no college.
As of June 2022, 15% of all working respondents were fully remote; 55% were full-time on site; and 30% had a hybrid arrangement. But, when just considering employees who are able to work from home, around 50% chose a hybrid arrangement; 30% chose to work-full time on site; and around 20% chose to work-full time remote.
When asked “after the pandemic ends, how often is your employer planning for you to work full days at home?”, the response from the 70% of respondents able to work from home was over 2.3 days for week in the September 2022 survey, a significant increase from the 1.8 days per week response in the June 2021 survey.
Employees were also asked “after the pandemic ends, how often would you like to have full paid days at home?.” In the June 2021 survey, there was a significant gap between the workers desire of working from home, 2.8 days per week, compared to their employers desire of 1.8 days per week. But, in the latest survey the responses were significantly closer, with the workers response at 2.6 days per week versus their employers’ at 2.3 days per week.
Finally, let me cite a few additional findings from the July 2022 survey updates:
Working From Home is Much More Common in Major Cities than in Smaller Cities and Towns: top ten cities - around 38%; next 11 to 50 cities - 30%; and smaller cities and towns - 27%.
The desire to work from home increases with age: 2.57 days per week for those in the 20-29 age category, rising to 3.01 days per week for those the 50-64 category. In addition, 24% of those 20-29 want to work full-time remote compared to 41% of those 50-64 who want to work full-time remote.
Current levels of working from home are highest for information professionals - 2.61 days per week; finance & insurance - 2.25 days per week; and professional & business services - 2.05 days per week.
Current levels of working from home are lowest for those in hospitality & food - 0.63 days per week; transportation & warehousing - 0.78; retail trade - 0.8; and manufacturing - 0.85 days per week.
The top benefits of working from home cited by respondents include: no commute - 51.1%; flexible work schedule - 44.3%; less time getting ready for work - 41.4%; and more time with friends and family- 34.8%.
And, the top benefits of working on the employer’s business premise cited by respondents included: face-to-face collaboration - 49.3%; socializing - 49.1%; work/personal life boundaries - 40.6%; and more time with manager - 30.9%.
Will working from home stick? “Much of the COVID-induced shift to WFH will stick long after the pandemic ends,” was the conclusion reached by Barrero, Bloom and Davis in their April 2021 paper. Since then they’ve conducted 18 additional monthly surveys and collected over three times as many valid responses. The additional data continues to support their earlier conclusion that WFH will stick long after the pandemic ends. Both workers and employers have warmed to the idea of working from home since the onset of the pandemic, and they have actually come closer together in their expectations of WFH days per week over the past year. “Desires to work from home part of the week are pervasive across groups defined by age, education, gender, earnings, and family circumstances.”
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