Working from home offers a mixed bag
The pandemic gave Americans more than 9 billion hours of our lives back over the summer.
That's 60 million hours every day that people did not spend commuting and could use for other activities. Workers gave 21 million of those hours to their employers for no increase in pay, researchers at the University of Chicago found.
Working from home is working out well for those who can do it, and the employers who allow it. The home office likely will outlast anything else to come out of the pandemic.
The math used by Jose Maria Barrero, Nick Bloom and Steven Davis at the Becker Friedman Institute is straightforward. Their survey found 37 percent of adults who made at least
$20,000 a year began working from home when the pandemic struck. With 147 million workers reporting an average 54-minute commute, that’s about 60 million hours every day.
The big question is what people would do with that extra hour? Would they watch television, go for a walk, take care of the kids? Americans are not as lazy as most of you probably assume, according to the survey respondents.
When asked to break down that extra hour, respondents, on average, said they devoted a little more than 20 minutes to their primary job, with indoor leisure taking up 12 minutes. Television watching falls into this category.
But Americans divided the other 20 minutes between child care, outdoor leisure or a secondary job, the survey found. Home improvement and chores took up the remainder of the hour. But all of those minutes add up.
“The time savings are approaching 10 billion hours as of mid-September for American workers alone,” the study’s authors wrote. “Our survey data also say that nearly twothirds of the savings in commuting time accrue to workers in the form of extra time for leisure and household production activities.”
These benefits, though, are not spread evenly. In addition to the millions who cannot work from home, which was about 35
percent of Americans, education levels made a difference in how people
spent that extra hour a day
Workers with a high
school education or less devoted 32 percent of their extra time to their primary career and 15 percent of their secondary job because most lowskilled workers cannot afford to work just one job and survive.
Parents spent 18 percent of their additional hours on child care, unsurprisingly, but still gave 33 percent of them to their primary employer. Of course, this does not count the time their child spent bombing video calls, attracting coos from coworkers while driving parent nuts. Non-parents spend 3 percent more of their extra time outdoors.
One of the big questions is whether people working from home are as productive as those who go to the office. Researchers at Stanford were ahead of the curve by releasing a study on work-from-home productivity just before the pandemic.
At the Institute for Economic Policy Research, Nicholas Bloom conducted a randomized trial of 1,000 employees of a Chinese travel company, where some stayed in the office while others worked from home. Those who worked from home were 13 percent more productive.
The critical difference, though, is those workers prepared for the ninemonth experiment. Most Americans did not see work-from-home coming.
Too many of us are torquing our backs sitting at dining room tables in uncomfortable chairs. Too many children still are at home, demanding attention and turning parents into substitute teachers. A lot of us are feeling cabin fever or a low-level depression brought on by social isolation.
Bloom also had the Chinese workers go to the office one day a week to maintain workplace relationships and attachment to the company. Americans don’t have that option.
“I fear this collapse in office face-time will lead to a slump in innovation,” he told Stanford News. “The new ideas we are losing today could show up as fewer new products in 2021 and beyond, lowering long-run growth.”
In my anecdotal conversations, I’ve found that childless people who work independently love working from home and would prefer never going back to the office. But parents or those who work collaboratively miss the office’s conviviality.
Bosses have struggled to manage different personality types to achieve maximum productivity. In the future, they will need new skills for dealing with remote workers while a portion of the team loves their cubicle in the office.
Working from home, though, will also introduce a new inequality. Those with well-appointed home offices will have an easier time than those in a cramped studio apartment. Management and labor will have to decide the real value of the time spent commuting.