Is the five-day office week over?
Latest data indicates future may involve a split between home, workplace
Most American office workers are in no hurry to return to the office full time, even after the coronavirus is under control. But that does not mean they want to work from home forever. The future for them, a variety of new data shows, is likely to be workweeks split between office and home.
Recent surveys show that both employees and employers support this arrangement. And research suggests that a couple of days a week at each location is the magic number to cancel out the negatives of each arrangement while reaping the benefits of both.
“You should never be thinking about full time or zero time,” said Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University whose research has identified causal links between remote work and employee performance. “I’m a firm believer in postCOVID half time in the office.”
According to a new survey by Morning Consult, 47% of those working remotely say that once it is safe to return to work, their ideal arrangement would be to continue working from home 1-4 days a week. Forty percent would work from home every day, and just 14% would return to the office every day.
The group of workers that is able to work from home is likely to have more education, with higher incomes, and so far they
have escaped the most severe job losses from the pandemic.
That could change as the economy continues to suffer, which analysts said could affect work-from-home policies in different ways: Employers might panic and revert to their old ways, or encourage remote work to cut real estate costs.
In the Survey of Business Uncertainty — by the Atlanta Fed, Stanford and the University of Chicago — employers predicted that post-pandemic, 27% of their full-time employees would continue working from home, most for a few days a week. Other surveys of firms have shown that they expect at least 40% of employees to keep working remotely.
Across organizations, work was most effective when employees were home 1-2 days a week, found research by Humu, a tech company run by Google’s former chief of human resources.
“It creates a shift, where office time is for collaborative work, for innovative work, for having those meetings, and home time is for focused work,” said Stefanie Tignor, director of data and analytics at Humu, which makes tools to nudge people to improve their time at work.
Some past experiments in remote work in the United States, like at Best Buy and Yahoo, were ended because managers decided remote workers were not accountable enough and missed out on in-person collaboration.
But in research on remote work, it has been hard to prove that workers’ location caused certain effects, and to know if the effects would have been different had their competitors, partners and customers also been working from home. Also, only in the last few years has technology for video calls and virtual collaboration become more seamless.
Now, the pandemic has forced corporate America into a large-scale experiment on remote work.
And so far, the results have largely been positive — even with the enormous stresses of the pandemic, including shuttered schools.
In the Morning Consult survey, conducted June 16-20 with a representative sample of 1,066 Americans who said their jobs could be done remotely, nearly two-thirds said they had enjoyed working from home, and just 20% said they had not (the rest said they did not know or had no opinion). Three-quarters are happy with how their companies have handled the transition; just 9% are not.
Fifty-nine percent would be more likely to apply to a job that offered remote work.
Of the 87% who want to keep working from home some number of days a week, even after it is safe to return to the office, the most favored choice across all demographic groups is working remotely 1-4 days a week. People 18-44 are slightly more likely to want this arrangement, as are people with college degrees and higher incomes.
Women are slightly more likely than men to say they want to work from home every day.
In the Morning Consult survey, 49% of respondents said they were more productive working from home — even with distractions related to the pandemic — compared with 32% who said they were not (19% did not know).