Houston Chronicle Sunday

People saving time with remote work

- By Michael Sasso

Working from home is saving commuters around the world 72 minutes a day, time they’re splitting between their jobs, leisure and caregiving, a new study shows.

Remote staffers are saving the most time in China, where forgoing the trek to and from one’s workplace is freeing up 102 minutes a day, according to the study published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Serbian workers saw the smallest savings of 51 minutes, while those in the U.S. also saw a comparativ­ely low 55 minutes spared.

The team of economists from Europe, Mexico and the U.S. —including Stanford University’s Nicholas Bloom — calculated daily commute times from surveys of workers across 27 countries in the past two years.

When accounting for those who never worked remotely in that time period, the economists estimate that work-fromhome saved about two hours of travel time per worker, per week. That will be cut in half after the pandemic ends given employers’ plans to bring staff back in, the researcher­s say.

That amounts to 2.2 percent of a 46-hour workweek, with 40 paid hours plus six hours of commuting, the paper found. As such, the private value of the time savings is around 2.2 percent of after-tax earnings in the post-pandemic economy.

“Commuters strongly dislike unpredicta­ble travel times, and automobile drivers strongly dislike congested road conditions,” the economists said. “Thus, long commutes, unpredicta­ble commute times and congested road conditions push the private value of time savings above the after-tax wage.”

Workers are hardly sloughing off. Businesses are the biggest beneficiar­ies of the travel time savings, with workers devoting 40 percent of their saved time toward primary and secondary jobs. About a third went toward leisure activities and 11 percent went to caregiving, the study found.

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