Working from home doesn’t just benefit the elite – 05/10/2023 – Market

The work has been getting bad press lately. We had the “big resignation” trend, the “anti-work” movement, the “quiet resignation” and a wave of strikes. It all boils down to the feeling that work is getting worse and people are fed up with it. I was even asked to participate in a podcast discussion last year titled “Is this the end of work as we know it?”

But that’s not necessarily what the data says, at least in the UK. When Alan Felstead and Rhys Davies of Cardiff University conducted an online survey in 2018/19 and again in 2022, they gathered around 100,000 responses from people across the country to detailed questions about their jobs.

Academics found that in 2022, people reported greater ability to decide when to start and stop work, more room to take leave in an emergency, more supportive managers, less pressure at work, more say in work-related decisions, better prospects for promotion and greater job security. On the downside, they had less discretion about their professional tasks.

It is worth treating the online questionnaire data with some caution, as the authors readily admit. The sample size was huge, but the respondents were self-selected and biased towards women, civil servants and professionals (although academics tried to explain this with weighted values).

But another survey of job quality in the UK, carried out annually by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, also leans against the notion that work has deteriorated on average: most metrics have remained fairly stable, with some improvement in the balance between personal and professional life.

If the quality of work improved a little, what would be the reason? The tight job market has helped people feel less insecure — and may well have prompted employers to make other changes to recruit and retain employees. Then there’s the pandemic-induced shift toward remote or hybrid work, which Felstead calls “a sea change, a moment of light, a breakthrough in history.” Nicholas Bloom, professor of economics at Stanford University in the United States, said that work-from-home levels doubled approximately every 15 years until the pandemic. So we had “40 years of acceleration in the space of three years”.

Felstead and Davies found that job quality improved most in occupations that became more likely to involve working from home at least one day a week. And, remarkably, these winners weren’t just highly paid professionals who had the best working conditions to begin with. This puts a question mark over the idea that hybrid working has widened the chasm between “lovely” and “awful” jobs.

“Before the pandemic, those working from home were among the highest earners, but that benefit has diminished,” Felstead told me. People like call center workers, office workers, housing consultants, and paralegals are now much more likely to work from home at least one day a week than they were before the pandemic. And that seems to have improved the quality of their jobs: more flexibility, less pressure.

Of course, not many people can work remotely. I think it’s no surprise that these workers are more likely to quit or go on strike. CIPD surveys suggest that people in care, leisure and factory jobs are among those who have actually experienced a drop in work-life balance since the start of the pandemic. Pay was certainly the main reason for the industrial conflict at a time of falling real wages, but Bloom says the ability to do hybrid work equates to a wage increase of about 7% to 8%, based on research on the how much people value it. This is an advantage that has fallen highly unevenly.

Is hybrid work here to stay? Research by Bloom and his colleagues, which used a large artificial intelligence language model to analyze 250 million job ads in five English-speaking countries, shows that the share of posts that explicitly offer fully remote or hybrid work has skyrocketed from less from 5% before the pandemic to around 10% or more in all countries (over 15% in the UK) in 2023. But it is worth remembering that the “new normal” has not yet been tested in a job market where unemployment is high and workers compete for employers, not the other way around.

I hope bosses don’t try to turn back the clock, even if they find they can. Hybrid working seems to have improved working life – not for everyone, but not just for the elite either. Many jobs are still bad, but if some are less bad, or more enjoyable, that’s progress we shouldn’t throw away.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves