Some of us have been hearing predictions about the growth of remote work (it used to be called telecommuting) for four decades or so. And while there have been secular changes, it is difficult to make a case that anything really has changed the adoption curve of full remote work, even if lots of people take some work home from the office, routinely. The underlying trends are what they are, and might get something of a boost, but that might be hard to detect.
A Gartner survey of 229 human resources leaders finds execs now believe more remote work will be done by their employees, post pandemic. “While 30 percent of employees surveyed worked remotely at least part of the time before the pandemic, Gartner analysis reveals that post-pandemic, 41 percent of employees are likely to work remotely at least some of the time,” said Brian Kropp, Gartner HR practice chief of research.
What all that means is not yet clear, as the definitions of remote work vary widely. Some of us might consider remote work to be “employees who are based full time at remote or home locations.”
Others might include employees who work remotely at least half the time. That is a very small number of people, at the moment, perhaps as few as 3.6 percent of the entire workforce, by some estimates.
The number of U.S. employees working at home 50 percent of the time or more in 2020 is estimated at five million, representing 3.6 percent of the workforce, according to Global Workplace Analytics. And that is after 40 years of evangelization that some of us are personally aware of.
But most people likely take a broader view of remote work, including some work from home days each week or month.
In the past, “telecommuting” has generally been thought of as employees working “at home” sometimes--or full time--instead of at the office, campus or plant. That sort of thing might not differ much from workers occasionally or even routinely bringing some work home from the office.
One way of setting a reasonable universe of potential remote work is to evaluate the total number of jobs that conceivably could be done entirely remotely. By some estimates, only a third of jobs can be done remotely, according to a study conducted by professors Jonathan Dingel and Brent Neiman of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
The study suggests 34 percent of U.S. jobs can plausibly be performed at home. Assuming all occupations involve the same hours of work, these jobs account for 44 percent of all wages. The converse is that 66 percent of jobs cannot plausibly be shifted to “at home” mode.
If we assume that most people will consider “working from home” sometimes as a valid case of remote work, the universe of jobs appears to be close to 34 percent, looking at jobs that can be completely remote, full time. Using less stringent definitions would produce a higher number, but the value of such estimates might be questionable.
It is not clear that the actual requirements of remote work, done on a casual or occasional basis, actually include much more than having a smartphone, a PC and adequate internet access at home, plus the standard cloud computing apps typically used in an office.
More specific computing tasks, requiring sophisticated equipment (robots or industrial or process machinery) are not the sort to be done at home on a casual basis.
To be sure, some executives will look to reduce spending on office facilities by shifting some work to full remote status, while allowing others to work substantially from home. But technology is not the only issue. Managers must trust that worker productivity remains substantially the same when work moves remotely.
But recall that similar predictions were made in 2009 when the HiN1 virus outbreak happened. It is by no means clear that some non-linear acceleration of remote work trends happened after that, and was sustainable.
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