Most observers seem certain that work from home trends will get a permanent boost from Covid-19 experiences. The only real question is how big a change might occur, as WFH has slowly been growing for decades. As with other trends, the pandemic might accelerate an ongoing trend. The magnitude is the issue.
Remote work is distinct from “work from home full time,” has a few meanings. It can refer to those full-time employees of a company who telecommute, rather than work on site. It includes organization employees who work from home at least some of the time, travel for work or bring work home.
But it also includes home-based workers. Those are very different use cases.
By some estimates, as much as 17 percent of workers essentially are full time WFH. In other cases, including those who telecommute a few times a month, the percentage of workers doing WFH is as low as five to six percent.
But if you count traveling employees who sometimes work outside the office, possibly 63 percent of all workers sometimes work from outside the office.
But many jobs cannot be performed at home, and that might include as much as 63 percent of all U.S. jobs, for example. To that one might add work done by home-based businesses.
“According to the 2018 American Time Use Survey, less than a quarter of all full-time workers work at all from home on an average day, and even those workers typically spend well less than half of their working hours at home,” say economists Jonathan Dingel and Brent Nieman.
Doubtless all the types of remote work, telecommuting and work from home will get an extra boost after the pandemic. The issue is whether the growth curve changes enough to notice. Many suppliers who benefit from WFH hope so.
But lots of changes are fairly short lived, as business and consumer behavior might suggest after the internet bubble burst and Great Recession of 2008. Lasting impact can be hard to spot, as prior trends simply reasserted themselves.
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