A new study reveals that employees prefer working remotely—and claim remote work is more productive than work in the office.
Key details
A study from WFH Research released on Wednesday shows that workers worldwide love and prefer remote work.
Employees from across the world, particularly well-educated and higher-income employees, are claiming that remote work improves their lives, improves the quality of their work, and is something they are willing to change jobs over.
As Bloomberg reports…
- People surveyed work an average of 1.5 days from home per week
- Employees from countries with typically longer commutes reflect this, with India reflecting the highest rate of 2.6 days per week
- Average workers are willing to take a 5% pay cut to remain remote, particularly female employees
- Workers want to work from home more than they do now
- One-third of U.S. workers want to seek another job if they’re mandated to return to work
- A majority of workers claim they’re more productive at home than in the office
Why it’s important
Worker preference and satisfaction are going to play a major factor in the coming months as firms attempt to incentivize or mandate a return to working in offices.
As we reported yesterday, dozens of major tech and Wall Street firms are pushing to return their staff to the office to improve productivity. Labor Day marked a point of demarcation where major companies like Apple and Morgan Stanley drew a line in the sand and mandated partial or hybrid returns to the office to improve corporate culture and protect profitability.
“The problem is that workers don’t want to come back—and that’s true across countries and industries, according to a research paper published Wednesday by an international team of economists… who’ve been gathering data on remote work since the early days of the pandemic,” says Bloomberg.
Similar studies from Deloitte, Basking.io, and Pew Research agree.
Stansberry Research analyst Matt McCall says that the ball is in the court of workers at the moment who are in a position to force the market to be more open to remote options, so long as there is no continued drop in productivity.
“The job market is strong and heavily tilted toward job seekers. Businesses are looking to hire more than ever, with job openings sitting near all-time high levels. That means employees have the power to push for remote work or change jobs to one that allows them to work remotely,” says McCall.
