WASHINGTON–Moving forward, some 20% of work in the U.S. post-pandemic will be performed remotely, even as more than a third of employees say they want to continue to work from home, according to a new analysis.
The figures and projections were included as part of a new National Bureau of Economic Research titled “Why Working from Home Will Stick”.
But why is working from home remaining “sticky” even as more people are vaccinated. For a number of reasons, according to the report, which found that over the course of the pandemic Americans spent $561 and 15 hours of their own time on average to upgrade their work-from-home setups.
“The dollar value of these investments amounts to 0.7% of annual GDP,” the authors of the report wrote.
At the same time, employers also invested resources to improve their back-end infrastructure systems. “As a result of these pandemic-driven investments, both workers and firms are now better positioned to work from home effectively,” the authors added.
More Than 30,000 Surveyed
The report, written by three professors from Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, Stanford University and the University of Chicago, respectively, is based on a poll of 30,000 working-age Americans who earned at least $20,000 in 2019.
According to MarketWatch, the survey was conducted in monthly waves beginning in May 2020 through March 2021.
Prior to the pandemic, a quarter of American workers occasionally worked from home, according to a 2019 Bureau of Labor Statistics report, and some 15% of all workers in 2017 to 2018 were required to work from home on certain days, the same report found.
As of March 2021, some 45% of work was being done at home, according to findings from the report circulated by NBER.
Looking Forward
Going forward, more than 30% of all workers want to continue working from home five days a week after the pandemic, while nearly 22% of workers said they never or rarely want to work from home after the pandemic, according to survey responses cited by Marketwatch, which noted that as vaccination rates continue to rise in the U.S., some workers won’t have a choice as more employers announce mandatory return-to-work dates while others experiment with a hybrid model.
MarketWatch noted that to incentivize workers to return back to offices, some employers are offering free spa retreats and meals for non-remote workers. In addition, many employers “don’t think working from home is sustainable in the long run and are eager to bring back water cooler chats and dust off conference room tables.”
Not Going Away
But there are some reasons why work from home isn’t going away entirely anytime soon, according to the NBER paper, Marketwatch noted. Among those reasons is that after a year most people who have been working from home have nailed down a routine that won’t be easy to change, the researchers said in the report.
MarketWatch also reported the number of U.S. patent applications for products that help enable people to work from home more than doubled from January to September 2020.
“This development will raise the quality and efficiency of remote work over time, reinforcing a shift to WFH [work from home] well after the pandemic ends,” the report states.