Back to Work Around the World
If you just listen to people in English-speaking countries, the story about office work after the pandemic is pretty straightforward: COVID-19 changed everything forever and going forward almost all of us will be working from home at least part of the time.
But a global study of more than 42,000 workers in 34 different countries by Work From Home Research shows that work from home is being treated very differently in different parts of the world. On average, in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US, employees are working 1.4 days a week from home (Canada is highest, with the average worker spending 1.7 days a week at home; the US average is 1.4 day).
But the rest of the world is going back to the office at much higher rates.
Work From Home Research ‘s survey of number of days per week working from home shows huge variation by country and by region.
On average folks in Latin American countries spend 0.9 days working from home; Europeans 0.78 days per week (Denmark, France and Greece work from home less than other countries in Europe), and Asian countries surveyed 0.64 days (South Korea and Japan work from home less than other Asian countries). Overall, the survey shows across the world 66.5% of workers are back working fully on site, with just 7.9% working fully from home.
Why are Americans (and other English-speaking countries) working from home more often than folks in other parts of the world? There seem to be at least four different factors at play:
· Tighter labor market – Competition for workers in the US is higher than in other parts of the world, with the US experiencing both exceptionally low unemployment and lower labor force participation (see previous post on this). This gives workers more power to negotiate, and one of the things workers are negotiating is workplace flexibility (as noted in this post, flexibility now ranks second only to salary for US workers considering jobs).
· More space – Working from home is less attractive if the home is smaller or has more people in it. “A lot of people here don’t have their own places,” Daan Van Rossum, the CEO of FlexOS in Ho Chi Minh City, told the New York Times earlier this month. “Working from home at the kitchen table with three generations running around is not the best environment to be productive.” Americans and Canadians tend to have more space with fewer other people in it.
South Korean rush hour traffic never dropped off during the pandemic The rate of people working from home is less than 1/3 of the US rate.(Photo from Carl Who, Unsplash)
· Longer lockdown duration: The US stayed on lockdown longer than many other countries. That meant workers in the US had to figure out how to work from home. We converted rooms for remote work; we boosted our Internet speed and we had more time to fall in love with the flexibility work from home offers; our workplaces came up with strategies to measure our work based on productivity vs. presence. The combination of sunken costs and greater convenience makes it harder now for US workers to voluntarily give up work from home. By contrast, in South Korea, companies never implemented work from home policies during the pandemic. Now South Korea ranks lowest among the 34 countries surveyed in the amount of time employees spend working from home: 0.4 days per week.
· Different cultural norms: US norms allow for more of an informal negotiation over workplace conditions than some other countries, and in a competitive environment, that gives an edge to employees. In Germany, one of the European countries where work from home is most common, return to work policies have been negotiated by strong unions. Countries where management is more traditionally top-down are more likely to simply mandate returns.
Where is this going from here? In an interview this month with the New York Times, Mark Ein, CEO of Kastle, which has been surveying office occupancy levels since the pandemic began, summarized it this way: “The desire to get people back among business managers is nearly universal. It’s the ability to do it that varies across countries.” But the WFH research finds that in every country there will be tension between what workers want and what employers want. On average companies across the world expect on average workers will end up spending 1.1 days a week working from home (up from the current world average of 0.9). But workers will want more: 71.1% of workers want to work two or more days a week from home. Interesting negotiations ahead…
-Leslie
References:
The global Work From Home survey: https://wfhresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/GSWA-2023.pdf
Assessing work from home norms across the world: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/04/business/return-to-office-covid.html