Notes on WFH
This has become super popular in the literature. Let’s be careful not to get overexcited, and,
for those who are in the professional and white collar sector, not to
extrapolate too much from their own personal observation .
The ONS publishes data on working from home in their fantastic
Business Impact of Coronavirus (COVID-19) Survey (BICS). Here are weighted
results from Wave 16, link being:
and specifically
The table below shows some of the key figures. They start in
column one and column 2 by asking firms whether more or less of their workers
are working from home, referring to the week 5th -1th October. Perhaps
not surprisingly 26% on average in all industries of workers are working more from
home, although 75% report no increase in working from home. Notice that the
biggest increase in the number of workers working from home is in the water and
sewerage industry , at 85%. Even in manufacturing, where you would imagine
working from home would be rather complicated, 24% more workers are working
from home.
A snapshot of working from home may not be very informative.
Perhaps it's of more information therefore to ask firms whether they expect not
working from home will be a permanent feature. This is set out in columns 8 and
9 (with 10 for not sure). In column 8 we can see that 17% of all industries 17%
expect working from home to be a permanent feature of their business model. 65%
do not expect it to be the case and 17% don't know. Returning to the
water industry only 2% of firms expect this to be a permanent feature and 93%
of firms expected not to be the case.
Notice that there are really only three industries which stand
out as expecting working from home to be a permanent feature: information and
communication and professional and scientific and education. There is fairly
clear blue water between the numbers in those sectors, 37 percent, 34% at 28% and
the other sectors. This immediately
suggests that perhaps the discussion of working from home might be dominated by
the bias of those people who are typically writing about it.
Finally, we may look at the consequences of working from
home for productivity. These are in columns 4,5 and 6. Perhaps the most
striking result is how balanced these results are. Around 60% of firms think
that productivity will be the same 19% of firms think that productivity will go
down , and 14% of firms think the productivity will go up. Once again the numbers who think productivity
will rise are concentrated in a rather small number of industries most notably
46% in information and communications and 52% in other services. Professional scientific and administrative have
numbers at around 10% but otherwise none of the other industries have a
particularly strong expectation of an increase in productivity.
Finally the scatter plot summarises some of these numbers. The
vertical axis is the number expecting long run increase in WFH less those expecting
long run decrease. The horizontal axis we have the net numbers in the
industries who expect productivity to increase .
As we see in the scatter, the bulk of the industries are at
the bottom left. There is some small expected increase in the numbers working
from home, but productivity or net is anticipated to be lower. Rather few
industries are in the top right where productivity is expected on net to
increase and there was to be substantial more working from home. These are
dominated essentially by ICT , other services and professional scientific and
technical, where there is expected to be, on net a slight loss in productivity.
Notice finally the all industries: on 48%
more firms expect less WFH then expect more WFH and 5% more of firms expect
productivity to fall.
Update:
Finally, ONS also ask business who say they will have more (less)
working from home why they intend to do so (not to do so) . Of businesses not intending, 91% say that’s
unsuitable for their business. Of those intending, we have
a.
64% say lower overheads
b.
61% improved staff wellbeing
c.
40% increased staff productivity
d.
22% ability to recruit from wider pool
e.
18% reduced sickness
f.
11% better able to match jobs with skills
