The covid-19 pandemic led to a tenfold increase in teleworking. The post-covid era has reduced it to fivefold. While those who sit still every day on the main roads leading to Luxembourg are 100% in favour, bosses and other managers more often talk about the negative effects, such as the loss of contact, team cohesion or ‘creative genius.’ Today, more and more large groups are ‘inviting’ everyone back to the office in the name of collective efficiency.
Amid this chorus of disagreement, Stanford University economics professor Nicholas Bloom, drawing on studies and data from the United States as well as Europe and Asia, has come up with a number of advantages to making teleworking permanent, which he explains in an released 13 September 2024.
An 8% pay rise
To understand why employees consider it worth 8% of their salary, note that typical workers spend around 45 hours a week in the office, but spend almost eight extra hours a week in transport. Working from home three days a week saves them around five hours a week, or around 10% of their total weekly working and commuting time. In Luxembourg, according to the national statistics bureau Statec, almost one resident in four takes more than 40 minutes to get from home to work, or an hour and a half per day. For French cross-border commuters, a journey of 44km takes an average of 53 minutes by road and 47 to 58 minutes to travel from Metz to Luxembourg by TER (regional express train), according to Frontaliers Grand Est, representing a journey time of 1 hour 43 minutes to 1 hour 56 minutes per day. This is no mean feat, says the IMF economist: according to by Nobel Prize winner , commuting is the most hated activity of the day, even more hated than work itself.
More jobs for disabled workers
The number of working in the United States since the pandemic is around two million, according to the study. This increase in the employment of disabled people has occurred mainly in occupations where teleworking is common. Disabled employees benefit in two ways: first, by avoiding long commutes and, second, by being able to control their work environment from home. from the Econometric Society on discrimination and job reallocation show that expanding labour markets to a wider pool of potential employees can have considerable beneficial effects on productivity. Going from 10 to 10,000 qualified candidates for a job makes for a much more productive matchmaking process, especially if artificial intelligence can help select candidates. Remote working enables global connections between employees and companies, which increases labour productivity.
More women in the labour market
The employment of middle-aged women in the United States has increased by around 2% faster than that of middle-aged men since the pandemic. Women’s greater role in childcare could be behind this increase in women’s participation in the labour market via teleworking, says by Emma Harrington from the University of Virginia and Matthew Kahn from the University of Southern California.
Freeing up office space for housing
If employees are at home two or three days a week, the company needs less office space, which can be used for other activities. In major city centres, around half of the land area is occupied by offices. Given that office occupancy is now 50% below pre-pandemic levels, there is great potential for reducing office space.
A positive effect for innovation
“A long history of market size effects in economics shows how companies strive to innovate to serve larger, more lucrative markets. When we go from five million to 50 million people working from home every day, large hardware and software companies, startups and funders take notice. This leads to an acceleration of new technologies to serve these markets, improving their productivity and growth,” writes Bloom.
“This feedback loop has already begun. The share of with the US Patent and Trademark Office that repeatedly use ‘remote work,’ ‘work from home’ or similar terms remained stable through 2020, but has begun to increase. This highlights the improvement in technologies.”
This article was originally published in .