AS COVID-19 infections fall and economies around the world begin to open, companies are facing difficult choices about their work culture. Should they

Daily chart Will workers return to the office?

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2021-06-06 20:00:10

AS COVID-19 infections fall and economies around the world begin to open, companies are facing difficult choices about their work culture. Should they demand that employees return to the office or allow them to keep working from home?

Workers seem to have discovered a taste for the latter. A poll conducted by Morning Consult in March found that 87% of Americans who were working remotely during the pandemic wanted to continue to do so at least one day a week after life returned to normal.

Among executives, though, the sentiment is more mixed. The boss of Goldman Sachs, a bank, has called remote working an “aberration” and expects staff based in America to be at their desks full-time by mid-June. Similarly, Google’s boss, Sundar Pichai, talked about the importance of “in-person” culture as he announced plans to phase out remote work by September. The company will, however, let staff work up to two days a week from home. By contrast, other tech firms, such as Facebook and Twitter, have said that they will allow remote working to continue indefinitely for those who want to.

Whether remote working continues to be common will depend, in part, on the preference of employees and perhaps where they feel most productive. Covid-19 has provided an opportunity to take a deeper look at this question. Since the onset of the pandemic, pollsters and researchers have asked people whether they are more or less productive when working from home. The Economist has collected data from 12 of these nationally representative surveys from nine mostly rich-world countries over the past 12 months. We find that a majority of workers have consistently claimed that remote work either has no effect on, or even boosts, their productivity (see chart above). What is more, we find that sentiment has remained robust even as the pandemic has dragged on.

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