The promise that the COVID-19 vaccine will eventually bring things back to normal might not be true when it comes to workers returning to their offices.
“Our employees have been polled, and they want to work from home as long as possible,” Wes Guckert, president and CEO of The Traffic Group, a traffic engineering firm, told the Washington Examiner.
Recent polling by the Pew Research Center shows that Guckert’s workers are not the only ones who feel this way.
A majority of workers polled, 54%, currently work from home and want to continue doing so for all or most of the time after the coronavirus pandemic is over. Only 11% said they would never want to work from home.
The survey, which polled over 10,000 adults, also found that 87% felt transitioning from the office to working from home was “very” or “somewhat easy.”
“The abrupt closure of many offices and workplaces this past spring ushered in a new era of remote work for millions of employed Americans and may portend a significant shift in the way a large segment of the workforce operates in the future,” the poll stated.
Other surveys found similar results.
A working paper from the University of Chicago titled “Why Working From Home Will Stick” surveyed 15,000 people. It found that workers doing their job from home consider it a perk and would be willing to cut their pay by as much as 8% to continue doing so after the pandemic.
It also found that 70% of workers are reluctant to engage in pre-pandemic activities, such as riding a subway to work or being in a crowded elevator, even when a vaccine for COVID-19 is widely available.
“This persistent fear of proximity to others is likely to leave some residual demand for social distancing at workplaces and prop up demand for working from home in the coming years,” the paper states.
The Chicago study also found that working from home increased productivity by 2.4%.
“Our survey reveals that the experience has been positive and better than expected for the majority of firms and workers,” the paper states.
The promise of increased productivity, coupled with the fact that most workers don’t want to return to the office, has prompted some high-profile companies, such as Google, to announce even after the vaccine was approved that they are rejiggering their workweek.
In a companywide email on Dec. 13, Google informed employees that it had extended its work-from-home order to September of 2021. It had been set to last until July. It also announced that it would test a new “flexible workweek” model that will allow staff to work from home two days a week after the offices are open.
“We are testing a hypothesis that a flexible work model will lead to greater productivity, collaboration, and well-being,” wrote Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, as reported by the New York Times.
Guckert tapped the opinions of his employees and found they also want a hybrid model, which would allow them to continue to work from home while still enabling them to go to the office. The change will require less office space.
“In all likelihood, we will reduce our office space by 30% or more when the time comes to renew our lease,” he said, adding that his lease expires in three years, which will likely be long after the need to work from home has passed.
The pandemic enticed scores of employers to seek less office space as staff worked from home. That trend is likely to continue even after the pandemic, according to Gary Beasley, CEO and co-founder of real estate firm Roofstock.
He expects that roughly 20% of the workforce will continue to work from home, at least partially, after the pandemic passes. Roughly 5% did so before the virus hit, Beasley said.
The increase in remote workers has put downward pressure on rents for commercial real estate because less space is required to house a smaller number of employees.
“Landlords are in deal-making mode and more about retaining occupancy than maximizing rent,” Beasley said.
Neil Brooks, head of capital markets at Knight Frank Asia Pacific, recently told CNBC that his company had seen a “massive footfall in offices” in the United States. He thinks that offices will likely become a gathering place for employees instead of a workspace.
“We expect the office to change slightly from being a place where people go to work as a place where people go to collaborate with other people,” he said on Dec. 14. “The days of people being in small cubicles for long periods of time are over.”
Companies are also more willing to hire remote workers, according to a recent Conference Board survey, thereby making it even less likely that the number of workers returning to the office will equal what occurred before the pandemic.
The survey found that 88% of companies are more eager to hire remote workers than the 52% of businesses that were open to the idea before the pandemic.
It also found that worker productivity has increased during the pandemic, a similar finding reported by the University of Chicago working paper, but the surge was because employees were home and working longer hours.
Robin Erickson, a principal researcher at the Conference Board, viewed the increase in productivity as a negative and cautioned employers to enact rules that would avoid it.
“To further support the health and well-being of their workers, companies can consider implementing quiet periods without email, mandating use of vacation time, or even offering more benefits related to health and wellness to mitigate stress,” he said when releasing the survey.
