Work from anywhere jobs gained unprecedented popularity with the summer spark (Pic: Canva Pro/TIMES NOW DIGITAL)
According to the quarterly Flexible Working Index released by Flexa, the demand for WFA roles saw a remarkable 120 per cent jump. Around 33 per cent of all job seekers were actively searching for such opportunities in the April-June quarter. The number of people who stated WFA as their top preference was the recorded by the Index since its launch in July 2022. The findings this year were the result of insights gathered from over 350,000 job searches. The preferences of over 8,000 job seekers regarding their desired location, schedule, and work style for the relevant quarter were taken into account.
What is WFA?
Following the Covid-19 pandemic, the popularity of WFA schemes has risen considerably. Since employees have the option to work from any location, they can take advantage of the benefit of travelling to new places or visiting family members overseas without using up their yearly vacation days.
Molly Johnson-Jones, CEO and co-founder of Flexa said,”this kind of flexibility allows employees to travel for extended periods without having to use up annual leave or take a cut in pay – a particularly appealing prospect during the warmer months.”
Higher demand for fully remote roles, flexible work hours
A month-on-month growth in the demand for fully remote roles was noticed, with 59 per cent of all workers expressing a preference for fully remote positions by June 2023. This marked a 13 per cent increase from April this year.
“We saw fully remote roles fall out of favour with job seekers last autumn, with demand dropping to an all-time low in December. The reversal of this trend, which began in spring and has continued into the summer, highlights the seasonality behind demand for different working locations,” Molly Johnson-Jones said.
The past quarter also saw a seasonal increase of nine per cent in the number of job seekers who preferred summer hours. Around 24 per cent of all workers indicated a preference for summer hours, compared to 22 per cent in April. The change in preference coincides with employees wanting to make the most of the extended and warmer evenings that come with the summer season.
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Andrew Parkin is a sessional lecturer at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto. Justin Savoie is a PhD Candidate in political science at the University of Toronto. |
THE onset of the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a sudden disruption of everyday life. While many things are back to the way they were before, one change has proven harder to reverse: working from home.
Three years after the switch to remote work, there is little sign people are growing tired of it. In fact, experiences of working from home have become more positive over time. What’s more, our latest research shows that remote work is not eroding people’s well-being.
This evidence points to one conclusion: employers should focus more on managing new hybrid work models and less on trying to force employees back into their cubicles.
Who is working from home?
The Survey on Employment and Skills has been tracking the pandemic’s impact on the workplace over the past three years.
The latest wave — a survey of 5,904 Canadian adults conducted in March 2023 — found that almost two in five (38 per cent) people worked remotely at least some of the time in the early months of 2023. These individuals had previously worked outside the home before the pandemic.
The likelihood of working from home varies significantly by occupation. A majority of office workers (57 per cent) and executives or managers (57 per cent) work from home at least some days.
But working from home is much less common among skilled trade workers (16 per cent). The likelihood of working from home is also higher for workers with more education or higher incomes.
These figures remind us that COVID-19’s impact on work goes beyond the appeal of remote work. It has also created a new division in the labour force between those whose jobs can be done at home (mostly white-collar workers) and those whose jobs cannot (mostly blue-collar and service workers).
This new division is likely to continue because those who are still working from home like the new arrangement.
People prefer remote work
From the start, a majority of those who switched to remote work said they preferred it to in-person work.
The proportion of people holding this view increased to 74 per cent in 2023 from 63 per cent in 2020. In addition, over the past three years, seven out of 10 individuals working from home said they wanted their employer to allow them to do so after the pandemic ends.
When people say they would like to work from home, they really mean it. Forty-three per cent of those who want to keep working from home say they would like to do so every day; three-quarters (73 per cent) say at least two to three days a week. Only one in four envision working from home occasionally.
Another indicator of how hard it will be to reverse this trend is that a small, but noticeable, group of workers have reorganized their lives around working from home.
About one in ten said they switched jobs to make it easier to work from home. The same proportion said the option to work from home allowed them to relocate to a different community. Given the life choices some have made, getting them back into the office will take more than a memo from their managers.
Health and well-being findings
The biggest obstacle to getting everyone back into the workplace is the fact that people who are working from home seem to be doing better — or at least no worse — than those who are not.
At the start of the pandemic, there were concerns that adjusting to working from home, like finding a suitable workspace and dealing with distractions, would negatively impact people’s mental well-being.
But three years later, those who work from home are reporting slightly higher job satisfaction, mental health and overall well-being than their counterparts who are working outside the home.
They also appear to have a similar number of connections to friends, suggesting they do not feel more isolated.
Since there are specific demographics of workers that are more likely to work remotely, our analysis controlled for things such as education and occupation.
The results confirmed that people who are working from home are genuinely more satisfied and healthy than those who are not. At the very least, they are not more likely to report feeling lonely or isolated. These positive outcomes were most noticeable for women and for younger workers.
New workplace challenges
Our survey not only provides insights about the current remote work situation, but also sheds light about what it was like to go into the workplace every day prior to the pandemic.
For many workers, it would seem the pre-pandemic arrangement was inconvenient, tiring or stressful. People worked in-person jobs because no other option was on offer. The pandemic forced an alternative out into the open, and what began as a temporary disruption has become permanent.
Employers now face the challenge of not only accommodating ongoing remote work arrangements, but also managing new inequities between those whose jobs lend themselves to remote work and those whose don’t.
Employers also need to think more about the job satisfaction and mental health — not just of remote workers, but of those who can’t work remotely and find themselves in a workplace that feels a lot more empty than before.
Author’s Note: Most data cited is from the Survey on Employment and Skills, conducted by the Environics Institute, the Future Skills Centre and the Diversity Institute at Toronto Metropolitan University. The Survey on Employment and Skills is funded primarily by the Government of Canada’s Future Skills Centre. Additional data is from surveys funded by the Toronto Foundation, Community Foundations of Canada, and other Toronto-based community organizations.
Andrew Parkin is a sessional lecturer at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto. Justin Savoie is a PhD Candidate in political science at the University of Toronto. Read the original article with hyperlinks on The Conversation Canada. Author photos courtesy: The Conversation. Title image by Tumisu from Pixabay.
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Lisa Dent
Weekdays 2-6pm
A native of Rockford, Lisa Dent, heard 2 pm to 6 pm weekdays, began her radio career in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin in 1981. She has worked at stations in Minneapolis, San Diego, Seattle, and Houston. Dent returned to Chicago in 2002. (Click for more.)
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Roma Priya, Founder of the firm, shares,
“At Burgeon Law, we want the work to be challenging, but not overwhelming. Achieving life-work balance is a steady process and all of us need to make the conscious decision to achieve balance. The time I spend off-work has a positive impact on increasing my productivity at work and I want to provide my team with this opportunity to achieve balance. Since family relationships have a critical impact on wellbeing and mental health, these ‘Work-From-Home & Remote Working Clusters’ will provide greater opportunity for my team to enhance communication and interaction with their families.”
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How Remote Work Has Affected Real Estate Values
The remote work boom that was seen during the pandemic has undoubtedly changed how we work in a fundamental way. For instance, a survey conducted in 2021 found that over 75% of workers would gladly sacrifice a pay raise if they could work flexibly more often than before Covid.
Indeed, the recent Workmonitor from HR services provider Randstad found that the current macroeconomic circumstances are not changing employee demands which started during the pandemic: workers still want flexibility, value alignment, and a good work-life balance, with 61% of workers not accepting a job if it impacts work-life balance.
Impact on real estate
As this trend was unfolding there was considerable concern about its potential impact on cities, with people concerned that if we can work from anywhere then we might choose to leave the city and find somewhere cheaper and quieter to live. While I never really thought that was a realistic concern, not least as there is a lot more that draws us to cities than just work, the trend towards more remote work, or hybrid work is having an impact on corporate real estate.
Research from Columbia Business School suggests that the shift to hybrid working has affected not just the commercial real estate market but even the housing market itself, with suburban rents rising alongside house prices in comparison to urban locations.
“The pandemic and its aftershocks have changed the real estate investment landscape both for the short- and for the long-run,” the researcher explains. “One of the pandemic’s longest-lasting impacts will be wider adoption of remote work.”
Lasting impact
In a recent article, I explored whether remote working might have an impact on inflation, the Columbia research suggest it could have a similarly significant impact on the equity and debt markets.
They explain that for the entirety of human history there has been an intrinsic connection between the places we live and the places we work. The rise in remote working has severed that relationship, and they believe this will impact not only the real estate market but society more broadly.
The researcher reviewed data from both the three years before the pandemic and the three years from the start of the pandemic until now, while also examining data from both the 20th and 21st centuries to try and understand the possible implications working from home might have on everything from real estate valuations to the structure of cities.
This data included national remote work policies, rent changes in 30 metropolitan areas, the share of remote job postings on the jobs website Indeed, and migration patterns both globally and specifically for New York City.
Drop in usage
The analysis shows that during the pandemic, there was a considerable decline in office usage, which is understandable. What is interesting, however, is that this decline has lasted far longer than was initially expected, and it shows precious little sign of reversing.
The author highlights that pre-Covid, around 250 million square feet of new office leases were signed per year, but this fell to just 100 million in the first half of 2022.
This has had an understandable impact on office values, which fell considerably and remain below 2019. The author believes these valuations will remain below those levels for the next decade.
Simulations of office values, that took into account remote work rates, show that the value of all NYC office properties dropped by more than 40% in 2020. Predictions for 10 years after the shift to working from home suggest that office values in 2029 will remain an average of 39% lower than they were in 2019.
This coincided with a rise in both house prices and rents in the suburbs. The pandemic-induced migration from urban areas led to a significant rise in house prices and rents in suburban areas, while city centers saw the opposite trend with a decrease in prices and rents.
As companies attempt to bring employees back to the office, the real estate market and attitudes toward work are likely to change. It will take more time and data to understand the full impact of the remote work trend on society more broadly and on the real estate sector more specifically. This is a story that still has some way to play out yet.
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