As Wall Street firms order employees back to the office, the option of working from home remains more popular than ever all over the world, a new study showed.
More than two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies have eased vaccination, testing and mask rules, and reopened their offices full-time. Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Jefferies Financial Group Inc are among US financial giants leading an aggressive push back to in-person work.
The problem is that workers do not want to come back — and that is true across countries and industries, according to a research paper published on Wednesday by an international team of economists, including Stanford University professor Nicholas Bloom, who have been gathering data on remote work since the early days of the pandemic.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Workers say they are more productive at home, would quit their jobs or look elsewhere if they are forced back, and would take pay cuts to maintain the remote option, the study found.
It is based on surveys conducted in the middle of last year and early this year of people in 27 countries, skewing toward higher-income employees.
The shift to remote work “benefits workers,” the researchers wrote.
“The reason is simple: Most workers value the opportunity to WFH [work from home] part of the week, and some value it a lot,” they added.
On average, people surveyed by the research team work about 1.5 days from home each week.
Employees in countries where commutes are typically longer tend to place more value on time working from home. In India and China, for example, commute times average more than 90 minutes, about double the length for US workers.
Workers said they would take a pay cut of 5 percent on average to keep working from home.
Women — who are more likely to be primary caregivers for children or other family members — value the remote option more than men, the study found.
In many countries, workers want to work from home more often than they are doing now. Respondents in Brazil and Singapore said they want to work the most days remotely, while in some nations, such as India, they want to spend more time in the office.
About one-third of US workers would quit or start looking for another job if told to return to the workplace five days a week, higher than the global average.
The rate was highest in the UK.
Workers do not feel they are any less productive when working from home, the study said, underscoring earlier research by academics including Bloom.
The new paper by the WFH Research team is based on online polling that likely skews toward well-educated and higher-income workers, who have better access to technology and more time to answer surveys, the authors said.
For example, about 90 percent of their respondents in China said they have college degrees, while only about one-quarter of the overall population does.
soft landing: The US’ rate-setting FOMC finds itself in a difficult situation as it seeks to address inflation through interest rate hikes while avoiding a recession The US Federal Reserve is widely expected to hold interest rates steady on Wednesday after a summer of mixed economic data, while leaving the door open to another hike if needed. The Fed has raised interest rates 11 times over the past 18 months, lifting its key lending rate to a level not seen for 22 years as it tackles inflation still stubbornly above its long-term target of 2 percent. Analysts and traders broadly expect the US central bank to hold rates steady on Wednesday in order to give policymakers more time to assess the health of the world’s largest economy. “We think
AI TREND: TSMC has been rapidly expanding capacity to meet a spike in demand for advanced packaging services, but still expects supplies to be tight for 18 months Arizona is in talks with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) about advanced chip packaging, state Governor Katie Hobbs said yesterday, which is crucial for the manufacturing of artificial intelligence (AI) chips. TSMC, which is building a US$40 billion chip factory in the US state, has not announced plans to build facilities for advanced chip packaging in the US. Advanced packaging processes stitch multiple chips together into a single device, lowering the added cost of more powerful computing. “Part of our efforts at building the semiconductor ecosystem is focusing on advanced packaging, so we have several things in the works around that
NXP Semiconductors NV expects its first automotive-grade 5-nanometer chip built by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) to become available for automakers within one-and-a-half years at the earliest, following demand for better computing performance and energy efficiency for connected vehicles, a company executive said yesterday. That would mean a significant upgrade from the 16-nanometer technology NXP adopted in its existing series of microprocessors. NXP chief technology executive Lars Reger made the remarks during a media briefing yesterday in Taipei. The latest updates came after NXP unveiled its plan to source 5-nanometer capacity from TSMC in 2021. This is Reger’s first trip to
Tailwinds: Blockbuster earnings at Nvidia Corp have sparked hopes of a tech sector boom; Taiwanese chipmakers are hopeful benefits will come to them too The worst could be over for the New Taiwan dollar as China’s economic recovery and a rebound in the chip industry will support the beleaguered currency, analysts said. The NT dollar is on course to weaken for a sixth month, the longest stretch since 2006, after foreign funds turned sour on its technology sector and risk sentiment deteriorated on slower growth in China. The tide seems to be turning now on nascent signs of stabilization in China’s economy — its biggest trading partner — following policy boosts. The yuan emerged as the best-performing Asian currency last week, followed by the Japanese yen
RSS