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.
ISSUES: Gogoro has been struggling with ballooning losses and was recently embroiled in alleged subsidy fraud, using Chinese-made components instead of locally made parts Gogoro Inc (睿能創意), the nation’s biggest electric scooter maker, yesterday said that its chairman and CEO Horace Luke (陸學森) has resigned amid chronic losses and probes into the company’s alleged involvement in subsidy fraud. The board of directors nominated Reuntex Group (潤泰集團) general counsel Tamon Tseng (曾夢達) as the company’s new chairman, Gogoro said in a statement. Ruentex is Gogoro’s biggest stakeholder. Gogoro Taiwan general manager Henry Chiang (姜家煒) is to serve as acting CEO during the interim period, the statement said. Luke’s departure came as a bombshell yesterday. As a company founder, he has played a key role in pushing for the
China has claimed a breakthrough in developing homegrown chipmaking equipment, an important step in overcoming US sanctions designed to thwart Beijing’s semiconductor goals. State-linked organizations are advised to use a new laser-based immersion lithography machine with a resolution of 65 nanometers or better, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said in an announcement this month. Although the note does not specify the supplier, the spec marks a significant step up from the previous most advanced indigenous equipment — developed by Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment Group Co (SMEE, 上海微電子) — which stood at about 90 nanometers. MIIT’s claimed advances last
CROSS-STRAIT TENSIONS: The US company could switch orders from TSMC to alternative suppliers, but that would lower chip quality, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), whose products have become the hottest commodity in the technology world, on Wednesday said that the scramble for a limited amount of supply has frustrated some customers and raised tensions. “The demand on it is so great, and everyone wants to be first and everyone wants to be most,” he told the audience at a Goldman Sachs Group Inc technology conference in San Francisco. “We probably have more emotional customers today. Deservedly so. It’s tense. We’re trying to do the best we can.” Huang’s company is experiencing strong demand for its latest generation of chips, called
GLOBAL ECONOMY: Policymakers have a choice of a small 25 basis-point cut or a bold cut of 50 basis points, which would help the labor market, but might reignite inflation The US Federal Reserve is gearing up to announce its first interest rate cut in more than four years on Wednesday, with policymakers expected to debate how big a move to make less than two months before the US presidential election. Senior officials at the US central bank including Fed Chairman Jerome Powell have in recent weeks indicated that a rate cut is coming this month, as inflation eases toward the bank’s long-term target of two percent, and the labor market continues to cool. The Fed, which has a dual mandate from the US Congress to act independently to ensure