Because It Is Here To Stay

Across the United States, a substantial part of the workforce is deciding that the temporary, pandemic-induced habits of working remotely might not be temporary after all.  

The same goes for hybrid arrangements that split time between traditional worksites and remote locations. 

There’s a growing sense that these adjustments might be the enduring new face of work.

• In the second-to-last week of December, 42.4% of U.S. workdays were worked from home. 

That’s according to a monthly survey commissioned by a trio of economists studying remote work, who couldn’t get the answers they needed from government data. It’s probably the best measure we have of how entrenched working from home has become since the arrival of Covid-19.

Before the pandemic, WFH accounted for about 5% of U.S. paid full workdays, Jose Maria Barrero of the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, Nicholas Bloom of Stanford, and Steven Davis of the University of Chicago estimated on the basis of a government survey conducted in 2017 and 2018. 

That share catapulted past 60% in spring 2020, according to their Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes, and has held remarkably steady at a bit above 40% since May 2021, not long after vaccines became available to all working-age Americans.

The percentage has likely jumped in January, because of the Omicron wave. 

As for what happens after, the survey also asks workers about their expectations for post-pandemic arrangements:

• Last spring the responses indicated they expected to work from home on 21% of workdays. 

• By December that was 29%, and Barrero says he expects it to keep rising in coming months. 

The new normal we appear to be settling into, then, is one in which 30% to 40% of workdays are remote.  That’s for the entire workforce, including those with jobs that can’t be done remotely, meaning the percentage is even higher for white-collar positions.

Each industry, of course, tends to be its own story. The Workforce Confidence surveys currently find that

• Software (80%),

• Media (71%), and

• Finance (70%) 

are the sectors with the largest percentage of respondents currently saying that they’re working mostly remotely.

At the other extreme, face-to-face contact is vital in some other fields. The Workforce Confidence survey documents that onsite work is still the norm for most people working in

• Public Safety (78%),

• Retail (71%),

• Construction (70%),

• Recreation and Travel (70%), and

• Transportation and Logistics (70%).

Working onsite also currently remains the norm in fields such as

• Manufacturing (63%),

• Healthcare (62%), and

• Education (62%). 

 It’s worth noting, though, that all three sectors offer a lot of supervisory and administrative work that needn't be done in a face-to-face setting. 

For example, surgical nurses need to be in the operating room, while billing specialists and purchasing managers find it easier to work remotely.

 

In the middle are fields such as

• Real Estate (47%),

• Legal (44%),

• Corporate Services (43%), and

• Entertainment (43%) 

where working mostly onsite is the winning choice for many people.

This is the biggest change in generations in how Americans do their jobs. And many CEOs, Sales Managers and their teams will even be more remote going forward, even though they were already working this way for many years before the pandemic.

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Hybrid Sales Performance Advisor

Ken Hall, CEO and President of KR HALL Consultants Inc. has been an effective sales leader, sales consultant and hybrid sales performance advisor for over 30 years, working with key customer companies including aerospace & defense, entertainment & media, professional services, hospitality & leisure, financial services & banks, insurance, medical solutions & healthcare, freight transportation services, communications & cable, technology and software.

Glad to talk about working with CEOs and Sales Leaders worldwide to effectively and efficiently help their remote salespeople to collaborate with their sales team, achieve goals and objectives and win desired sales results.

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Workforce Insights - Reopened offices; empty desks: Why 49% of us stick with remote or hybrid