By Mark Beatson

We know already that the economic news in the short-term will be dire.  How dire will depend in part on how productive the millions of people working from home have been.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a massive increase in homeworking (see the chart below, taken from a recent CIPD survey of employers'). 

In addition, our survey of employees found that 61% were not attending their normal place of work during the pandemic. The precise numbers might be a slight overestimate, but ONS surveys also suggest that around half the workforce have heeded the government’s call to work from home.  According to YouGov, a fifth of the workforce have switched from never working at home to always working at home.

Norms that were holding back adoption of homeworking have been truly shattered

A recent CIPD Megatrends report said norms and force of habit were holding back adoption of homeworking.  The pandemic has well and truly shattered these norms.  One sign is that internet searches in the UK for “working from home” soared this March (see the chart below).

Most employers – 75%, according to our survey – expect demand for homeworking to increase once restrictions are lifted.  Some companies have sought to jump the gun by, for example, allowing all employees to continue working from home if they want to do so.

Whether homeworking on anywhere near the current scale persists, though, will depend largely on the relative productivity of homeworking.  In other words, the value of an hour spent working at home versus an hour spent elsewhere.  After all, until the Industrial Revolution, most people worked at home – even in manufacturing – but it was the productivity advantage of working in factories and offices that changed this.

Workers who choose to work from home claim no impact on their ability to do their job

If we ask employees, the answer would seem to be that location nowadays makes little or no difference to how well they do their jobs.  The chart below is based on data from our Good Work Index, which was collected in early 2020. 

Employees who had worked from home during the year before the survey – which might have been on a very occasional basis – were no less likely to doubt their competence than employees who had never worked from home.

Just under a third of employees (32%) had worked from home in the 12 months preceding this survey.  The data were collected pre-pandemic so presumably most of these chose to work from home, and they either had jobs where it was easier to work from home, or their preferred way of working suited working from home, or their personal circumstances meant they sought out work that could be done from home (possibly all of these).   For these (and other) reasons, existing data on people who voluntarily work from home doesn’t necessarily tell us much about the impact on people who are told suddenly that they are working from home (with, presumably, little choice in the matter).

A frequently quoted study of travel agents in China tried to approach this more like a controlled experiment, with decisions about who could work from home initially made at random.  The study found that those who worked from home tended to work harder and more effectively.  However, it is unclear how far these results can be generalised. 

And remote working doesn’t seem to impede innovation and creativity either

In addition, studies, including the one in China, have tended to look at the impact of homeworking on the performance of current duties.  It’s much harder to test rigorously for the impact of homeworking on employee creativity or innovation.  Yet this aspect seems to have mattered a lot to some companies, such as IBM and Yahoo, which took steps to discourage or prohibit employees from working from home (even if technology-intensive corporates seem now to be moving in the opposite direction).

Again, we have some (pre-pandemic) data from our Good Work Index.  In early 2020, 57% of employees who hadn’t worked from home during the previous 12 months agreed (or agreed strongly) that ‘I make innovative suggestions to improve the overall quality of my team or department’, but the percentage increased to 72% among those who had worked from home.  Even when we allow for other factors, such as position in the management hierarchy or arrangements for capturing employee voice, homeworkers were more likely to say they contributed innovative suggestions.  Again, this isn’t proof positive – for one thing, we don’t know whether employees were working from home when making these innovative suggestions – but it does at least suggest that employers shouldn’t set their face against working from home when it comes to innovation.

When it comes to recent pandemic data, initial findings from a CIPD survey of employees in May 2020 finds a similar pattern. Those working remotely during the pandemic were more likely to say they make innovative suggestions to improve the overall quality of my team or department; 68% said this, compared to 56% of those going to their normal place of work. While there’s not a definitive answer as to when and where these suggestions were made, from the perspective of employees at least, there’s little evidence that innovation has fallen since January 2020 in the wake of increased home working.  

Quality of line management makes more difference to competence than where we work

Pre-pandemic data highlights that how workers are managed also seems to be important.  The table below shows, again, that self-rated employee competence is little different for people who did and didn’t work from home.  However, the quality of line management does seem to make more of a difference. 

UK, excluding self-employed

** Measured using an employees’ assessment of their line manager’s competence, trustworthiness and fairness* People who, when asked, “In the last 12 months, have you made use of any of the following arrangements, and if not, are they available to you if you needed them? Working from home in normal working hours” answered “I have used this arrangement”.
Source: CIPD Good Work Index, 2020.

Employees were more likely to regard their own performance in a positive light if they also had a (relatively) positive assessment of their line manager.

We simply don’t know yet how well or how widely knowledge of the challenges (and opportunities) of managing home-based working has been shared among the millions of people who have some line management or supervisor responsibility.

For most people, homeworking seems unlikely to be an ‘all or nothing’ choice

How this all balances out wasn’t entirely clear before the pandemic.  And while the pandemic has certainly shifted the dial on homeworking, the experience doesn’t seem yet to have provided clear answers to all our questions. No doubt the answer varies a lot from person to person, as well as depending on other factors such as length of commute and caring commitments.  In addition, for most people, homeworking seems unlikely to be an ‘all or nothing’ choice in the long term.  More flexibility – including the option to work from home – may be a more sustainable feature of most employees’ working lives.