Remote work is popular, but can it last?
Not only did January 2024 mark the fourth anniversary of the Covid-19 pandemic, but it also marked a significant leap in the number of people working from home as a result. Additionally, workers, businesses, and the economy continue to investigate. Leading experts’ recent analyses suggest that a hybrid model—working part-time at the office and part-time at home—is emerging and will be the norm for many workers in the future. For example, my sister works three days at home and two days at the office. She totally enjoys the concept. She gets more freedom, is more performant and still maintains contact two days a week with her coworkers. He says it is essential to maintain this relationship and avoids burn out and loneliness.
It’s important to keep in mind how much the pandemic affected the economy as a whole, but especially certain occupations and industries. Before the pandemic, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that between 9.7 and 10.7 percent of all workers did some teleworking. But few did full-time. Many industries can rely on full-time homework, but most cannot.
For some jobs and industries, remote work was and is still more common. Workers in information, many journalists, investigative journalists, work from home. In finance, business services, teaching, tutoring are now done online.
The pandemic came as a huge shock to the economy, and the Internet revolutionized all. Because they were uncertain and worried about the virus, many workers refused to return to their workplaces. The Pew Research Center found that 71% of workers who were able to work from home were doing so by October 2020, up from 23% before Covid-19. This is an amazing turn of events.
There was a lot of talk about this boom in working from home. One of the leading experts on working from home, Stanford economist Nick Bloom, recently presented a comprehensive slideshow of his predictions. Bloom sees working from home “stabilizing at about 28% of (working) days” economy-wide, “a 5-fold jump” over pre-pandemic levels in 2019.
The majority of workers do not have the option to work from home. Full-time homeworkers are often working in services and are people running their own service or business. The latter group, which gets a lot of attention, has a lot of specialists in IT support, payroll, and human resources. Many are contractors. So, their relative isolation from the office isn’t such a dramatic change, they usually don’t even have an office.
If we want to analyze in terms of industry and occupation, we ought to look at two aspects, education and income. Many of those working fully online are higher income earners. Bloom is a firm believer that businesses, employees, and the economy as a whole all benefit from working from home. I do too. Although these viewpoints may be firmly based on data and analysis, they may occasionally veer off course and adopt a cheerleading posture that downplays or overlooks the issues associated with this change. Now, a real double issue makes me wonder.
Try to think about, the development of AI, and what if a major economic downfall occurs? Then, what’s next?
