COVID-19 and its influence on the propensity to work from home between March 2020 and June 2021

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on the world of work. With growing support and preference revelation from both employees and employers, we might anticipate a settling in of working from home around one to two days a week, varying by occupation depending on the ability to work remotely. Although there are a growing number of studies that have analysed data collected at a point in time or over time during the pandemic, there is now sufficient time and data to treat the waves of collected data as a repeated cross section that is jointly modelled to assess systematically, the changing roles of various influences on the proportion of working days that are worked from home. This paper estimates random effects regression models for the Greater Sydney Metropolitan Area and South-East Queensland over four waves of data collected in 2020 and 2021, where this last one represents a period with almost full vaccinations and minimum restrictions (i.e., ‘new normal’). By jointly estimating four waves of data within a single modelling framework, we are able to track the changing roles of the influences found to be statistically significant across the waves. The elasticity outputs reveal how these influences impact on the propensity to WFH, giving clues on whether we were starting to see a stabilisation of WFH activity mid-way in the pandemic period that can be reflective of a ‘new normal’. Results are very supportive of employees’ preferences, suggesting that those that feel the same or more productive when working from home relative to going to the office, are more likely to working from home relative to those that feel less productive.