Name: What is the future of working from home? - The Global Story podcast, BBC World Service
Uploaded: 2025-02-16T02:53:54.000Z
Duration: 20 min 55 s
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Hi there, I'm Catriona Perry, and this is The Global Story.

Past simple

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the working world went through a revolution.

To-infinitive

Workers, particularly white-collar office workers, were ordered to work from home to stop the spread of the virus, and it seemed like a permanent change.

Hybrid working has remained incredibly popular years after the COVID lockdowns were lifted.

But now, more and more companies are ordering employees back to work.

And many employers have slammed working from home as inefficient and bad for the bottom line.

So is the work-from-home revolution over now?

Joining me from London is the BBC's employment correspondent, Zoe Conway.

And also with me, Nick Bloom, an economist at Stanford University in the US, who has studied the effect that all of this is having on productivity.

Now, before we go any further, I just want to establish the status here.

Are you working from home or in the office?

I'm actually at home, although I have to say, for me, it's eight in the morning.

But right now, yes, this is this is the spare bedroom.

But ordinarily, you're in the office full time?

So I teach obviously students because I'm a Stanford.

But I do spend a couple of days a week on Zoom, you know, taking calls, working from home.

I work with a team of incredibly clever, interesting and funny people.

And I like the camaraderie of the office.

But I travel around the UK for work quite a lot as well.

OK, so we've established where you both stand on the working from home.

I obviously I'm not working from home, can't be a presenter and work from home, unfortunately, although I did suggest it from time to time during the pandemic.

But before the pandemic, I was working here in the US.

And I mean, it was really very rare in this country that you would have encountered anyone really working from home.

Nick, are there certain countries or certain industries that have always had this tradition of remote working or working from home?

So tech has always been pretty work from home friendly.

So you can think of, you know, if you're on a keyboard using computers, you often don't need to be in the office.

You know, it's also actually interesting that a lot of English speaking countries, it's not clear why, but you're right.

Northern Europe, you know, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand have been pretty high.

We tend to see the lowest levels are in Asia.

So there are big international differences.

So Asian, you know, typically back in the office pretty much full time.

But Northern Europe, US, we still see tech, some finance working from home two, three days a week.

But of course, everything changed for everyone, didn't it?

In the spring of 2020, with the arrival of this thing we'd never heard of before, COVID-19 and the pandemic and how that changed everything at that time.

Governments rushing to announce stay at home orders, lockdowns to try and keep everyone away from each other, limit the number of infections.

We were told at the time to keep the hospitals from getting overloaded and to get everyone safe.

And suddenly employers had to adapt to a situation where their employees could not come into work.

Zoe, tell us a little bit about that transition.

Who was working from home and who wasn't?

It was the most incredible adjustment for so many of us.

There were all these forms of technology we'd never used before, whether it's Zoom calls or team chats, that some of us are still fairly useless at using, certainly in my unit.

And I think what we're seeing in many cases in the UK are people who have learnt that they can be very productive at home and that they can juggle it very successfully with, you know, perhaps raising a young family or looking after elderly relatives.

And so there's a lot more flexibility that we're seeing.

But I think there's still a huge amount of uncertainty here in the UK about whether we're going to see a big switch back.

Because as well as having more time with your family and your children, I mean, there are other benefits for people from working from home as well, financially, commuting time.

Now, that is right in the heart of the city in London.

It's the sort of place where you're going to see a lot of people very smartly dressed, walking incredibly fast to get to their law firm or their bank where they work.

And we went on a Thursday morning and we went again on a Friday morning during rush hour.

And the data shows that now on a Friday, if you go to Bank Underground Station, you'll see that the commuters are roughly at just just over half what they were before the pandemic.

And on that point, I mean, individuals might save because they can make their lunch at home.

They're not spending on fuel for their cars, train tickets and so on.

But what's been the economic impact on businesses from this situation where people are working from home?

Mostly for businesses, hybrid, which is when you come in, say, two, three days a week and work from home two, three days a week.

It's why if you look at the Fortune 500, so these are the largest 500 companies in the world. 80% of them are on hybrid because it makes them a lot of money.

Well, if you look at the research, if you work from home a couple of days a week, it doesn't really seem to damage productivity.

So, yes, you know, you need to be in for mentoring, for connectivity, for building culture, for innovating.

But by the time you're coming in three days a week, it looks like you kind of have your fill.

And the other two days are good for quiet time and for recharging without a commute.

What businesses gain is turnovers a lot lower.

So in one study we published actually last year in Nature, you see quit rates fall by about a third.

And, you know, you can see why, like folks are like, I really like working from home a couple of days a week.

And for businesses, that saves them an enormous amount of money because every person that quits, you've got to go out, you've got to reinterview, rehire.

And has that passion been replicated across the world?

This move from a full time working from home to that hybrid model you're talking about?

If you look at Southern Europe and Asia, take Tokyo.

There's very little working from home going on.

You know, in 2019, these cities look similar.

Suddenly, five years later, you know, six years later, we've now seen a surge of work from home in much of Europe and the US and pretty much everyone's returned to the office in Asia.

And Zoe, what has that meant for how people might move between jobs now if you can potentially be working from home for a company that is no longer based in your town or in a nearby city, as may have been the case in the past when you sought employment adjacent to where you live?

I think there has been a shift in terms of the balance of power that when you apply for a job, it has become the norm to ask for flexible working, or certainly more normalised, and to expect it.