Remote work is here to stay—but not everywhere, and not in all companies.
As the business world emerges from the pandemic, some companies are demanding a full return to the office. Others are embracing remote work options for their employees. New research suggests how people work now depends on company location, industry, skill set, and even an individual company’s cultural preference.
“The notion that we will go back to a point in which at least some firms will not commit to remote work—we've passed that moment.”
From 2019 to 2023, job postings for one or more remote work days per week climbed more than three-fold in the United States. In Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, openings skyrocketed by at least a factor of five. That said, in Miami; Savannah, Georgia; and Memphis, job listings with one or more days remote have slowed or leveled off.
“There has been a discrete change,” says Raffaella Sadun, the Charles E. Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and a co-author of the new study. “The notion that we will go back to a point in which at least some firms will not commit to remote work—we've passed that moment. Having said that, we are also clearly not, at the other extreme of remote work, seeing a universal type of practice that every firm is going to apply.”
Sadun co-authored the paper with Stanford University’s Nick Bloom; The University College of London’s Stephen Hansen; Peter John Lambert of the London School of Economics; Steven J. Davis of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business; and Lightcast Chief Economist Bledi Taska.
Crunching the ‘WHAM’ algorithm
To parse where and how people are working remotely, the researchers teamed with Lightcast, a market-analytics firm, to create an algorithm they named WHAM, short for “Work from Home Algorithmic Measure.”
Three people labeled 10,000 chunks of text to help WHAM analyze whether job posting text included language indicating the role would involve remote work. They then “trained” WHAM using text from job vacancy postings.
WHAM processed text from some 250 million online job listings, sorting them into categories including country, city, job type, and industry.
San Francisco and Boston lead remote offerings
The pattern in all categories? Variety.
“Remote-work posting shares vary greatly across occupations, industries, and cities,” the authors write.
Jobs based in San Francisco, Boston, and New York continue to offer a high-level of job postings with one or more days a week of remote work. Miami, among other cities in the southern US, is almost back to its pre-pandemic shares of remote work advertised.
The disparity also depends on profession. Finance, insurance, information, and communications have the highest remote-work shares, the authors found. Skills play a role, too. Higher-paying jobs with computer use and education requirements are more likely to offer a remote option than those that require direct customer interactions, the researchers write.
Take listings with “computer and mathematical” requirements. Before the pandemic, just one in 20 job posts offered remote work. By 2022, more than one-third mentioned the option.
Culture is more a factor than industry
Individual corporate culture also appears to play a big part in offering remote work. While one company may offer work-from-home options, a competitor may not, the authors found.
Take the automotive industry. In 2019, almost no jobs from Honda, GM, Ford, or Tesla promoted the possibility of remote work, according to the authors.
By 2022, Honda offered half of new engineering hires the option to work at home at least one day a week. GM ads offered less than half that, while fewer than one-sixth of Ford’s listings had a remote component. Tesla, whose CEO Elon Musk famously opposes off-site work, offered few remote possibilities either year, the researchers found.
“There is so much variability in the decision to commit to remote work, even for companies that are in the same industry and compete for the same type of talent.”
The researchers found similar patterns across professions, pointing to insurance and aerospace as two other notable examples.
“There is so much variability in the decision to commit to remote work, even for companies that are in the same industry and compete for the same type of talent,” Sadun says. “That tells you the decision depends on whatever makes sense for the company at that point in time in terms of strategy, technology, management processes that they already have, and probably the culture.”
Who’s in your talent pool?
So what’s a remote job-seeker to do?
Finding the right job depends on profession and, perhaps more crucially, what individual firms are willing to offer. Competition for jobs where the company is based is another big factor, Sadun says.
“What's in the San Francisco and Boston talent pool is likely very different from what is in Savannah or Miami Beach,” she says.
“You will compete for talent based on whether you offer remote work, which clearly is appealing for certain types of talent and certain types of demographics.”
For companies, remote work options may remain important for attracting certain kinds of talent, Sadun says.
“More and more, this will become one element in the value proposition that companies have to create for prospective employees. And, in part, you will compete for talent based on whether you offer remote work, which clearly is appealing for certain types of talent and certain types of demographics,” she says.
But, the ability to include remote employees in a firm’s day-to-day operations may be just as important, she notes.
“It will be even more important for companies to truly understand what type of talent they want to attract … but also how they will be able to work it into their workflow,” Sadun says. “Not every company can do it.”
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Image: iStockphoto/Oscar Gutierrez Zozulia