Is work from home dead? Bosses have made headlines during the past few months, ordering employees back to the office five days a week, and there’s been some grumpy rhetoric to match: “All this work-from-home nonsense is completely changing,” David Harrison, chief of commercial property giant Charter Hall, told a recent Australian Financial Review property summit.
But there’s a problem for those who want to drag our workplaces back in time: hybrid work will deliver economic benefits Australia can’t afford to squander.
A recent IMF blog titled Remote Work’s Growth Gift spelt out how work from home can boost productivity and power economic growth. The author, Stanford University economics professor Nicholas Bloom, argued that firms, employees and society in general have all reaped huge dividends from remote work.
“In my lifetime as an economist, I have never seen a change that is so broadly beneficial,” he wrote.
Among the biggest beneficiaries are those who care for children or the elderly, those with a disability, and older people who would like employment.
Research by the Committee for the Economic Development of Australia think tank shows that carers, women with children, people with a health condition, and those with a disability “have significantly increased their workforce participation in occupations that have made large transitions to remote work since the pandemic”.
Remote work has “levelled the playing field” for groups that traditionally faced barriers to employment, the report concluded.
The long commute to a distant office is not the dealbreaker it once was. For some women with caring responsibilities, remote work has allowed them to take on a higher paid, more productive job that better matches their training.
Remote working in some form is here to stay. A return to the five-day office week would only set us back.
Source: https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/bosses-want-to-kill-off-working-from-home-there-s-just-one-problem-with-that-20241203-p5kvbl.html?