The coronavirus and efforts to mitigate its impact are having a transformative impact on many aspects of economic life, intensifying trends like shopping online rather than visiting brick-and-mortar stores and increasing the incidence of working from home. Indeed, many tech giants have already made working from home a permanent option for employees.
Working from home, or telecommuting, is not a new phenomenon. According to a survey by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), around 8 percent of all employees worked from home at least one day a week before the arrival of COVID-19. However, only 2.5 percent worked from home full-time in the 2017–18 survey period.
Working from home has surged in the wake of social distancing and other efforts to contain the virus, and this surge brings up a good question: How many jobs can be done at home? Some careful research by Jonathan Dingel and Brent Neiman indicates that nearly 40 percent of U.S. jobs can be done at home.
While this provides an upper bound, can does not mean will, so a natural follow-up question is: How many jobs willbe done at home? To get a sense of how many jobs and how many working days will beperformedat home after the pandemic recedes, we turn to our Survey of Business Uncertainty (SBU). To preview our conclusion, the share of working days spent at home is expected to triple after the COVID-19 crisis ends compared to before the pandemic hit, but with considerable variation across industries.
In the May SBU, we asked two questions to gauge how firms anticipate working from home to change. To get a pre-pandemic starting point, we asked panelists, "What percentage of your full-time employees worked from home in 2019?" And to gauge how that's likely to change after the crisis ends, we asked, "What percentage of your full-time employees will work from home after the coronavirus pandemic?" We asked firms to sort the fraction of their full-time workforce into four categories, ranging from those employees working from home five full days per week to those who rarely or never work from home.
Chart 1 summarizes firms' responses to these two questions. It also summarizes the responses by workers to questions about working from home in the BLS's 2017–18 American Time Use Survey. For the period preceding COVID-19, SBU results and the Time Use Survey results are remarkably similar. Both surveys say 90 percent of employees rarely or never worked from home, and a very small fraction worked from home five full days per week. As reported in the chart's rightmost column, about 5 to 6 percent of all working days happened at home before the pandemic hit.
According to the SBU results, the anticipated share of working days at home is set to triple after the pandemic ends—rising from 5.5 percent to 16.6 percent of all working days. Perhaps even more striking, firms anticipate that 10 percent of their full-time workforce will be working from home five days a week.
Overall, firms say that about 10 percent of their full-time employees worked from home at least one day a week in 2019. That fraction is expected to jump to nearly 30 percent after the crisis ends (well below the upper bound estimated by Dingel and Neiman). Chart 2 gives a look at firm's working-from-home expectations for major industry groups.
The share of people working from home at least one day a week is expected to jump markedly in the construction, real estate, and mining and utilities sectors, presumably by granting front-office staff working-from-home status. It is also expected to jump markedly in health care, education, leisure and hospitality, and other services, possibly by relying more heavily on remote-delivery options (for example, online education and virtual doctor's visits). Firms in the business services sector anticipate that working from home will rise to nearly 45 percent.
For the industries we can match directly to American Time Use Survey statistics, the two data sources imply a similar incidence of working from home before COVID-19. For manufacturing, SBU data indicate that 9 percent of employees worked at home at least one day a week prior to COVID-19, and the American Time Use Survey indicates that 7.3 percent did so. For retail and wholesale trade, the corresponding figures are 4.1 percent and 4.0 percent, respectively.
To summarize, our survey indicates that, compared to before the pandemic, the share of working days spent at home by full-time workers will triple after the pandemic. Our results also say that this shift will happen across major industry sectors. These changes in the location of work are also likely to exert powerful effects on the future of cities and the demand for high-rise office space (more on that next month).
Regarding the long-run impact of the shift to working from home, there are grounds for optimism, including a potential boost to productivity—although if you're juggling kids at home and working from your couch or bedroom, we can understand if it's hard to imagine right now.
By David Altig, executive vice president and research director in the Atlanta Fed's Research Department,
Jose Maria Barrero, assistant professor of finance at Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México Business School,
Nick Bloom, the William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University,
Steven J. Davis, the William H. Abbott Professor of International Business and Economics at the Chicago Booth School of Business and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution,
Brent Meyer, a policy adviser and economist in the Atlanta Fed's Research Department,
Emil Mihaylov, research analyst in the Atlanta Fed's Research Department, and
