Yahoo Finance Surprising reason Aussies like working from home so much: 'Rugged individuals stand up to powerful forces'
New research has revealed Australians prefer to do the majority of their job from the comfort of their own home.
Why do we like working from home so much? The answer, according to new international research, is that we're a bunch of individualists. That’s right. Ties are for office workers, tattoos are for remote workers.
The new research finds working from home varies a lot between countries that seem otherwise similar. Some countries work from home a lot. Some not much at all.
The researchers - from the universities Princeton, Stanford, King’s College London, etc - wanted to know why. They found a bunch of reasons.
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COVID had a large impact but it wasn't the biggest kicker
One of the reasons was how strict lockdowns were.
Hmm. When you put it that way it certainly doesn’t sound like good news for companies that employ these people! And yet the countries with high working-from-home rates are some of the wealthiest and nicest to live in in the whole world.
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But the bitter experience of lockdowns isn’t the only reason people work from home. Nor is it even the biggest reason.
The biggest explanation is the fundamental character of the nation. Countries with a strong collective spirit, like Taiwan, are getting on the bus and going into the office, every damn morning. But countries with a strong streak of individualism are sitting at home in their snuggies and checking emails.
As the next chart shows, the most individualist country is, not surprisingly, the United States of America. It has a strong rate of working from home, with 1.3 days worked from home each week. Australia is close behind while Canada works from home the most.
What is individualism exactly?
According to the scientists, individualism “measures the extent to which individuals in a society prioritize their own ambitions and independence above the collective goals and unity of the group.”
Hmm. When you put it that way it certainly doesn’t sound like good news for companies that employ these people! And yet the countries with high working-from-home rates are some of the wealthiest and nicest to live in in the whole world.
There’s a lot of moving parts here and the researchers have used a technique called regression to find the ones that matter. Some things you might think matter a lot, like the share of jobs that could be done remotely, don’t actually matter that much.
In every country, plumbers and nurses can’t work from home. Look at South Korea in the chart above. That’s a rich country with a lot of office jobs. But the South Korean office workers are all in the actual office.
Working from home “has a reputation for being a rich-country phenomenon,” the researchers write. “But measures of income like GDP per capita and average state wages are not robust predictors of [working from home].”
What they are trying to point out here is that the researchers thought of a lot of the confounding effects and tried to measure them too. The finding that individualism matters comes to the fore after checking for all these other things.
Proof of this is if you limit the analysis to people with a high propensity to work from home (the university-educated) the same basic pattern emerges. That’s what the next chart shows.
(For what it’s worth, this story was written on a Macbook in a café. Your correspondent hasn’t been inside an office since approximately 2013 and finds the newfound enthusiasm everyone has for working from home endearing.)
The Trump Effect
Political effects matter. Which way they operate may surprise you!
This finding comes from some bonus work the researchers did on how working from home varied within America. Turns out counties that favoured Biden at the last election were more likely to work from home, while counties that favoured Trump were less likely to work from home.
Given the way everything turns into a culture war these days, it’s probably not long before working from home becomes a major cultural dividing line, with riding the subway into the office being MAGA-coded and checking into a meeting via Teams being a sign you’re woke.
Working from home is already controversial enough. The politicians charged with making city centres bright and vibrant struggle to get enough people to show up on most weekdays, and city centres are, as a result, struggling.
While residential rents are the highest they’ve ever been, office rents are, on latest data, still below 2019 levels. And city centre retail is suffering from a double whammy. Working from home is combined with the rise of online shopping to leave a lot of city-centre retail vacant.
Powerful interests want people back in the office. And it’s going to take a lot of rugged individualism to stand up to them!
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