Country split on working from home

More than five years after the start of the pandemic, four in ten of all workers in Britain are still working from home for at least part of the week.
Data from the Office for National Statistics shows that, as of last month, 28 per cent of the country’s workforce are hybrid working, with 13 per cent working from home full-time.
The proportion of people working from home every day has been broadly stable for the past two years, while the number of hybrid workers has edged slightly higher.
With the likes of shop workers, doctors and builders unable to work from home, 44 per cent of people still commute to their place of work every day.
The ONS said that hybrid working is probably here to stay “but for some workers more than others”. Its research showed that older, highly educated people with children are more likely to work from home for at least part of the week.
Between April and June, 29 per cent of over-30s followed a hybrid working pattern, compared with 19 per cent of those aged 16-29.
Working parents (35 per cent) were more likely to work from home for part of the week than those without children, with more dads hybrid-working than mums.
Workers with a degree or equivalent were ten times more likely to hybrid-work than those with no qualifications, at 42 per cent compared with 4 per cent respectively.
Those in the IT industry and “professional, scientific and technical” sectors were likely to have adopted hybrid-working, the ONS found.
One criticism of working from home is that junior staff are not able to learn from their senior colleagues as they might have otherwise done. Just under half people in senior roles, such as managers and directors, followed a hybrid-working model, the survey found.
The ONS surveyed hundreds of workers who, on average, estimated that they saved 56 minutes on commuting whenever they worked from home on a given day. As a consequence, compared with those who had to travel to work, they were able to spend an extra 24 minutes in bed and did an extra 15 minutes of exercise on average.
Despite most workers’ preference to sometimes work from home if possible, bosses seem intent on making them go into the office more often. The vast majority of chief executives are still expecting a full return to pre-pandemic ways of working by 2027, a recent survey from KPMG found.