According to a significant new study, 75% of Londoners believe they will never return to the office full time after experiencing working from home (WFH).
According to a survey conducted by the Policy Institute and King’s College London, working life in London is unlikely to revert to pre-Covid patterns anytime soon, with 60% of professionals still working from home at least once a week.
Only 20% of London workers are currently employed full-time, with the remaining 13% working part-time.
And, according to 80 percent of home workers, the so-called hybrid system has improved their life, with the lack of a rush hour trip regarded as the most significant benefit.
After putting the network to a standstill and forcing commuters to board overcrowded buses or hail overpriced Ubers and cabs, the severe Tube strikes this week and in March are sure to have added to this opinion.
It’s also obvious that coronavirus is still on workers’ minds, with just under half (48%) naming it as a primary reason for wanting to avoid going to work.
The cost of commuting and the amount of time it takes to go to work were both major complaints.
Despite Boris Johnson’s pleas last month for people to return to work full time, strong support for WFH has emerged.
While working from home, the prime minister stated that individuals become obsessed with snacking from the fridge, confessing that he often found himself wasting time’making another cup of coffee’ or ‘hacking off a small piece of cheese’ before ‘forgetting what it was you were doing.’
However, an overwhelming majority of the 2,015 workers polled disagreed with him, with only 16% saying that home workers do not work as hard as those who work in offices.
While the majority of respondents said they would prefer to work from home at least one day a week, more than half (57%) said they still enjoyed being at work.
The majority of them (57%) cited being able to “see and meet more people” and socializing with others during breaks as reasons.
They also listed avoiding the blurring of work and home life boundaries, and more than a third said they found it easier to complete work-related tasks.
When it came to salary, some 66 per cent of the respondents disagreed with the view that people who work at home should be paid less.
It comes after companies have threatened to deduct the pay of employees who choose to WFH, including law firm Stephenson Harwood, which said it would bring in a 20 per cent cut for home workers.
But despite the widespread support for WFH, Paul Swinney, director of policy at Centre for Cities, said the work environment might soon resemble pre-pandemic life quicker than people predict.
‘There is a difference between what people’s expectations are and what we might see in reality,’ he told the Telegraph.
‘People are rational to say they don’t think they’ll do it ever again, but it’s hard to make that call.
‘They don’t know what the world might look like in two years’ time.’
It comes after from the Office of National Statistics yesterday found that fewer than one in 10 Britons want to return to working in the workplace full-time.
However, the data also laid bare the wealth and age gap between people in the office full-time and those working from home.
Among workers who earned £40,000 or more, 23 per cent are working from home 38 per cent were in a hybrid pattern, splitting their time between the office and home.
On the other hand, among those on £15,000 or less, just six per cent of workers were WFH, while just 14 per cent of people had a hybrid working arrangement.
In terms of age, the ONS found that workers aged between 30 to 49 were the most likely to have a hybrid pattern at 29 per cent.
Meanwhile, just 23 per cent of workers aged 16 to 29 have a hybrid working arrangement, while that number dropped to 20 per cent for those aged between 50 and 69.
Some 90 per cent of those quizzed by the ONS want to keep working from home at least part-time despite efforts by ministers to get people to return to city centres.
And the proportion of those wanting to spend the majority of their working week at home rather than their traditional workplace has also risen by 12 percentage points in the past year since rules were relaxed.
The proportion rose from 30 per cent to 42 per cent between April 2021 and February, with the proportion wanting to work permanently from home rising from four to six per cent.
At the same time, the proportion planning to commute five days a week fell from 11 per cent to eight per cent. The percentage planning to go to a workplace for the majority of their time also fell, as did those planning an even split.
The figures appear to show that workers are ignoring pleas from ministers to return to offices and other sites.
The ONS noted that the most common reason given for retaining WFH was that it had become part of workers’ ‘normal routine’.