RESEARCH

This report to the Fair Work Commission discusses findings from a range of different research projects, conducted between April and November 2020, including our own survey, the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Roy Morgan, and the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA).

The objective of the report was to identify important work from home (WFH) trends emerging in Australia as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, investigate the impacts of this move towards WFH in more detail, and discuss the key challenges, benefits, gender effects, and implications for health and wellbeing, in addition to future predictions for this trend. 

Click here to view report

 The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in many people having to work from home, some for the first time, and often at very short notice. 

Together with Swinburne University of Technology, WorkFLEX conducted a survey in April-May 2020, to learn more about this transition, the strategies and tools that are being employed, and what impact this period might have on the long-term future of work in Australia.  This project has been approved by Swinburne University of Technology’s Human Research Ethics Committee. A preview of a small number of early results from this survey are available in the infographic above. 

In August 2020 we ran a poll on LinkedIn, to try and gain a quick understanding of how workers were currently feeling towards working from home, and how often they think they will continue to work from home in the future.. and the results were fascinating.

We joined a current trend on LinkedIn, for running polls using the LinkedIn reaction emojis, to ask whether workers predicted they would work 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 days from home per week in the future, once all COVID-related restrictions had been lifted. After 322 responses the option of working full-time from home (5 days per week) was the clear winner, attracting 35% of the vote, whilst only 5% predicted they would return to working 5 days per week in the office once all restrictions had been lifted.

This was particularly interesting, as the WorkFLEX team asked exactly the same question as part of a survey earlier in the year, and the results were very different (see below). Back in April, only 5% of participants in our survey predicted they would work from home full time in the future, so what has caused such a change of heart in only a matter of months?