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Nearly 90 per cent of Australian workers would like to work at least part of their week from home the latest Taking the Pulse of the Nation report has revealed.
The report, compiled by the Melbourne Institute and Roy Morgan found that there is still a divide between workers and employers about working from home, with female workers more inclined to want that option since the start of the pandemic.
Of those surveyed, more than half of Australians said they can perform their work tasks at home and while some jobs require workers to be on-site 61 per cent of workers report they have work tasks that can be performed at home. This improves the likelihood that workers and employers could negotiate on where a worker performs their job.
Almost all workers (88 per cent) would like to work at least part of the workweek at home, and 60 per cent would like some hybrid version where they work at home and in the office. However, only 49 per cent of workers report their employers would agree to hybrid work.
The report also found that workers and employers agree on the number of hours spent working from home only 37 per cent of the time while over one-third of workers would like to spend more time working from home than their employer would permit. Conversely, the disagreement goes the opposite way as well. About one-third of workers want to spend more hours in the office, even when their employer would let them work those hours from home. This pattern has been relatively stable from April 2021 to May 2022 and reflected a mismatch between what employers and workers envision for the workplace.
Women are 25 per cent more likely than men (8 percentage point difference) to want to spend more time working from home than their employer would allow. This is not because women are more likely to be caregivers. A 7 percentage point gender gap remains even after accounting for having children in the household.
The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that being in the office is not necessarily an essential requirement for workers to perform their jobs successfully.
However, the report found that many employers would still prefer their workers to be in the office more often than workers would like. This disagreement in working arrangements has been relatively stable over the past year. How this settles in the labour market remains to be seen. Workers who would like more flexibility have the option of seeking alternative employment, and given current labour shortages, employers may need to give workers what they want.