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Peer-reviewed

Research Article

Researchers working from home: Benefits and challenges

Roles Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Validation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Institute of Psychology, ELTE Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary

Roles Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Resources, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliations Institute of Psychology, ELTE Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary, Doctoral School of Psychology, ELTE Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary

Roles Conceptualization, Methodology, Supervision, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Department of Sociology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Roles Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Supervision, Validation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Balazs Aczel,
Marton Kovacs,
Tanja van der Lippe,
Barnabas Szaszi

Published: March 25, 2021
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249127
Peer Review
Reader Comments

The flexibility allowed by the mobilization of technology disintegrated the traditional work-life boundary for most professionals. Whether working from home is the key or impediment to academics’ efficiency and work-life balance became a daunting question for both scientists and their employers. The recent pandemic brought into focus the merits and challenges of working from home on a level of personal experience. Using a convenient sampling, we surveyed 704 academics while working from home and found that the pandemic lockdown decreased the work efficiency for almost half of the researchers but around a quarter of them were more efficient during this time compared to the time before. Based on the gathered personal experience, 70% of the researchers think that in the future they would be similarly or more efficient than before if they could spend more of their work-time at home. They indicated that in the office they are better at sharing thoughts with colleagues, keeping in touch with their team, and collecting data, whereas at home they are better at working on their manuscript, reading the literature, and analyzing their data. Taking well-being also into account, 66% of them would find it ideal to work more from home in the future than they did before the lockdown. These results draw attention to how working from home is becoming a major element of researchers’ life and that we have to learn more about its influencer factors and coping tactics in order to optimize its arrangements.

Citation: Aczel B, Kovacs M, van der Lippe T, Szaszi B (2021) Researchers working from home: Benefits and challenges. PLoS ONE 16(3): e0249127. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249127

Editor: Johnson Chun-Sing Cheung, The University of Hong Kong, HONG KONG

Received: September 24, 2020; Accepted: March 11, 2021; Published: March 25, 2021

Copyright: © 2021 Aczel et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: All research materials, the collected raw and processed anonymous data, just as well the code for data management and statistical analyses are publicly shared on the OSF page of the project: OSF: https://osf.io/v97fy/ .

Funding: TVL's contribution is part of the research program Sustainable Cooperation – Roadmaps to Resilient Societies (SCOOP). She is grateful to the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW) for their support in the context of its 2017 Gravitation Program (grant number 024.003.025).

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

Fleeing from the Great Plague that reached Cambridge in 1665, Newton retreated to his countryside home where he continued working for the next year and a half. During this time, he developed his theories on calculus, optics, and the law of gravitation—fundamentally changing the path of science for centuries. Newton himself described this period as the most productive time of his life [ 1 ]. Is working from home indeed the key to efficiency for scientists also in modern times? A solution for working without disturbance by colleagues and being able to manage a work-life balance? What personal and professional factors influence the relation between productivity and working from home? These are the main questions that the present paper aims to tackle. The Covid-19 pandemic provides a unique opportunity to analyze the implications of working from home in great detail.

Working away from the traditional office is increasingly an option in today’s world. The phenomenon has been studied under numerous, partially overlapping terms, such as telecommuting, telework, virtual office, remote work, location independent working, home office. In this paper, we will use ‘working from home’ (WFH), a term that typically covers working from any location other than the dedicated area provided by the employer.

The practice of WFH and its effect on job efficiency and well-being are reasonably well explored outside of academia [ 2 , 3 ]. Internet access and the increase of personal IT infrastructure made WFH a growing trend throughout the last decades [ 4 ]. In 2015, over 12% of EU workers [ 5 ] and near one-quarter of US employees [ 6 ] worked at least partly from home. A recent survey conducted among 27,500 millennials and Gen Z-s indicated that their majority would like to work remotely more frequently [ 7 ]. The literature suggests that people working from home need flexibility for different reasons. Home-working is a typical solution for those who need to look after dependent children [ 8 ] but many employees just seek a better work-life balance [ 7 ] and the comfort of an alternative work environment [ 9 ].

Non-academic areas report work-efficiency benefits for WFH but they also show some downsides of this arrangement. A good example is the broad-scale experiment in which call center employees were randomly assigned to work from home or in the office for nine months [ 10 ]. A 13% work performance increase was found in the working from home group. These workers also reported improved work satisfaction. Still, after the experiment, 50% of them preferred to go back to the office mainly because of feeling isolated at home.

Home-working has several straightforward positive aspects, such as not having to commute, easier management of household responsibilities [ 11 ] and family demands [ 12 ], along with increased autonomy over time use [ 13 , 14 ], and fewer interruptions [ 15 , 16 ]. Personal comfort is often listed as an advantage of the home environment [e.g., 15 ], though setting up a home office comes with physical and infrastructural demands [ 17 ]. People working from home consistently report greater job motivation and satisfaction [ 4 , 11 , 18 , 19 ] which is probably due to the greater work-related control and work-life flexibility [ 20 ]. A longitudinal nationally representative sample of 30,000 households in the UK revealed that homeworking is positively related with leisure time satisfaction [ 21 ], suggesting that people working from home can allocate more time for leisure activities.

Often-mentioned negative aspects of WFH include being disconnected from co-workers, experiencing isolation due to the physical and social distance to team members [ 22 , 23 ]. Also, home-working employees reported more difficulties with switching off and they worked beyond their formal working hours [ 4 ]. Working from home is especially difficult for those with small children [ 24 ], but intrusion from other family members, neighbours, and friends were also found to be major challenges of WFH [e.g., 17 ]. Moreover, being away from the office may also create a lack of visibility and increases teleworkers’ fear that being out of sight limits opportunities for promotion, rewards, and positive performance reviews [ 25 ].

Importantly, increased freedom imposes higher demands on workers to control not just the environment, but themselves too. WFH comes with the need to develop work-life boundary control tactics [ 26 ] and to be skilled at self-discipline, self-motivation, and good time management [ 27 ]. Increased flexibility can easily lead to multitasking and work-family role blurring [ 28 ]. Table 1 provides non-comprehensive lists of mostly positive and mostly negative consequences of WFH, based on the literature reviewed here.

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249127.t001

Compared to the private sector, our knowledge is scarce about how academics experience working from home. Researchers in higher education institutes work in very similar arrangements. Typically, they are expected to personally attend their workplace, if not for teaching or supervision, then for meetings or to confer with colleagues. In the remaining worktime, they work in their lab or, if allowed, they may choose to do some of their tasks remotely. Along with the benefits on productivity when working from home, academics have already experienced some of its drawbacks at the start of the popularity of personal computers. As Snizek observed in the ‘80s, “(f)aculty who work long hours at home using their microcomputers indicate feelings of isolation and often lament the loss of collegial feedback and reinforcement” [page 622, 29 ].

Until now, the academics whose WFH experience had been given attention were mostly those participating in online distance education [e.g., 30 , 31 ]. They experienced increased autonomy, flexibility in workday schedule, the elimination of unwanted distractions [ 32 ], along with high levels of work productivity and satisfaction [ 33 ], but they also observed inadequate communication and the lack of opportunities for skill development [ 34 ]. The Covid-19 pandemic provided an opportunity to study the WFH experience of a greater spectrum of academics, since at one point most of them had to do all their work from home.

We have only fragmented knowledge about the moderators of WFH success. We know that control over time is limited by the domestic tasks one has while working from home. The view that women’s work is more influenced by family obligations than men’s is consistently shown in the literature [e.g., 35 – 37 ]. Sullivan and Lewis [ 38 ] argued that women who work from home are able to fulfil their domestic role better and manage their family duties more to their satisfaction, but that comes at the expense of higher perceived work–family conflict [see also 39 ]. Not surprisingly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, female scientists suffered a greater disruption than men in their academic productivity and time spent on research, most likely due to demands of childcare [ 40 , 41 ].

In summary, until recently, the effect of WFH on academics’ life and productivity received limited attention. However, during the recent pandemic lockdown, scientists, on an unprecedented scale, had to find solutions to continue their research from home. The situation unavoidably brought into focus the merits and challenges of WFH on a level of personal experience. Institutions were compelled to support WFH arrangements by adequate regulations, services, and infrastructure. Some researchers and institutions might have found benefits in the new arrangements and may wish to continue WFH in some form; for others WFH brought disproportionately larger challenges. The present study aims to facilitate the systematic exploration and support of researchers’ efficiency and work-life balance when working from home.

Materials and methods

Our study procedure and analysis plan were preregistered at https://osf.io/jg5bz (all deviations from the plan are listed in S1 File ). The survey included questions on research work efficiency, work-life balance, demographics, professional and personal background information. The study protocol has been approved by the Institutional Review Board from Eotvos Lorand University, Hungary (approval number: 2020/131). The Transparency Report of the study, the complete text of the questionnaire items and the instructions are shared at our OSF repository: https://osf.io/v97fy/ .

As the objective of this study was to gain insight about researchers’ experience of WFH, we aimed to increase the size and diversity of our sample rather than ascertaining the representativeness of our sample. Therefore, we distributed our online survey link among researchers in professional newsletters, university mailing lists, on social media, and by sending group-emails to authors (additional details about sampling are in S1 File ). As a result of the nature of our sampling strategy, it is not known how many researchers have seen our participation request. Additionally, we did not collect the country of residence of the respondents. Responses analyzed in this study were collected between 2020-04-24 and 2020-07-13. Overall, 858 individuals started the survey and 154 were excluded because they did not continue the survey beyond the first question. As a result, 704 respondents were included in the analysis.

We sent the questionnaire individually to each of the respondents through the Qualtrics Mailer service. Written informed consent and access to the preregistration of the research was provided to every respondent before starting the survey. Then, respondents who agreed to participate in the study could fill out the questionnaire. To encourage participation, we offered that upon completion they can enter a lottery to win a 100 USD voucher.

This is a general description of the survey items. The full survey with the display logic and exact phrasing of the items is transported from Qualtrics and uploaded to the projects’ OSF page: https://osf.io/8ze2g/ .

Efficiency of research work.

The respondents were asked to compare the efficiency of their research work during the lockdown to their work before the lockdown. They were also asked to use their present and previous experience to indicate whether working more from home in the future would change the efficiency of their research work compared to the time before the lockdown. For both questions, they could choose among three options: “less efficient”; “more efficient”, and “similarly efficient”.

Comparing working from home to working in the office.

Participants were asked to compare working from home to working from the office. For this question they could indicate their preference on a 7-point dimension (1: At home; 7: In the office), along 15 efficiency or well-being related aspects of research work (e.g., working on the manuscript, maintaining work-life balance). These aspects were collected in a pilot study conducted with 55 researchers who were asked to indicate in free text responses the areas in which their work benefits/suffers when working from home. More details of the pilot study are provided in S1 File .

Actual and ideal time spent working from home.

To study the actual and ideal time spent working from home, researcher were asked to indicate on a 0–100% scale (1) what percentage of their work time they spent working from home before the pandemic and (2) how much would be ideal for them working from home in the future concerning both research efficiency and work-life balance.

Feasibility of working more from home.

With simple Yes/No options, we asked the respondents to indicate whether they think that working more from home would be feasible considering all their other duties (education, administration, etc.) and the given circumstances at home (infrastructure, level of disturbance).

Background information.

Background questions were asked by providing preset lists concerning their academic position (e.g., full professor), area of research (e.g., social sciences), type of workplace (e.g., purely research institute), gender, age group, living situation (e.g., single-parent with non-adult child(ren)), and the age and the number of their children.

The respondents were also asked to select one of the offered options to indicate: whether or not they worked more from home during the coronavirus lockdown than before; whether it is possible for them to collect data remotely; whether they have education duties at work; if their research requires intensive team-work; whether their home office is fully equipped; whether their partner was also working from home during the pandemic; how far their office is from home; whether they had to do home-schooling during the pandemic; whether there was someone else looking after their child(ren) during their work from home in lockdown. When the question did not apply to them, they could select the ‘NA’ option as well.

Data preprocessing and analyses

All the data preprocessing and analyses were conducted in R [ 42 ], with the use of the tidyverse packages [ 43 ]. Before the analysis of the survey responses, we read all the free-text comments to ascertain that they do not contain personal information and they are in line with the respondent’s answers. We found that for 5 items the respondents’ comments contradicted their survey choices (e.g., whether they have children), therefore, we excluded the responses of the corresponding items from further analyses (see S1 File ). Following the preregistration, we only conducted descriptive statistics of the survey results.

Background information

The summary of the key demographic information of the 704 complete responses is presented in Table 2 . A full summary of all the collected background information of the respondents are available in S1 File .

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249127.t002

Efficiency of research work

The results showed that 94% (n = 662) of the surveyed researchers worked more from home during the COVID-19 lockdown compared to the time before. Of these researchers, 47% found that due to working more from home their research became, in general, less efficient, 23% found it more efficient, and 30% found no difference compared to working before the lockdown. Within this database, we also explored the effect of the lockdown on the efficiency of people living with children (n = 290). Here, we found that 58% of them experienced that due to working more from home their research became, in general, less efficient, 20% found it more efficient, and 22% found no difference compared to working before the lockdown. Of those researchers who live with children, we found that 71% of the 21 single parents and 57% of the 269 partnered parents found working less efficient when working from home compared to the time before the lockdown.

When asking about how working more from home would affect the efficiency of their research after the lockdown, of those who have not already been working from home full time (n = 684), 29% assumed that it could make their research, in general, less efficient, 29% said that it would be more efficient, and 41% assumed no difference compared to the time before the lockdown ( Fig 1 ).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249127.g001

Focusing on the efficiency of the subgroup of people who live with children (n = 295), we found that for 32% their research work would be less efficient, for 30% it would be no different, and for 38% it would be more efficient to work from home after the lockdown, compared to the time before the lockdown.

Comparing working from home to working in the office

When comparing working from home to working in the office in general, people found that they can better achieve certain aspects of the research in one place than the other. They indicated that in the office they are better at sharing thoughts with colleagues, keeping in touch with their team, and collecting data, whereas at home they are better at working on their manuscript, reading the literature, and analyzing their data ( Fig 2 ).

The bars represent response averages of the given aspects.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249127.g002

Actual and ideal time spent working from home

We also asked the researchers how much of their work time they spent working from home in the past, and how much it would be ideal for them to work from home in the future concerning both research efficiency and well-being. Fig 3 shows the distribution of percentages of time working from home in the past and in an ideal future. Comparing these values for each researcher, we found that 66% of them want to work more from home in the future than they did before the lockdown, whereas 16% of them want to work less from home, and 18% of them want to spend the same percentage of their work time at home in the future as before. (These latter calculations were not preregistered).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249127.g003

Feasibility of working more from home

Taken all their other duties (education, administration, etc.) and provided circumstances at home (infrastructure, level of disturbance), of researchers who would like to work more from home in the future (n = 461), 86% think that it would be possible to do so. Even among those who have teaching duties at work (n = 376), 84% think that more working from home would be ideal and possible.

Researchers’ work and life have radically changed in recent times. The flexibility allowed by the mobilization of technology and the continuous access to the internet disintegrated the traditional work-life boundary. Where, when, and how we work depends more and more on our own arrangements. The recent pandemic only highlighted an already existing task: researchers’ worklife has to be redefined. The key challenge in a new work-life model is to find strategies to balance the demands of work and personal life. As a first step, the present paper explored how working from home affects researchers’ efficiency and well-being.

Our results showed that while the pandemic-related lockdown decreased the work efficiency for almost half of the researchers (47%), around a quarter (23%) of them experienced that they were more efficient during this time compared to the time before. Based on personal experience, 70% of the researchers think that after the lockdown they would be similarly (41%) or more efficient (29%) than before if they could spend more of their work-time at home. The remaining 30% thought that after the lockdown their work efficiency would decrease if they worked from home, which is noticeably lower than the 47% who claimed the same for the lockdown period. From these values we speculate that some of the obstacles of their work efficiency were specific to the pandemic lockdown. Such obstacles could have been the need to learn new methods to teach online [ 44 ] or the trouble adapting to the new lifestyle [ 45 ]. Furthermore, we found that working from the office and working from home support different aspects of research. Not surprisingly, activities that involve colleagues or team members are better bound to the office, but tasks that need focused attention, such as working on the manuscript or analyzing the data are better achieved from home.

A central motivation of our study was to explore what proportion of their worktime researchers would find ideal to work from home, concerning both research efficiency and work-life balance. Two thirds of the researchers indicated that it would be better to work more from home in the future. It seemed that sharing work somewhat equally between the two venues is the most preferred arrangement. A great majority (86%) of those who would like to work more from home in the future, think that it would be possible to do so. As a conclusion, both the work and non-work life of researchers would take benefits should more WFH be allowed and neither workplace duties, nor their domestic circumstances are limits of such a change. That researchers have a preference to work more from home, might be due to the fact that they are more and more pressured by their work. Finishing manuscripts, and reading literature is easier to find time for when working from home.

A main message of the results of our present survey is that although almost half of the respondents reported reduced work efficiency during the lockdown, the majority of them would prefer the current remote work setting to some extent in the future. It is important to stress, however, that working from home is not equally advantageous for researchers. Several external and personal factors must play a role in researchers’ work efficiency and work-life balance. In this analysis, we concentrated only on family status, but further dedicated studies will be required to gain a deeper understanding of the complex interaction of professional, institutional, personal, and domestic factors in this matter. While our study could only initiate the exploration of academics’ WFH benefits and challenges, we can already discuss a few relevant aspects regarding the work-life interface.

Our data show that researchers who live with dependent children can exploit the advantages of working from home less than those who do not have childcare duties, irrespective of the pandemic lockdown. Looking after children is clearly a main source of people’s task overload and, as a result, work-family conflict [ 46 , 47 ]. As an implication, employers should pay special respect to employees’ childcare situations when defining work arrangements. It should be clear, however, that other caring responsibilities should also be respected such as looking after elderly or disabled relatives [ 48 ]. Furthermore, to avoid equating non-work life with family-life, a broader diversity of life circumstances, such as those who live alone, should be taken into consideration [ 49 ].

It seems likely that after the pandemic significantly more work will be supplied from home [ 50 ]. The more of the researchers’ work will be done from home in the future, the greater the challenge will grow to integrate their work and non-work life. The extensive research on work-life conflict, should help us examine the issue and to develop coping strategies applicable for academics’ life. The Boundary Theory [ 26 , 51 , 52 ] proved to be a useful framework to understand the work-home interface. According to this theory, individuals utilize different tactics to create and maintain an ideal level of work-home segmentation. These boundaries often serve as “mental fences” to simplify the environment into domains, such as work or home, to help us attend our roles, such as being an employee or a parent. These boundaries are more or less permeable, depending on how much the individual attending one role can be influenced by another role. Individuals differ in the degree to which they prefer and are able to segment their roles, but each boundary crossing requires a cognitive “leap” between these categories [ 53 ]. The source of conflict is the demands of the different roles and responsibilities competing for one’s physical and mental resources. Working from home can easily blur the boundary between work and non-work domains. The conflict caused by the intrusion of the home world to one’s work time, just as well the intrusion of work tasks to one’s personal life are definite sources of weakened ability to concentrate on one’s tasks [ 54 ], exhaustion [ 55 ], and negative job satisfaction [ 56 ].

What can researchers do to mitigate this challenge? Various tactics have been identified for controlling one’s borders between work and non-work. One can separate the two domains by temporal, physical, behavioral, and communicative segmentation [ 26 ]. Professionals often have preferences and self-developed tactics for boundary management. People who prefer tighter boundary management apply strong segmentation between work and home [ 57 , 58 ]. For instance, they don’t do domestic tasks in worktime (temporal segmentation), close their door when working from home (physical segmentation), don’t read work emails at weekends (behavioral segmentation), or negotiate strict boundary rules with family members (communicative segmentation). People on the other on one side of the segmentation-integration continuum, might not mind, or cannot avoid, ad-hoc boundary-crossings and integrate the two domains by letting private space and time be mixed with their work.

Researchers, just like other workers, need to develop new arrangements and skills to cope with the disintegration of the traditional work-life boundaries. To know how research and education institutes could best support this change would require a comprehensive exploration of the factors in researchers’ WFH life. There is probably no one-size-fits-all approach to promote employees’ efficiency and well-being. Life circumstances often limit how much control people can have over their work-life boundaries when working from home [ 59 ]. Our results strongly indicate that some can boost work efficiency and wellbeing when working from home, others need external solutions, such as the office, to provide boundaries between their life domains. Until we gain comprehensive insight about the topic, individuals are probably the best judges of their own situation and of what arrangements may be beneficial for them in different times [ 60 ]. The more autonomy the employers provide to researchers in distributing their work between the office and home (while not lowering their expectations), the more they let them optimize this arrangement to their circumstances.

Our study has several limitations: to investigate how factors such as research domain, seniority, or geographic location contribute to WFH efficiency and well-being would have needed a much greater sample. Moreover, the country of residence of the respondents was not collected in our survey and this factor could potentially alter the perception of WFH due to differing social and infrastructural factors. Whereas the world-wide lockdown has provided a general experience to WFH to academics, the special circumstances just as well biased their judgment of the arrangement. With this exploratory research, we could only scratch the surface of the topic, the reader can probably generate a number of testable hypotheses that would be relevant to the topic but we could not analyze in this exploration.

Newton working in lockdown became the idealized image of the home-working scientist. Unquestionably, he was a genius, but his success probably needed a fortunate work-life boundary. Should he had noisy neighbours, or taunting domestic duties, he might have achieved much less while working from home. With this paper, we aim to draw attention to how WFH is becoming a major element of researchers’ life and that we have to be prepared for this change. We hope that personal experience or the topic’s relevance to the future of science will invite researchers to continue this work.

Supporting information

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249127.s001

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Szonja Horvath, Matyas Sarudi, and Zsuzsa Szekely for their help with reviewing the free text responses.

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The Work at Home Wife

Helping you work at home and make money online

11 Awesome Online Research Jobs: Get Paid For Being A Know-It-All

By Angie Nelson

Last Updated March 13, 2019 . Disclosure: We may receive compensation if you sign up for or purchase products linked below. Details on offers may change, and you should confirm them with the company prior to taking action.

Online Research Jobs

One form of being a know-it-all is a Serial Researcher. If you’ve always enjoyed learning everything you could – whether by reading an entire encyclopedia or reading a bunch of nonfiction articles on any subject that interests you – you can make your endless curiosity work for you by turning it into a job! Countless industries and jobs depend on research, much of which can be done online: put your skills to work as an industry researcher, expert, or consultant.

Some online research jobs from home are entry-level and require no previous experience in research; however, some better-paying opportunities that are industry-specific may need either formal education or at least formal experience to land. For example, a court researcher should have some background in legal work – or an expert in nutrition might need to demonstrate an education in nutrition or a related subject.

10EQS hires Subject Matter Experts in specific industries, technologies, or functions – to qualify for this position, you should have extensive practical experience with your particular subject. You’ll join their database of prospective experts and have the opportunity to get assigned to live research projects with their clients. You may also have the option to complete these projects over the phone or in person.

IT-Boss Research works with independent contractors (such as yourself!) to complete court research for their clients. This does involve going to local courthouses to find the data required by IT-Boss Research’s clients, but you still have the flexibility to do so on your schedule (within limits imposed by the courthouse’s open hours). They say the average researcher can earn between $10 and $15 hourly, while more experienced court research can pull $25.

Answering Questions

Of course, maybe it’s not the thrill of internet research that drives you – maybe you just love having the answer to every question! If that’s the case, that know-it-all drive can create an income for you as well. There are several companies online today that sell just such a question-answering service to their clients – whether their questions are complex (companies needing to know if an idea has been done before) or simpler (a student needing help with their homework assignments).

In these cases, it does pay to have a particular area of expertise – but you can still find work even if most of your know-it-all vibe is based on being a skilled practitioner of Google-fu.

Wonder is one of the most popular companies to answer questions for – you’ll see them mentioned quite often. They invite their clients to submit questions, and then their researchers spend a little time finding at least five quality sources that answer that question. Then synthesizing that information into an answer for their clients. You must pass a quiz and complete a sample assignment to work with them.

Rachael Granby, the Director of Research, was kind enough to stop by and answer a few questions about the work-at-home job. Wonder is a marketplace where each research question is priced differently, depending on a variety of factors including how quickly the client needs the research back and how challenging the research question is. Each researcher sets his or her own schedule, chooses which requests to work on and chooses which price points to accept. That’s a long way of saying that each researcher’s earning potential varies based on how much time s/he wants to spend researching each week and which types of requests s/he accepts. Top researchers can earn as much as $35+ per hour, and make up to $2K per month. In addition to the payment, researchers also get the opportunity to work on interesting new projects every day, to learn about new fields, to network with peers all across the world, and to build up a portfolio of research. The two most important criteria are: excellent writing skills and a love of learning. Creative problem solving helps too, as sometimes clients ask for information that isn’t immediately available and then we need to come up with a creative way to guesstimate the answer. For example, a client might ask “How many songs are currently listed on the SoundCloud website?” SoundCloud hasn’t released this data, but there was an article from 6 months ago which had the number of SoundCloud songs at the time, and a separate article which highlighted the rate at which new songs were being added, so it was possible to guesstimate how many songs there are today by using the number of songs six months ago and the projected growth rate over the last six months. Researchers set their own schedules – they can work as often as they want, and as much as they want. A researcher will typically log onto our dashboard to see which requests are available, and then choose a specific request to start working on. Researchers also use Slack, a chat service, to talk to each other about what they’re working on, to ask questions and to share tips. We recommend that researchers answer a minimum of 1 request per week, to keep their skills sharp, and experienced researchers typically answer 5+ requests each week. However, there is no minimum requirement. Researchers are paid via PayPal, every two weeks. In addition to doing research, there are also earning opportunities for researchers who want to review the work completed by others. This involves reading through someone else’s completed research to make sure it fully answered the client’s question, that it’s clear and well-presented, and that it follows Wonder’s formatting guidelines. We pay reviewers $1 for each review they complete. What tips do you have for those wanting to become a Wonder Researcher? a) Read the instructions on the application! I know that seems like a silly one, but it’s amazing how many potentially strong candidates submit applications that make it clear they didn’t read the instructions. For example, we ask applicants to complete one piece of mock research and we include instructions for how to use the right formatting. If you’re interested in joining the Wonder Research Network, use the right formatting! b) There’s definitely a learning curve, so we provide a resource center for all researchers with information about how to tackle different kinds of requests, and we have a community support system where researchers regularly ask each other for advice on specific requests. But the biggest asset a researcher can bring in here is a good attitude – if your English writing is strong, and you’re willing to learn, and you’d like to be part of a collaborative environment with interesting fellow researchers from all over the world, then this is the right role for you.

StudyPool works with independent tutors to help students with their homework assignments – while working with them, you can browse questions in over 30 subjects and offer to help. The company acts somewhat as a facilitator since you get to set your own rates. You also set your schedule; payment is made when you’ve finished helping a given student.

Experts 123 provides a place for you to answer questions by writing articles that show off your expertise, although the pay is not always guaranteed. When writing their base level articles, what you make depends on how much traffic your article receives. You can graduate to higher levels of engagement that offer some guaranteed pay if your articles are amazing.

The answering-questions gig can also be good as a side hustle, with plenty of apps and sites offering cash or prizes in exchange for your answers regarding various companies and services (or even providing some mild technical assistance). Check out companies like Help Owl , FixYa , Weegy , etc .

Ask an Expert

If you’re an all-around expert on a given subject, you can earn an income by offering your services on an Ask an Expert platform. Requirements for these types of sites vary, but some may ask you to prove your expertise via a degree or proof of training. The amount of income you can expect to make in this role varies as well – from how in-demand your subject is to how many people you help. On the plus side, you can entirely set your schedule, and you can even arrange to take calls on the go.

Just Answer – Sign up to offer expert answers via JustAnswer, prove your credentials, and set your hours to get started! Any time a client has a question for your specialty – and you’ve marked yourself as available – you can speak with the client to provide answers. You’ll split the fee with Just Answer.

Maven refers to their experts as microconsulants and offers quick sign-up: just set your hourly rate and answer a few questions. Their system matches you up with their clients’ needs – you may answer questions via writing, talk on the phone, or participate in a project. You can also earn a commission from referrals.

Presto Experts connects you with their clients via chat, phone, or email (you can decide which) to answer questions in your areas of expertise – or perhaps even to provide tutoring. After registering, you’ll create your profile listing your credentials (education, qualifications, etc .) – potential clients can find you when you’re online when they search various categories. Set your own fees!

Clarity allows you to put your expertise to work answering questions for clients through one-on-one phone calls. They mainly deal with freelancers, executives, and entrepreneurs. They pay every two weeks, and you’re able to set your fees and availability through their platform. They take a cut of 15% for facilitating.

I hope I’ve shared a few things with you today you didn’t already know! Now get out there and find your perfect research job from home and answer questions to your heart’s content. I’d also love to hear about your experience with any of these companies – so drop me a note when and if you’ve worked with them!

Related at-home job ideas for a smartypants worker:

Online Librarian Jobs: Opportunities You Won’t Want to Miss
Everything You Need to Know About At-Home Paralegal Jobs

About Angie Nelson

Angie Nelson began working from home in 2007 when she figured out how to take her future into her own hands and escape the corporate cubicle farm. Angie’s goal is sharing her passion for home business, personal finance, telecommuting, and entrepreneurship, and her work has been featured on Recruiter, FlexJobs and Business News Daily..

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Americans are embracing flexible work—and they want more of it

When the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered workplaces nationwide, society was plunged into an unplanned experiment in work from home. Nearly two-and-a-half years on, organizations worldwide have created new working norms that acknowledge that flexible work is no longer a temporary pandemic response but an enduring feature of the modern working world.

About the survey

This article is based on a 25-minute, online-only Ipsos poll conducted on behalf of McKinsey between March 15 and April 18, 2022. A sample of 25,062 adults aged 18 and older from the continental United States, Alaska, and Hawaii was interviewed online in English and Spanish. To better reflect the population of the United States as a whole, post hoc weights were made to the population characteristics on gender, age, race/ethnicity, education, region, and metropolitan status. Given the limitations of online surveys, 1 “Internet surveys,” Pew Research Center. it is possible that biases were introduced because of undercoverage or nonresponse. People with lower incomes, less education, people living in rural areas, or people aged 65 and older are underrepresented among internet users and those with high-speed internet access.

The third edition of McKinsey’s American Opportunity Survey provides us with data on how flexible work fits into the lives of a representative cross section of workers in the United States. McKinsey worked alongside the market-research firm Ipsos to query 25,000 Americans in spring 2022 (see sidebar, “About the survey”).

The most striking figure to emerge from this research is 58 percent. That’s the number of Americans who reported having the opportunity to work from home at least one day a week. 1 Many of the survey questions asked respondents about their ability or desire to “work from home.” “Work from home” is sometimes called “remote work,” while arrangements that allow for both remote and in-office work are often interchangeably labeled “hybrid” or “flexible” arrangements. We prefer the term flexible, which acknowledges that home is only one of the places where work can be accomplished and because it encompasses a variety of arrangements, whereas hybrid implies an even split between office and remote work. Thirty-five percent of respondents report having the option to work from home five days a week. What makes these numbers particularly notable is that respondents work in all kinds of jobs, in every part of the country and sector of the economy, including traditionally labeled “blue collar” jobs that might be expected to demand on-site labor as well as “white collar” professions.

About the authors

This article is a collaborative effort by André Dua , Kweilin Ellingrud , Phil Kirschner , Adrian Kwok, Ryan Luby, Rob Palter , and Sarah Pemberton as part of ongoing McKinsey research to understand the perceptions of and barriers to economic opportunity in America. The following represents the perspectives of McKinsey’s Real Estate and People & Organizational Performance Practices.

Another of the survey’s revelations: when people have the chance to work flexibly, 87 percent of them take it. This dynamic is widespread across demographics, occupations, and geographies. The flexible working world was born of a frenzied reaction to a sudden crisis but has remained as a desirable job feature for millions. This represents a tectonic shift in where, when, and how Americans want to work and are working.

The following six charts examine the following:

the number of people offered flexible working arrangements either part- or full-time
how many days a week employed people are offered and do work from home
the gender, age, ethnicity, education level, and income of people working or desiring to work flexibly
which occupations have the greatest number of remote workers and how many days a week they work remotely
how highly employees rank flexible working arrangements as a reason to seek a new job
impediments to working effectively for people who work remotely all the time, part of the time, or not at all

Flexible work’s implications for employees and employers—as well as for real estate, transit, and technology, to name a few sectors—are vast and nuanced and demand contemplation.

1. Thirty-five percent of job holders can work from home full-time, and 23 percent can do so part-time

A remarkable 58 percent of employed respondents—which, extrapolated from the representative sample, is equivalent to 92 million people from a cross section of jobs and employment types—report having the option to work from home for all or part of the week. After more than two years of observing remote work and predicting that flexible working would endure after the acute phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, we view these data as a confirmation that there has been a major shift in the working world and in society itself.

We did not ask about flexible work in our American Opportunity Survey in past years, but an array of other studies indicate that flexible working has grown by anywhere from a third to tenfold since 2019. 1 Rachel Minkin et al., “How the coronavirus outbreak has—and hasn’t—changed the way Americans work,” Pew Research Center, December 9, 2020; “Telework during the COVID-19 pandemic: Estimates using the 2021 Business Response Survey,” US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Monthly Labor Review, March 2022.

Thirty-five percent of respondents say they can work from home full-time. Another 23 percent can work from home from one to four days a week. A mere 13 percent of employed respondents say they could work remotely at least some of the time but opt not to.

Forty-one percent of employed respondents don’t have the choice. This may be because not all work can be done remotely or because employers simply demand on-site work. Given workers’ desire for flexibility, employers may have to explore ways to offer the flexibility employees want to compete for talent effectively.

2. When offered, almost everyone takes the opportunity to work flexibly

The results of the survey showed that not only is flexible work popular, with 80 million Americans engaging in it (when the survey results are extrapolated to the wider population), but many want to work remotely for much of the week when given the choice.

Eighty-seven percent of workers offered at least some remote work embrace the opportunity and spend an average of three days a week working from home. People offered full-time flexible work spent a bit more time working remotely, on average, at 3.3 days a week. Interestingly, 12 percent of respondents whose employers only offer part-time or occasional remote work say that even they worked from home for five days a week. This contradiction appears indicative of a tension between how much flexibility employers offer and what employees demand .

3. Most employees want flexibility, but the averages hide the critical differences

There’s remarkable consistency among people of different genders, ethnicities, ages, and educational and income levels: the vast majority of those who can work from home do so. In fact, they just want more flexibility: although 58 percent of employed respondents say they can work from home at least part of the time, 65 percent of employed respondents say they would be willing to do so all the time.

However, the opportunity is not uniform: there was a large difference in the number of employed men who say they were offered remote-working opportunities (61 percent) and women (52 percent). At every income level, younger workers were more likely than older workers to report having work-from-home opportunities.

People who could but don’t work flexibly tend to be older (19 percent of 55- to 64-year-olds offered remote work didn’t take it, compared with 12 to 13 percent of younger workers) or have lower incomes (17 percent of those earning $25,000 to $74,999 per year who were offered remote work didn’t take it, compared with 10 percent of those earning over $75,000 a year). While some workers may choose to work on-site because they prefer the environment, others may feel compelled to because their home environments are not suitable, because they lack the skills and tools to work remotely productively, or because they believe there is an advantage to being on-site. Employers should be aware that different groups perceive and experience remote work differently and consider how flexible working fits with their diversity, equity, and inclusion strategies .

4. Most industries support some flexibility, but digital innovators demand it

The opportunity to work flexibly differs by industry and role within industries and has implications for companies competing for talent. For example, the vast majority of employed people in computer and mathematical occupations report having remote-work options, and 77 percent report being willing to work fully remotely. Because of rapid digital transformations across industries , even those with lower overall work-from-home patterns may find that the technologists they employ demand it.

A surprisingly broad array of professions offer remote-work arrangements. Half of respondents working in educational instruction and library occupations and 45 percent of healthcare practitioners and workers in technical occupations say they do some remote work, perhaps reflecting the rise of online education and telemedicine. Even food preparation and transportation professionals said they do some work from home.

5. Job seekers highly value having autonomy over where and when they work

The survey asked people if they had hunted for a job recently or were planning to hunt for one. Unsurprisingly, the most common rationale for a job hunt was a desire for greater pay or more hours, followed by a search for better career opportunities. The third-most-popular reason was looking for a flexible working arrangement.

Prior McKinsey research has shown that for those that left the workforce during the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, workplace flexibility was a top reason that they accepted new jobs . Employers should be aware that when a candidate is deciding between job offers with similar compensation, the opportunity to work flexibly can become the deciding factor.

6. Employees working flexibly report obstacles to peak performance

The survey asked respondents to identify what made it hard to perform their jobs effectively. Those working in a flexible model were most likely to report multiple obstacles, followed by those working fully remotely, and then by those working in the office. Our research doesn’t illuminate the cause and effect here: it could be that people who face barriers are more likely to spend some time working from home. It could also be that workers who experience both on-site and at-home work are exposed to the challenges of each and the costs of regularly switching contexts.

Some obstacles were reported at much higher rates by specific groups: for example, about 55 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds offered the option to work fully remotely say mental-health issues impacted their ability to perform effectively, though only 17 percent of people aged 55 to 64 said the same. Workers with children at home who were offered full-time remote-work options were far more likely than their peers without children to report that problems with physical health or a hostile work environment had a moderate or major impact on their job.

The results of the American Opportunity Survey reflect sweeping changes in the US workforce, including the equivalent of 92 million workers offered flexible work, 80 million workers engaged in flexible work, and a large number of respondents citing a search for flexible work as a major motivator to find a new job.

Competition for top performers and digital innovators demands that employers understand how much flexibility their talent pool is accustomed to and expects. Employers are wise to invest in technology, adapt policies, and train employees to create workplaces that integrate people working remotely and on-site (without overcompensating by requiring that workers spend too much time in video meetings ). The survey results identify obstacles to optimal performance that underscore a need for employers to support workers with issues that interfere with effective work. Companies will want to be thoughtful about which roles can be done partly or fully remotely—and be open to the idea that there could be more of these than is immediately apparent. Employers can define the right metrics and track them to make sure the new flexible model is working.

At a more macro level, a world in which millions of people no longer routinely commute has meaningful implications for the commercial core in big urban centers and for commercial real estate overall. Likewise, such a world implies a different calculus for where Americans will live and what types of homes they will occupy. As technology emerges that eliminates the residual barriers to more distributed and asynchronous work, it could become possible to move more types of jobs overseas, with potentially significant consequences.

In time, the full impact of flexible working will be revealed. Meanwhile, these data give us early insight into how the working world is evolving.

For more on the imperative for flexible work and how organizations can respond, please see McKinsey.com/featured-insights/ Future-of-the-workplace .

André Dua is a senior partner in McKinsey’s Miami office; Kweilin Ellingrud is a senior partner in the Minneapolis office; Phil Kirschner is a senior expert in the New York office, where Adrian Kwok is an associate partner and Ryan Luby is a senior expert; Rob Palter is a senior partner in the Toronto office; and Sarah Pemberton is a manager in the Hong Kong office.

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Starting the research process

A Beginner's Guide to Starting the Research Process

When you have to write a thesis or dissertation , it can be hard to know where to begin, but there are some clear steps you can follow.

The research process often begins with a very broad idea for a topic you’d like to know more about. You do some preliminary research to identify a problem . After refining your research questions , you can lay out the foundations of your research design , leading to a proposal that outlines your ideas and plans.

This article takes you through the first steps of the research process, helping you narrow down your ideas and build up a strong foundation for your research project.

Step 1: choose your topic, step 2: identify a problem, step 3: formulate research questions, step 4: create a research design, step 5: write a research proposal, other interesting articles.

First you have to come up with some ideas. Your thesis or dissertation topic can start out very broad. Think about the general area or field you’re interested in—maybe you already have specific research interests based on classes you’ve taken, or maybe you had to consider your topic when applying to graduate school and writing a statement of purpose .

Even if you already have a good sense of your topic, you’ll need to read widely to build background knowledge and begin narrowing down your ideas. Conduct an initial literature review to begin gathering relevant sources. As you read, take notes and try to identify problems, questions, debates, contradictions and gaps. Your aim is to narrow down from a broad area of interest to a specific niche.

Make sure to consider the practicalities: the requirements of your programme, the amount of time you have to complete the research, and how difficult it will be to access sources and data on the topic. Before moving onto the next stage, it’s a good idea to discuss the topic with your thesis supervisor.

>>Read more about narrowing down a research topic

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So you’ve settled on a topic and found a niche—but what exactly will your research investigate, and why does it matter? To give your project focus and purpose, you have to define a research problem .

The problem might be a practical issue—for example, a process or practice that isn’t working well, an area of concern in an organization’s performance, or a difficulty faced by a specific group of people in society.

Alternatively, you might choose to investigate a theoretical problem—for example, an underexplored phenomenon or relationship, a contradiction between different models or theories, or an unresolved debate among scholars.

To put the problem in context and set your objectives, you can write a problem statement . This describes who the problem affects, why research is needed, and how your research project will contribute to solving it.

>>Read more about defining a research problem

Next, based on the problem statement, you need to write one or more research questions . These target exactly what you want to find out. They might focus on describing, comparing, evaluating, or explaining the research problem.

A strong research question should be specific enough that you can answer it thoroughly using appropriate qualitative or quantitative research methods. It should also be complex enough to require in-depth investigation, analysis, and argument. Questions that can be answered with “yes/no” or with easily available facts are not complex enough for a thesis or dissertation.

In some types of research, at this stage you might also have to develop a conceptual framework and testable hypotheses .

>>See research question examples

The research design is a practical framework for answering your research questions. It involves making decisions about the type of data you need, the methods you’ll use to collect and analyze it, and the location and timescale of your research.

There are often many possible paths you can take to answering your questions. The decisions you make will partly be based on your priorities. For example, do you want to determine causes and effects, draw generalizable conclusions, or understand the details of a specific context?

You need to decide whether you will use primary or secondary data and qualitative or quantitative methods . You also need to determine the specific tools, procedures, and materials you’ll use to collect and analyze your data, as well as your criteria for selecting participants or sources.

>>Read more about creating a research design

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Finally, after completing these steps, you are ready to complete a research proposal . The proposal outlines the context, relevance, purpose, and plan of your research.

As well as outlining the background, problem statement, and research questions, the proposal should also include a literature review that shows how your project will fit into existing work on the topic. The research design section describes your approach and explains exactly what you will do.

You might have to get the proposal approved by your supervisor before you get started, and it will guide the process of writing your thesis or dissertation.

>>Read more about writing a research proposal

If you want to know more about the research process , methodology , research bias , or statistics , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

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Researchers working from home: Benefits and challenges

Balazs Aczel

1 Institute of Psychology, ELTE Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary

Marton Kovacs

2 Doctoral School of Psychology, ELTE Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary

Tanja van der Lippe

3 Department of Sociology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Barnabas Szaszi

Associated data.

All research materials, the collected raw and processed anonymous data, just as well the code for data management and statistical analyses are publicly shared on the OSF page of the project: OSF: https://osf.io/v97fy/ .

Introduction

Materials and methods

Efficiency of research work

Comparing working from home to working in the office

Actual and ideal time spent working from home

Feasibility of working more from home

Background information

Data preprocessing and analyses

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is pone.0249127.g001.jpg

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The bars represent response averages of the given aspects.

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Supporting information

Acknowledgments.

We would like to thank Szonja Horvath, Matyas Sarudi, and Zsuzsa Szekely for their help with reviewing the free text responses.

Funding Statement

TVL's contribution is part of the research program Sustainable Cooperation – Roadmaps to Resilient Societies (SCOOP). She is grateful to the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW) for their support in the context of its 2017 Gravitation Program (grant number 024.003.025).

Data Availability

PLoS One. 2021; 16(3): e0249127.

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PONE-D-20-30010

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Comments to the Author

Reviewer #1: PONE-D-20-30010

Title: Researchers working from home: Benefits and challenges

Reviewer’s article summary: This manuscript provides results from a survey on work-life balance among academics who switched to remote work-from-home during the Covid-19 pandemic. I believe the article contributes insight on both the work-life balance among academics and how researchers have experienced their work during the pandemic, and will be of interest to the PloS One audience. Below, please see suggestions for improving the manuscript.

Abstract: Please include a brief statement about methodology, including sample size of the survey population, how the survey was conducted (convenience sample? Recruitment strategy?).

Introduction: The authors questions, “Is the relation between working from home and productivity influenced by personal and professional factors?” This question seems like a non-starter – how could working from home not be influenced by personal and professional factors? Advise revising this question to better focus your key arguments (i.e. what personal and professional factors most influence the productivity of working from home?).

“just as well increased autonomy over time use” – awkward sentence; please revise to clarify.

“physical and social distance to teal members” – do you mean team members?

Table 1 – please refer to the table in the text to guide the audience to this comparison of pros/cons in context of the introduction. It may also better position this manuscript within the literature to include more details from the studies that list these pros/cons (i.e. include the % of people who have reported each of the pros/cons within the table itself, and include a reference to the study where each % was derived).

Reference to Snizek in the 80’s – the benefit of including this quote is questionable; it would be more helpful to include more recent literature on this point since generational changes have perhaps changed this experience.

“just as well high levels of work productivity and satisfaction” – awkward sentence, please revise for clarity.

Materials and Methods: Please provide the study number for IRB approval.

The authors do include links to their study procedure, but it would be helpful for a more complete overview of the procedure within the manuscript so the audience can more easily ascertain the methodology employed. In comparison, the “Materials” section provides intricate detail that may not be necessary (in this reviewer’s opinion, it would be more efficient to simply list the types of questions asked—i.e. “Survey questions asked participants to report on changes that occurred in relation to research work efficiency, comparison of home to office work, amount of time spent…”(etc. or something of this nature)–with a link to the actual survey instrument).

There is no section or statement regarding data analysis. Please describe your analytical procedure (descriptive statistics, any regressions?) and software used for analysis.

Results – Recommend providing a demographics table in the manuscript that displays sample size and % for the information described in the “background information” section. Please include data about the countries where respondents live, if available; if not available, please include a statement regarding residence in the Methods section (i.e. was the sample all within a single country?).

Figures – please include sample size (n = ) in the figure titles.

” From these values we can assume that some of the obstacles of their work were specific to the pandemic lockdown and not directly to working from home” – please explain and clarify.

“…seems to be a generally wanted and beneficial model of work” – this statement seems to ignore the result that nearly half of respondents reported being less efficient during the pandemic. Recommend revising this statement, and including a summary that the results indicate although almost half of the respondents reported reduced work efficiency, they would prefer the current remote work setting to some extent in the future. May also be useful to note that the implications of this require further investigation – what is it about this new work situation that people prefer? What amount of time did people previously spend in commute that they now can use for other tasks or personal interests? What other factors have changed that make the current situation more preferred?

#5 – incomplete reference

There are several references that are now quite old (1987, 1996, 1999, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009…) – Recommend reviewing these carefully to ensure that there is not more recent literature that would shed better light on the subject.

Figure 1 – recommend revising the X axis to show sample size, and the bar labels to show % to increase clarity of results.

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/ . PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at gro.solp@serugif . Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

Author response to Decision Letter 0

17 Feb 2021

Dear Dr. Johnson Cheung,

We are happy to submit a revised version of our manuscript to PLOS One.

We would like to thank you and the reviewer for their comments and suggestions.

Below, you can find the detailed responses to all comments in bold.

Balazs Aczel, on behalf of all co-authors

Reviewer #1

We have added these aspects to the Abstract.

We agree with the reviewer and changed that question as suggested.

Table 1 is referred to in the text, just above the table. After due consideration of this suggestion, we judged that three paragraphs about the pros/cons provide sufficient details on the given topic. We found no sound way to merge the empirical reports of the referred studies to provide overall percentages of people reporting each pros/cons.

The old Snizek reference serves as an indicator that academics have already experienced some of the drawbacks of working from home at the start of the popularity of personal computers. We have now extended our Introduction with more studies from the recent literature, especially with those conducted during the pandemic.

We have now placed the Procedure section before the Materials section. At the beginning of the Materials section, we provide a link to the original content of our Qualtrics survey. This file contains the wording of the items and the display logic of the questions. We would also prefer to keep the detailed description of the survey items in the manuscript as most of the items were developed by the authors for the study. Should the Editor prefer that, we could move the Materials section to the Supporting Information and leave just the link to the exact survey questions in the manuscript.

Now, we state in the Data preprocessing and Analyses section that we used the R statistical software for the analyses and that we report only descriptive statistical results in this study.

The table with the sample size and proportions for all the levels of all the survey items is provided in the Supplementary Materials. However, as the whole table is more than 4 pages long, we think that by including the table in the main text we would corrupt the readability of the manuscript.

Now, we state in the Sampling section that the country of residence of the respondents is not known.

The sample sizes are now included in the figure titles.

We would like to thank the reviewer for pointing out the vagueness of this section. We rephrased the sentence and added one more sentence to the section to clarify our point.

We have now updated this sentence incorporating the reviewer’s suggestion. The updated paragraph is on page 16.

We fixed the incomplete reference.

We agree that some of our references are from the ‘80s or ‘90s, yet they are still good sources of our claims (e.g., how researchers found working from home when personal computers started or that setting up a home office comes with physical and infrastructural demands). Nevertheless, we have added more recent studies to our references, especially from the relevant literature that has been published since our initial submission 5 months ago:

Johnson N, Veletsianos G, Seaman J. US Faculty and Administrators’ Experiences and Approaches in the Early Weeks of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Online Learn. 2020;24(2):6–21.

Barrero JM, Bloom N, Davis SJ. Why Working From Home Will Stick. Univ Chic Becker Friedman Inst Econ Work Pap. 2020;(2020–174).

Korbel JO, Stegle O. Effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on life scientists. Genome Biol. 2020;21(113).

Ghaffarizadeh SA, Ghaffarizadeh SA, Behbahani AH, Mehdizadeh M, Olechowski A. Life and work of researchers trapped in the COVID-19 pandemic vicious cycle. bioRxiv. 2021;

Thank you for the recommendation. We have now modified this figure.

Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx

Decision Letter 1

23 Feb 2021

PONE-D-20-30010R1

Please submit your revised manuscript by Apr 09 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at gro.solp@enosolp . When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Reviewer #1:

Reviewer’s response to revisions: Overall, the authors have revised the manuscript to increase clarity and improve understanding of the contributions that this research provides regarding the future outlook for academics working from home. I have a few minor comments:

Limitations: This revised document brings to light the fact that 1) we do not know how the transition to working from home differs between countries since country was not a survey question (which could differ significantly given a number of social and technological/infrastructure factors), and 2) since the analysis only included descriptive statistics there is great potential in learning more from this dataset – and it is wonderful that the dataset will be publicly available. I do recommend adding a statement on limitations, both because it is a best practice, and because it shows that the authors have been thoughtful about the limits of their current analysis.

Results – Recommend providing a demographics table in the manuscript that displays sample size and % for the information described in the “background information” section. I appreciate the authors’ response to this request, but suggest that as a standard practice a shortened version of the key demographics could be provided in a table within the text, and the remainder of the demographics table could be in the supplemental material (having these results within the table is standard in my field since it provides the background information necessary for academics to easily understand the full scope of the results). In response to the question of length, I would suggest that the paragraph that lists the % of respondents who were male/female, etc. could be shortened and simply refer to the table instead.

Figure 1 – recommend revising the X axis to show sample size, and the bar labels to show % to increase clarity of results. The authors responded that this change was made in the revision, but I could not find the updated figure in the revised document.

Author response to Decision Letter 1

Overall, the authors have revised the manuscript to increase clarity and improve

understanding of the contributions that this research provides regarding the future outlook for

academics working from home. I have a few minor comments:

Limitations: This revised document brings to light the fact that 1) we do not know how the

transition to working from home differs between countries since country was not a survey

question (which could differ significantly given a number of social and

technological/infrastructure factors), and 2) since the analysis only included descriptive

statistics there is great potential in learning more from this dataset – and it is wonderful that

the dataset will be publicly available. I do recommend adding a statement on limitations, both

because it is a best practice, and because it shows that the authors have been thoughtful

about the limits of their current analysis.

We have now included a statement of limitations regarding the missing information

on country of residence and made it more clear in the limitations section that the

present study was only exploratory.

Results – Recommend providing a demographics table in the manuscript that displays

sample size and % for the information described in the “background information” section. I

appreciate the authors’ response to this request, but suggest that as a standard practice a

shortened version of the key demographics could be provided in a table within the text, and

the remainder of the demographics table could be in the supplemental material (having

these results within the table is standard in my field since it provides the background

information necessary for academics to easily understand the full scope of the results). In

response to the question of length, I would suggest that the paragraph that lists the % of

respondents who were male/female, etc. could be shortened and simply refer to the table

We have now included the key demographics as a table (Table 2) in the manuscript in

addition to the full summary of all the responses in the Supplementary information.

Figure 1 – recommend revising the X axis to show sample size, and the bar labels to show

% to increase clarity of results. The authors responded that this change was made in the

revision, but I could not find the updated figure in the revised document.

We made sure that all the figures are updated and uploaded with this submission

Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.pdf

Decision Letter 2

12 Mar 2021

PONE-D-20-30010R2

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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Acceptance letter

16 Mar 2021

Dear Dr. Aczel:

I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact gro.solp@sserpeno .

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on behalf of

Dr. Johnson Chun-Sing Cheung

How working from home works out

Key takeaways.

Forty-two percent of U.S. workers are now working from home full time, accounting for more than two-thirds of economic activity.
Policymakers should ensure that broadband service is expanded so more workers can do their jobs away from a traditional office.
As companies consider relocating from densely populated urban centers in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, cities may suffer while suburbs and rural areas benefit.
Working from home is here to stay, but post-pandemic will be optimal at about two days a week.

Working from home (WFH) is dominating our lives. If you haven’t experienced the phenomenon directly, you’ve undoubtedly heard all about it, as U.S. media coverage of working from home jumped 12,000 percent since January 1 .

But the trend toward working from home is nothing new. In 2014 I published a study of a Chinese travel company, Ctrip, that looked at the benefits of its WFH policies (Bloom et al. 2014). And in the past several months as the coronavirus pandemic has forced millions of workers to set up home offices, I have been advising dozens of firms and analyzing four large surveys covering working from home. 2

The recent work has highlighted several recurring themes, each of which carries policy questions — either for businesses or public officials. But the bottom line is clear: Working from home will be very much a part of our post-COVID economy. So the sooner policymakers and business leaders think of the implications of a home-based workforce, the better our firms and communities will be positioned when the pandemic subsides.

The US economy is now a working-from-home economy

Figure 1 shows the work status of 2,500 Americans my colleagues Jose Barrero (ITAM) and Steve Davis (Chicago) and I surveyed between May 21-25. The responders were between 20 and 64, had worked full time in 2019, and earned more than $20,000. The participants were weighted to represent the U.S. by state, industry, and income.

We find that 42 percent of the U.S. labor force are now working from home full time, while another 33 percent are not working — a testament to the savage impact of the lockdown recession. The remaining 26 percent are working on their business’s premises, primarily as essential service workers. Almost twice as many employees are working from home as at a workplace.

If we weight these employees by their earnings in 2019 as an indicator of their contribution to the country’s GDP, we see that these at-home workers now account for more than two-thirds of economic activity. In a matter of weeks, we have transformed into a working-from-home economy.

Although the pandemic has battered the economy to a point where we likely won’t see a return to trend until 2022 (Baker et al. 2020), things would have been far worse without the ability to work from home. Remote working has allowed us to maintain social distancing in our fight against COVID-19. So, working from home is a not only economically essential, it is a critical weapon in combating the pandemic.

Figure 1: WFH now accounts for over 60% of US economic activity

Source: Response to the question “Currently (this week) what is your work status?” Response options were “Working on my business premises“ , “Working from home” , “Still employed and paid, but not working“ , “Unemployed, but expect to be recalled to my previous job“ , “Unemployed, and do not expect to be recalled to my previous job“ , and “Not working, and not looking for work“

Data from a survey of 2,500 US residents aged 20 to 64, earning more than $20,000 per year in 2019 carried out between May 21-29, by QuestionPro on behalf of Stanford University. Sample reweighted to match current CPS.

Shares shown weighted by earnings and unweighted (share of workers)

The inequality time bomb

But it is important to understand the potential downsides of a WFH economy and take steps to mitigate them.

Figure 2 shows not everyone can work from home. Only 51 percent of our survey reported being able to WFH at an efficiency rate of 80 percent or more. These are mostly managers, professionals, and financial workers who can easily carry out their jobs on their computers by videoconference, phone, and email.

The remaining half of Americans don’t benefit from those technological workarounds — many employees in retail, health care, transportation, and business services cannot do their jobs anywhere other than a traditional workplace. They need to see customers or work with products or equipment. As such they face a nasty choice between enduring greater health risks by going to work or forgoing earnings and experience by staying at home.

Figure 2: Not all jobs can be carried out WFH

Source: Data from a survey of 2,500 US residents aged 20 to 64, earning more than $20,000 per year in 2019 carried out between May 21-25 2020, by QuestionPro on behalf of Stanford University. Sample reweighted to match the Current Population Survey.

In Figure 3 we see that many Americans also lack the facilities to effectively work from home. Only 49 percent of responders can work privately in a room other than their bedroom. The figure displays another big challenge — online connectivity. Internet connectivity for video calls has to be 90 percent or greater, which only two-thirds of those surveyed reported having. The remaining third have such poor internet service that it prevents them effectively working from home.

Figure 3: WFH under COVID-19 is challenging for many employees

Source: Pre-COVID data from the BLS ATUS . During COVID data from a survey of 2,500 US residents aged 20 to 64, earning more than $20,000 per year in 2019 carried out between May 21-25 2020, by QuestionPro on behalf of Stanford University. Sample reweighted to match the Current Population Survey.

In Figure 4, we see that more educated, higher-earning employees are far more likely to work from home. These employees continue to earn, develop skills, and advance careers. Those unable to work from home — either because of the nature of their jobs or because they lack suitable space or internet connections — are being left behind. They face bleak prospects if their skills erode during the shutdown.

Taken together, these findings point to a ticking inequality time bomb.

So as we move forward to restart the U.S. economy, investing in broadband expansion should be a major priority. During the last Great Depression, the U.S. government launched one of the great infrastructure projects in American history when it approved the Rural Electrification Act in 1936. Over the following 25 years, access to electricity by rural Americans increased from just 10 percent to nearly 100 percent. The long-term benefits included higher rates of growth in employment, population, income, and property values.

Today, as policymakers consider how to focus stimulus spending to revive growth, a significant increase in broadband spending is crucial to ensuring that all of the United States has a fair chance to bounce back from COVID-19.

Figure 4: WFH is much more common among educated higher-income employees

Trouble for the cities?

Understanding the lasting impacts of working from home in a post-COVID world requires taking a look back at the pre-pandemic work world. Back when people went to work, they typically commuted to offices in the center of cities. Our survey showed 58 percent of those who are now working from home had worked in a city before the coronavirus shutdown. And 61 percent of respondents said they worked in an office.

Since these employees also tend to be well paid, I estimate this could remove from city centers up to 50 percent of total daily spending in bars, restaurants, and shops. This is already having a depressing impact on the vitality of the downtowns of our major cities. And, as I argue below, this upsurge in working from home is largely here to stay. So I see a longer-run decline in city centers.

The largest American cities have seen incredible growth since the 1980s as younger, educated Americans have flocked into revitalized downtowns (Glaeser 2011). But it looks like 2020 will reverse that trend, with a flight of economic activity from city centers.

Of course, the upside is this will be a boom for suburbs and rural areas.

Working from home is here to stay

Working from home is a play in three parts, each totally different from the other. The first part is pre -COVID. This was an era in which working from home was both rare and stigmatized.

A survey of 10,000 salaried workers conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed only 15 percent of employees ever had a full day working from home. 3

Indeed, only 2 percent of workers ever worked from home full time. From talking to dozens of remote employees for my research projects over the years, I found these are mostly either lower-skilled data entry or tele-sales workers or higher-skilled employees who were able to do their jobs largely online and had often been able to keep a job despite locating to a new area.

Working from home before the pandemic was also hugely stigmatized — often mocked and ridiculed as “shirking from home” or “working remotely, remotely working.”

In a 2017 TEDx Talk , I showed the result from an online image search for the words “working from home” which pulled up hundreds of negative images of cartoons, semi-naked people or parents holding a laptop in one hand and a baby in the other.

Working from home during the pandemic is very different. It is now extremely common, without the stigma, but under challenging conditions . Many workers have kids at home with them. There’s a lack of quiet space, a lack of choice over having to work from home, and no option other than to do this full time. Having four kids myself I have definitely experienced this.

COVID has forced many of us to work from home under the worst circumstances.

But working from home post- COVID should be what we look forward to. Of the dozens of firms I have talked to, the typical plan is that employees will work from home between one and three days a week and come into the office the rest of the time. This is supported by our evidence on about 1,000 firms from the Survey of Business Uncertainty I run with the Atlanta Fed and the University of Chicago. 4

Before COVID, 5 percent of working days were spent at home. During the pandemic, this increased eightfold to 40 percent a day. And post-pandemic, the number will likely drop to 20 percent.

But that 20 percent still represents a fourfold increase of the pre-COVID level, highlighting that working from home is here to stay. While few firms are planning to continue full time WFH after the pandemic ends, nearly every firm I have talked to about this has been positively surprised by how well it has worked.

The office will survive but it may look different

“Should we get rid of our office?” I get that question a lot.

The answer is “No. But you might want to move it.”

Although firms plan to reduce the time their employees spend at work, this will not reduce the demand for total office space given the need for social distancing. The firms I talk to are typically thinking about halving the density of offices, which is leading to an increase in the overall demand for office space. That is, the 15 percent drop in working days in the office is more than offset by the 50 percent increase in demand for space per employee.

What is happening, however, is offices are moving from skyscrapers to industrial parks. Another dominant theme of the last 40 years of American cities was the shift of office space into high-rise buildings in city centers. COVID is dramatically reversing this trend as high rises face two massive problems in a post-COVID world.

Just consider mass transit and elevators in a time of mandatory social distancing. How can you get several million workers in and out of major cities like New York, London, or Tokyo every day keeping everyone six feet apart? And think of the last elevator you were in. If we strictly enforce six feet of social distancing, the maximum capacity of elevators could fall by 90 percent 5 , making it impossible for employees working in a skyscraper to expediently reach their desks.

Of course, if social distancing disappears post-COVID, this may not matter. But given all the uncertainty, my prediction is that when a vaccine eventually comes out in a year or so, society will have become accustomed to social distancing. And given recent nearly missed pandemics like SARS, Ebola, MERS, and avian flu, many firms and employees may be preparing for another outbreak and another need for social distancing. So my guess is many firms will be reluctant to return to dense offices.

So what is the solution? Firms may be wise to turn their attention from downtown buildings to industrial park offices, or “campuses,” as hi-tech companies in Silicon Valley like to call them. These have the huge benefits of ample parking for all employees and spacious low-rise buildings that are accessible by stairs.

Two types of policies can be explored to address this challenge. First, towns and cities should be flexible on zoning, allowing struggling shopping malls, cinemas, gyms, and hotels to be converted into offices. These are almost all low-rise structures with ample parking, perfect for office development.

Second, we need to think more like economists by introducing airline-style pricing for mass transit and elevators. The challenges with social distancing arise during peak capacity, so we need to cut peak loads.

For public transportation this means steeply increasing peak-time fares and cutting off-peak fares to encourage riders to spread out through the day.

For elevator rides we need to think more radically. For example, office rents per square foot could be cut by 50 percent, but elevator use could be charged heavily during the morning and evening rush hours. Charging firms, say $10 per elevator ride between 8:45 a.m. and 9:15 a.m. and 4:45 p.m. and 5:15 p.m., would encourage firms to stagger their working days. This would move elevator traffic to off-peak periods with excess capacity. We are moving from a world where office space is in short supply to one where elevator space is in short supply, and commercial landlords should consider charging their clients accordingly.

Making a smooth transition

From all my conversations and research, I have three pieces of advice for anyone crafting WFH policies.

First, working from home should be part time.

Full-time working from home is problematic for three reasons: It is hard to be creative at a distance, it is hard to be inspired and motivated at home, and employee loyalty is strained without social interaction.

My experiment at Ctrip in China followed 250 employees working from home for four days a week for nine months and saw the challenges of isolation and loneliness this created.

For the first three months employees were happy — it was the euphoric honeymoon period. But by the time the experiment had run its full length, two-thirds of the employees requested to return to the office. They needed human company.

Currently, we are in a similar honeymoon phase of full-time WFH. But as with any relationship, things can get rocky and I see increasing numbers of firms and employees turning against this practice.

So the best advice is plan to work from home about 1 to 3 days a week. It’ll ease the stress of commuting, allow for employees to use their at-home days for quiet, thoughtful work, and let them use their in-office days for meetings and collaborations.

Second, working from home should be optional.

Figure 5 shows the choice of how many days per week our survey of 2,500 American workers preferred. While the median responder wants to work from home two days a week, there is a striking range of views. A full 20 percent of workers never want to do it while another 25 percent want to do it full time.

The remaining 55 percent all want some mix of office and home time. I saw similarly large variations in views in my China experiment, which often changed over time. Employees would try WFH and then discover after a few months it was too lonely or fell victim to one of the three enemies of the practice — the fridge, the bed, and the television — and would decide to return to the office.

So the simple advice is to let employees choose, within limits. Nobody should be forced to work from home full time, and nobody should be forced to work in the office full time. Choice is key — let employees pick their schedules and let them change as their views evolve. The two exceptions are new hires, for whom maybe one or two years full time in the office makes sense, and under-performers, who are the subject of my final tip.

Third, working from home is a privilege, not an entitlement.

For WFH to succeed, it is essential to have an effective performance review system. If you can evaluate employees based on output — what they accomplish — they can easily work from home. If they are effective and productive, great; if not, warn them, and if they continue to underperform, haul them back to the office.

This of course requires effective performance management. In firms that do not have effective employee appraisal systems management, I would caution against working from home. This was the lesson of Yahoo in 2013 . When Marissa Mayer took over, she found there was an ineffective employee evaluation system and working from home was hard to manage. So WFH was paused while Mayer revamped Yahoo’s employee performance evaluation.

The COVID pandemic has challenged and changed our relationships with work and how many of us do our jobs. There’s no real going back, and that means policymakers and business leaders need to plan and prepare so workers and firms are not sidelined by otherwise avoidable problems. With a thoughtful approach to a post-pandemic world, working from home can be a change for good.

Figure 5: There is wide variation in employee demand for WFH post-COVID

Source: Response to the questions: “In 2021+ (after COVID) how often would you like to have paid work days at home?“

Data from a survey of 2,500 US residents aged 20 to 64, earning more than $20,000 per year in 2019 carried out between May 21-25, by QuestionPro on behalf of Stanford University.

Sample reweighted to match the Current Population Survey.

1 Newsbank Access World News collection of approximately 2,000 national and local daily U.S. newspapers showing the percentage of articles mentioning “working from home” or “WFH.”

2 These are the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey ; the Survey of Business Uncertainty ; the Bank of England Decision Maker Panel ; and the survey I conducted of 2,500 U.S. employees.

3 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Job Flexibilities and Work Schedules News Release. Sept. 24, 2019 .

4 Firms Expect Working from Home to Triple. May 28, 2020. Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta .

5 In a packed elevator each person requires about four square feet. With six-foot spacing we need a circle of radius six-feet around each person, which is over 100 square feet. If an elevator is large enough to fit more than one person, experts have advised riders to stand in your corner, face the walls and carry toothpicks (for pushing the buttons), as explained in this NPR report .

Baker, S.R., Bloom, N., Davis, S.J., Terry, S.J. (2020). COVID-Induced Economic Uncertainty (No. 26983). National Bureau of Economic Research.

Bloom, N., Liang, J., Roberts, J., Zhichun, J.Y. (2014). Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment. Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Glaeser, E. (2011). Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier. Penguin Books.

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Share full article

Share of fully remote

and hybrid workers

High school

Bachelor’s

Who Still Works From Home?

By Ben Casselman , Emma Goldberg and Ella Koeze

The American workplace’s experiment with remote work happened, effectively, overnight: With the onset of the pandemic in March 2020, more than half of workers began working from home at least part of the time, according to Gallup. But the shift to a permanent hybrid-work reality has been gradual, with periods of tension as workers across white-collar industries pushed against executives’ return-to-office orders .

Those battles have largely come to an end, and workplaces have reached a new hybrid-work status quo. Roughly one-tenth of workers are cobbling together a combination of work in the office and from home, and a similar portion are working entirely remotely.

This population of hybrid and remote workers in the United States doesn’t quite mirror the larger population of workers: Government data shows they tend to have more education and are more often white and Asian.

Type of worker

~115 million workers

~14 million

~15 million

High school or less

Some college

Bachelor's degree

Graduate degree

Each square here represents 50,000 workers between the ages of 18 and 64. In 2023, about 143 million people in that age range were working in the United States.

Roughly 80 percent of those work fully in person . The remaining work either a hybrid schedule or fully remote .

If we look at all workers by their level of education, the biggest group of workers have no college education.

But if we focus on just those who work at home all or some of the time, college educated workers become the most prominent. Working from home is, for the most part, a luxury for the highly educated.

The pandemic laid bare inequalities in the American economy. White-collar workers were in many cases able to do their jobs safely at home, but lower-income workers often had to continue to work in person, even when health risks were highest. And now that the public health emergency is over, that workplace divide — who gets the benefits of remote flexibility and who does not — has become entrenched.

White and Asian workers are more likely to work from home

Share of fully remote and hybrid workers who identify as a given race or ethnicity vs. the same group’s share of the entire work force

Hispanic workers and Black workers are underrepresented in remote work.

Only 10% of remote

share of all workers

The divide in who gets the flexibility to work remotely also reflects the country’s racial inequalities. Because white and Asian workers are more likely to hold office jobs, they are more likely to have the opportunity to work remotely part or all of the time. Black and Hispanic workers, meanwhile, more frequently hold jobs in food service, construction, retail, health care and other fields that require them to be in person.

The youngest workers are working from home less often

Share of fully remote and hybrid workers who fall in each age group vs. the same group’s share of the entire work force

When employers were first mounting their return-to-office battles, many assumed that their youngest employees would be the toughest to persuade to come back. But today, young people make up a greater share of those working in person than their share of the total work force.

That is partly because a smaller share of Americans under 25 have completed college degrees. Many work in jobs like food service that cannot be done remotely. But that is not the whole story: Even among college graduates, workers in their 20s are more likely to be in the office full time than their older colleagues. That suggests that young workers are embracing the benefits of in-person work: socialization, mentorship and face time with the boss. The potential downsides of fixed office schedules may also matter less to them: Relatively fewer young workers might have children (or aging parents) at home, making remote flexibility less of a priority.

More women work remotely, but it’s complicated.

Remote work also breaks down along gender lines — though it does not lend itself to a simple narrative.

Overall, women are more likely than men to work remotely. That’s partly because more women have college degrees, so more of them are in the kind of professional jobs in which flexible arrangements have become the norm. Even among those without college degrees, women are more likely to work at a desk in an administrative or customer support role, while men more often work in construction, manufacturing and other jobs that can only be done in person.

Looking narrowly at just college graduates, remote work patterns for women and men look more evenly distributed, with men slightly more likely to work remotely than women. But there’s one place where the pattern looks different: among parents with young children.

Parents have been some of the biggest winners in the flexible-work era. Remote flexibility made more feasible the constant juggling of professional and caretaking obligations. But it is mothers, not fathers, who appear to be taking the most advantage of workplace flexibility, whether out of choice or necessity.

Share of fully remote and hybrid college-educated workers who have children or not, by gender

College-educated men

With no kids

With young kids

With older kids

vs. share of all working college-educated men

College-educated women

Mothers of young kids are more likely to work from home than other women.

Note: Young kids are those 5 years old or younger.

Among college-educated men, having children does not make much difference to whether they work at home or in person. Among women, it’s a different story. Mothers of young children are much more likely to work remotely than women without children or mothers of older children.

When possible, disabled workers often choose to go fully remote

Fully remote and hybrid work often get talked about in the same breath. But in some cases, the implications are different.

For many workers with disabilities, the normalization of remote work has offered an opportunity to avoid energy-draining commutes and offices that are not designed to accommodate their needs. For others, it has opened up pathways into industries that were previously difficult to break into.

But those gains come primarily from fully remote work, not the hybrid model that has come to dominate some industries. Workers with disabilities are 22 percent more likely to work fully remotely than otherwise similar workers without disabilities, but only slightly more likely to work a hybrid schedule, according to research from the Economic Innovation Group . Workers with disabilities that limit mobility, such as those who use wheelchairs, were particularly likely to benefit from the opportunity to work entirely from home.

Employers should “understand the significant difference between full-remote and hybrid-remote,” the researchers wrote. “A labor market that includes a greater number of full-remote jobs will open the door for far more otherwise qualified workers.”

Methodology

The data in this article comes from the Current Population Survey, a monthly survey of 60,000 U.S. households conducted by the Census Bureau. Respondents are asked how many hours they worked the previous week, and how many of those hours they teleworked or worked from home. “Fully remote” workers are those who worked all of their hours remotely; “hybrid” workers are those who worked some but not all of their hours remotely. Respondents who were not employed, or who did not work at all in the previous week, are excluded. Data shown is for calendar year 2023. Figures are rounded throughout.

surbhi | 14 April, 2024 | 12:39 PM IST

[Work From Home] Thermo Fisher Scientific Hiring In Clinical Research as SIA Team Specialist

Thermo Fisher Scientific

Experience :

₹75,055 to ₹76,998 per month

Work From Home

PPD® is a leading global contract research organization (CRO) specializing in clinical research services. Their Clinical Research team plays a pivotal role in developing drugs to address the world’s most challenging health concerns, bringing scientific and clinical expertise to the forefront of getting cures to market.

SIA Team Specialist

Department :

Clinical Trials, Clinical Research

Education :

B.Pharm, M.Pharm, M.Sc, B.Sc, Pharm.D, Lifesciences

Job Lcation :

Job Description

The SIA Team Specialist is responsible for completing site activation or amendment deliverables within assigned projects. They ensure that all project deliverables meet customer expectations and contracted requirements by providing accurate projections, report updates, and ongoing risk assessments.

Essential Functions and Other Job Information: Essential Functions:

Collaborate with multiple team members in a matrix environment for effective delivery of site activation or amendments within assigned projects.
Assist in coordinating the flow of information between internal teams, clients, or functional departments involved in site activation or amendments.
Participate in developing plans/guidelines for project implementation.
Monitor and analyze project status to ensure successful progress and completion of all assigned projects, providing metrics and status updates to senior team members and/or upper management.
Perform risk identification and contingency planning.
Collaborate with team members to manage financial and contractual aspects of the studies related to site activation or amendments.
Participate in establishing appropriate controls to ensure that project resources and expenses are aligned with budgets.

Qualifications: Education and Experience:

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent and relevant formal academic/vocational qualification.
Previous experience that provides the knowledge, skills, and abilities to perform the job (comparable to 4+ years). CAS and CRA experience preferred.
In some cases, an equivalency, consisting of a combination of appropriate education, training, and/or directly related experience, will be considered sufficient for an individual to meet the requirements of the role.

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:

Able to work efficiently with cross-functional teams.
Strong organizational and communication skills.
Attention to detail relevant to driving colleagues to achieve broader study deliverables.
Ability to identify risks related to contractual deliverables and review potential solutions.
Demonstrates basic understanding of cross-cultural awareness and adapts appropriately.
Basic understanding and appreciation of clinical research/development, including medical and therapeutic areas, phases, and medical terminology.
Ability to lead, liaise, and coordinate activities as part of a cross-functional project team.
Firm knowledge/understanding of clinical development guidelines and directives.

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Searching for a fulfilling position at Thermo Fisher Scientific? We are looking for a qualified applicant for SIA Team Specialist in our Clinical Trials, Clinical Research team right now. The ideal applicant will have 4 years years of relevant experience, at least, and B.Pharm, M.Pharm, M.Sc, B.Sc, Pharm.D, Lifesciences. With its headquarters in Work From Home, this role pays a competitive Salary. We encourage you to apply if you have a strong interest in Department-related field and are prepared to make a difference. Come work with us at Thermo Fisher Scientific and become a member of our committed team that promotes quality and innovation in Clinical Trials, Clinical Research.

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Spotlight on... Tim Causer

11 April 2024

This week we meet Tim Causer, Principal Research Fellow at the Bentham Project. Tim chats about his work editing an extensive collection of Jeremy Bentham's manuscripts, shares his favourite dress code for a night in at the Bentham home, and reveals all on his screen debut.

What is your role and what does it involve?

I am a Principal Research Fellow at the Bentham Project in the Faculty of Laws, where our main duties are the production of the authoritative edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham , one of the most important English-language editions in the world. The Bentham Project was established as a central UCL initiative in 1959 to produce the Collected Works and thereby supersede the incomplete, inadequate eleven-volume edition of 1838–43 overseen by Bentham’s literary executor, John Bowring. The Collected Works , which stimulates scholarship around the world across a range of disciplines, is based in large part upon the massive Bentham manuscript collection of some 85,000 pages held by UCL Special Collections.

Editing each volume is a major task: we produce authentic texts from works published during Bentham’s lifetime as well as reconstructing them from unpublished manuscripts, and research and provide detailed annotation to the text to help the reader, amongst other things. Today marks the publication in open access by UCL Press of the 36th volume in the edition, The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, Volume 13: July 1828 to June 1832 , which reveals considerable detail about Bentham’s final years. The finished Collected Works will run to around 80 volumes, so the likelihood that I will be around to raise a glass to its completion is fairly slim.

How long have you been at UCL and what was your previous role?

I joined UCL as a Research Associate in October 2010 on a seven-month contract and have managed to hang around ever since. My first role was to co-ordinate our award-winning crowdsourcing initiative, Transcribe Bentham , for which volunteers from around the world have transcribed over 40,000 pages of Bentham’s manuscripts. I’ve worked on European Commission-funded projects with colleagues across Europe to produce tools for the automated transcription of handwritten manuscripts, worked on more funding proposals than I care to recall, given a toast at a wake for Bentham, and, of course, edited his works and correspondence. Though working on Bentham is pretty all-consuming, I also try to research and publish in my other area of alleged expertise, that of the history of the Australian penal colonies.

Prior to joining UCL I studied for an MA and then an MLitt, both in history, at the University of Aberdeen and worked in the loading bay of the local Debenhams to pay for them. In 2006 I was fortunate to be awarded a scholarship for a PhD at the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies at King’s College London, where I looked at the lives of 6,500 men detained between 1825 and 1855 at the notorious penal station at Norfolk Island, about 1,000 miles east of Sydney.

What working achievement or initiative are you most proud of?

It’s a profound honour to become an editor of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham , a major edition which will be used by researchers and students beyond my lifetime. It was especially pleasing that my first volume, Panopticon versus New South Wales, and other writings on Australia , was also the first volume of the Collected Works to be published in open access by UCL Press.

Perhaps the most surreal initiative was working with a group of brilliant students on the MA in Publishing who produced Jeremy Bentham’s Prison Cooking , a cookbook based on manuscripts containing recipes collated for the kitchen of Bentham’s unrealised panopticon penitentiary. One dish, a ‘Devonshire pie’, was made for a BBC feature by the chefs of the Michelin-starred St John Smithfield restaurant, where it occasionally appears on the menu—if you enjoy offal and gooseberries then you are in for a treat.

Tell us about a project you are working on now which is top of your to-do list?

In the immediate term we are working to complete volume 14 of Bentham’s Correspondence , which contains letters to and from Bentham identified since the first twelve volumes were published, as well as on our AHRC-funded project to edit A Picture of the Treasury , Bentham’s semi-autobiographical and tragi-comic account of his doomed attempt to persuade the British government to build his panopticon prison (all the material needed for the Bentham sitcom is there). I’m also co-chairing this June’s Bentham House Conference, generously funded by the Faculty of Laws, which will be the 17th conference of the International Society for Utilitarian Studies, and have reached the stage where I see the programme in my dreams.

What is your favourite album, film, and novel?

Album: This was the most difficult question, so apologies for cheating slightly—or to apply a Benthamic gloss to said cheating, for using the trifurcate method.

all-time favourite: Shoot Out the Lights by Richard and Linda Thompson (‘ Walking on a wire ’ may be the greatest song committed to record).
favourites of the past decade: Nocturnal by Amaral and the sublime Ten Love Songs by the sublime Susanne Sundfør.
recent favourite: Screen Violence by Chvrches.

Film: I’ve a soft spot for David Lynch’s deeply odd and flawed adaptation of Dune . Kyle MacLachlan remains the best Paul Atreides.

Novel: A close-run thing between Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Look at Me by Anita Brookner, and His Natural Life by Marcus Clarke. I’ll plump for Sunset Song , its lament for the passing of a way of life, and its heartbreaker ending—‘you can do without the day if you’ve a lamp quiet-lighted and kind in your heart’ and all.

What is your favourite joke (pre-watershed)?

A woman goes to the dentist and settles herself down into the chair. ‘Comfy?’, asks the dentist. ‘Glasgow’, the woman replies.

Who would be your dream dinner guests?

As a host I would be a disaster. I’d prefer to be a fly on the wall at one of the regular dinners hosted by Bentham when the great and good (and not so good) visited him at his home at Queen’s Square Place. For instance, the lads’ night in at QSP on 18 January 1832 sounded a riot: Bentham was joined for dinner by his nephew George, later a renowned botanist, and his former and present amanuenses Richard Doane and Edwin Chadwick, with the guests dressed in their lawyers’ wigs and gowns—for no other reason than Bentham seemed to find it funny.

What advice would you give your younger self?

There is no chance he would listen to me.

What would it surprise people to know about you?

I am listed in the Internet Movie Database after appearing as a convict in the ABC/BBC/RTÉ drama, The Last Confession of Alexander Pearce —moonlighting when living in Tasmania while researching my PhD. The film is based on the true story of convicts who in 1822 absconded from the remote Macquarie Harbour penal station in western Van Diemen’s Land, but who quickly got lost in the rainforest and to avoid starving killed and ate each other, one by one, with Pearce being last man standing. My role was limited to digging a trench and looking suspicious, with the latter coming naturally.

I’ve also had to become an expert at giving injections to small animals—my cat, Samson, was diagnosed with diabetes last summer and he would like everyone to know that he’s been a total hero.

What is your favourite place?

The far north-west Highlands of Scotland, where I grew up; Tasmania, which I miss with an ache I can’t quite describe; or wherever Manchester City, who I’ve supported for 35 years, are playing—roll on 20 April at Wembley.

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Political typology quiz.

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Where do you fit in the political typology?

Are you a faith and flag conservative progressive left or somewhere in between.

Take our quiz to find out which one of our nine political typology groups is your best match, compared with a nationally representative survey of more than 10,000 U.S. adults by Pew Research Center. You may find some of these questions are difficult to answer. That’s OK. In those cases, pick the answer that comes closest to your view, even if it isn’t exactly right.

About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

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U.S. Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes

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Researchers working from home: Benefits and challenges

Introduction

Materials and methods

Efficiency of research work.

Comparing working from home to working in the office.

Actual and ideal time spent working from home.

Feasibility of working more from home.

Background information.

Data preprocessing and analyses

Background information

Efficiency of research work

Comparing working from home to working in the office

Actual and ideal time spent working from home

Feasibility of working more from home

Supporting information

Acknowledgments

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About Angie Nelson

Americans are embracing flexible work—and they want more of it

About the survey

About the authors

1. Thirty-five percent of job holders can work from home full-time, and 23 percent can do so part-time

2. When offered, almost everyone takes the opportunity to work flexibly

3. Most employees want flexibility, but the averages hide the critical differences

4. Most industries support some flexibility, but digital innovators demand it

5. Job seekers highly value having autonomy over where and when they work

6. Employees working flexibly report obstacles to peak performance

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Hybrid work: Making it fit with your diversity, equity, and inclusion strategy

Workplace real estate in the COVID-19 era: From cost center to competitive advantage

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Materials and methods

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Actual and ideal time spent working from home

Feasibility of working more from home

Background information

Data preprocessing and analyses

Supporting information

Funding Statement

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How working from home works out

The US economy is now a working-from-home economy

Figure 1: WFH now accounts for over 60% of US economic activity

The inequality time bomb

Figure 2: Not all jobs can be carried out WFH

Figure 3: WFH under COVID-19 is challenging for many employees

Figure 4: WFH is much more common among educated higher-income employees

Trouble for the cities?

Working from home is here to stay

The office will survive but it may look different

Making a smooth transition

Figure 5: There is wide variation in employee demand for WFH post-COVID