Days working from home are levelling out

What does the image show?

The image shows the number of days per week worked from home of respondents in our survey areas who were not on furlough across the survey periods from pre-pandemic to June 2021. The chart does not correct for the total number of days worked per week and just provides the reported value in days. The level of home working remains much higher than pre-pandemic, almost four times as much. Across all of our sites we see a fall off from the peak of working from home in June 2020 but this seems to have stabilised between October 2020 and June 2021 with a much smaller decline observed.

Why is this important?

Working from home offers one opportunity to reduce the amount of car miles travelled and to enable early inroads into carbon reduction targets. The extent to which this is delivered will depend on how workplaces adapt and on the additional quantity of domestic heating and energy which is consumed as a result of a more spatially distributed workforce. Nonetheless, a quadrupling in days worked from home, were that to be stabilised would be a substantial behaviour change that would not have been considered feasible before the pandemic.