Two years into the pandemic and it’s clear telework is here to stay

It’s been two years since COVID-19 broke national headlines, prompting government officials everywhere to respond to the growing implications of a global—like telework. Offices were shuttered and administrative services were moved online. Prior to that pivotal impetus, remote work opportunities were an economic outlier—especially for public employers.

Now, they’re commonplace. 

In 2022, “One-third of U.S. civil servants will become permanent hybrid workers,” predicts a brief from Forrester, a market research and advisory organization. “Implementation of hybrid work will vary by employee role, department type, and geography.” 

Failure to adapt will be detrimental. Without the adoption of a hybrid work model, departments “will experience a brain drain as their best employees leave for other public or private sector organizations,” the brief continues.  

Looking ahead in California, for example, “the best estimates suggest that about 25 percent of future work will be done remotely,” according to an analysis from the Public Policy Institute of California. “Remote work made it possible for more Californians to relocate during COVID, and it could create economic challenges in business districts like downtown San Francisco and Los Angeles. A large-scale return to office settings this year may smooth out some regional inequities, but given the changes in workplace preferences, the location of workers and businesses are likely to be forever changed.” 

Telework in the public sector is expected to be most commonplace in knowledge-based professions. 

“This shift will probably have an uneven impact: for example, remote work is expected to be most common in professions like IT and finance and least common in manufacturing, retail, and health,” California’s analysis says. 

Across all sectors, a recent Pew Research Center report found that “roughly six-in-10 U.S. workers who say their jobs can mainly be done from home (59 percent) are working from home all or most of the time,” and “The vast majority of these workers (83 percent) say they were working from home even before the omicron variant started to spread in the United States.” 

While the pandemic is ongoing, Pew’s analysis notes the impetus for people working from home full-time or in hybrid-telework situations has shifted over the last few years. Most of those working from home in 2022 are doing so because they choose to do so, not because they must. With this, the reasons people are choosing to work from home have also changed.  

“Fewer cite concerns about being exposed to the coronavirus—42 percent now versus 57 percent in 2020 say this is a major reason they are currently working from home all or most of the time. And more say a preference for working from home is a major reason they are doing so (76 percent now vs. 60 percent in 2020),” the analysis says. The benefits come with a tradeoff: respondents reported a much better work-life balance, but less connection to co-workers. 

The analysis quantifies the powerful impact the coronavirus had on the way people work. Fifty-seven percent of those surveyed said they’d “rarely or never worked from home prior to the coronavirus outbreak.”

Once the pandemic has passed, the telework trend is expected to continue.

“Looking to the future, 60 percent of workers with jobs that can be done from home say when the coronavirus outbreak is over, if they have the choice, they’d like to work from home all or most of the time. This is up from 54 percent who said the same in 2020,” the report says.