Remote Working

A Research Overview

Alan Felstead

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000557374
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

The coronavirus pandemic forced work back into the home on a massive scale. The long-held belief that work and home are separate spheres of economic life was turned on its head overnight.

Many employees were new to this way of working and many employers had to manage a disparate workforce for the first time. This book reviews what impact this shift had on the lives of millions of employees, the organisations which employ them and the societies in which they live. It also looks to a future in which more work is carried out remotely – at home, in the local café, restaurant or bar, or while moving from place to place. The book syntheses the existing evidence in an accessible and easy-to-read way.

It will appeal to all those who want a quick and concise introduction to the major themes associated with remote and hybrid working. This will include teachers, lecturers, students, academics and policy-makers as well as those who have experienced the challenges and benefits of homeworking first-hand.

1 Setting the Scene

DOI: 10.4324/9781003247050-1

‘Never let a good crisis go to waste’, Winston Churchill, sometime in the mid-1940s.

1.1 Introduction

A prolonged period of being asked – sometimes instructed – to work at home has meant that many more of us have experienced working remotely, that is, outside the premises of the employer. For that reason, the book is titled Remote Working: A Research Overview. However, as will become clear, the coronavirus pandemic has raised fundamental questions about where we work and why, and whether it represents a pivotal moment from which there is no turning back. The location of work has received enormous attention as governments around the world have placed unprecedented restrictions on what their citizens can and cannot do, and where they are allowed to go.

In a bid to limit the spread of the coronavirus, many national governments curbed the ability of citizens to meet others and to move freely within and across national boundaries. Directly and indirectly this changed the ways in which people work and where they do so. Given that large numbers of people have traditionally gathered in workplaces and used public transport to move from A to B, the first response of governments was to limit physical interaction in offices, factories, and shops as well as on trains and buses. Another tactic was to promote working at home, hence limiting large workplace gatherings and removing one of the major reasons for travel. Out of 51 countries surveyed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in mid-2020, all but 5 were either encouraging or instructing segments of their population to work at home (OECD, 2020). At around the same time, 59 countries were mandating their directly employed, non-public-facing staff to work at home (ILO, 2020). A more drastic response was to impose national and/or regional lockdowns which further encouraged the employed population to work at home if possible.

In the face of these restrictions, homeworking rocketed. Across Europe as a whole, 37% of the working population reported working at home in April 2020 because of the pandemic with homeworking rates close to 60% in Finland and above 50% in Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Denmark (Eurofound, 2020). In the US, around a third (35%) of the workforce in April 2020 reported ditching the daily commute and working at home instead (Brynjolfsson et al., 2020). Employers, too, changed their behaviour. In line with government advice, many high-profile companies – such as Google, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and JP Morgan – closed their offices and ordered their staff to work at home (BBC News, 11 March 2020; Financial Times, 11 January 2021a).

Interest in the shift of work away from traditional workplaces and into the home can also be seen in the newspaper column inches, internet blogs, and TV and radio reports devoted to the subject. For example, newspaper articles in the UK on working from home – published in national broadsheets and tabloids, and in regional and local news outlets – rose from around 150 per month before the outbreak of Covid-19 to a monthly peak of almost 6,000 in March 2020. Working from home remained a hot topic for the remainder of the year with an average of 3,600 newspaper articles appearing on the subject every month. Its popularity continued into 2021 with thousands of column inches devoted to the issues surrounding working from home (see Figure 1.1). As the following headlines demonstrate, these articles have succinctly covered many of the issues addressed in this book. They have:

• mapped the growth of homeworking – ‘Where were the homeworking hotspots in 2020?’ (London Standard, 17 May 2021);
• identified who is thriving and who is struggling to cope – ‘Homeworking isn’t working, at least for the young’ (The Independent, 24 March 2021);
• listed the benefits that employers gain from these ‘new’ ways of working – ‘Offices: homeworking will save employers billions’ (Financial Times, 8 April 2021b);
• noted the relatively benign impact on business performance – ‘Home workers get more done during pandemic, study finds’ (The Daily Telegraph, 1 April 2021);
• outlined the dangers of keeping the world of work and home separate – ‘Homeworking sounds good – until your job takes over your life’ (The Guardian, 7 March 2021);
• highlighted how employees may lose out – ‘Homeworking is depriving me of juicy gossip’ (Financial Times, 13 July 2020a);
• identified the pluses for society – ‘Gentler, greener, quieter: welcome to the city of the future’ (The Daily Telegraph, 1 December 2020) – as well as the minuses – ‘Empty offices are killing town centres’ (Daily Mail, 10 July 2020);
• provided a sober account of the scale of the long-term change – ‘Death of the office exaggerated despite the homeworking boom’ (Financial Times, 1 July 2020b); and
• highlighted the increased appetite that employees have for working off-site – ‘Don’t make me go back to “hard pants” five days a week’ (Financial Times, 5 June 2021c).

Subsequent chapters in this book will provide a much fuller review of the historical and contemporary evidence on all of these matters. These headlines do, however, provide a foretaste of the issues reviewed by this book and backed up by empirical and theoretical evidence.

Figure 1.1 UK Newspaper Articles on ‘Working from Home’, March 2019–May 2021

Source: Extracted from Nexis.com, own calculations.

The spike in homeworking has ignited worldwide interest from employers, employees, and politicians alike. For example, Google searches of terms such as ‘homeworking’, ‘working at home’, and ‘working from home’ jumped as governments across the globe introduced restrictions and encouraged working at home wherever possible. In mid to late March 2020, searches using one of these three phrases were at their peak and were roughly ten times as popular as before the outbreak of coronavirus. The popularity of these searches has since declined. Nevertheless, they still remain twice as popular as similar searches carried out before Covid-19 (see Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 Google Worldwide Searches of ‘Homeworking’, ‘Working at Home’, and ‘Working from Home’, January 2019–May 2021

Source: Extracted from Google Trends, own calculations.

All academic debates have their twists and turns. However, the study of where work is carried out has more than its fair share. A key aim of this book is to chart the evolution of that debate and to situate the plethora of terms used to highlight particular changes to the spatial location of work. These include similar sounding, but conceptually distinctive terms such as ‘remote working’, ‘working at home’, ‘homeworking’, ‘working from home’, ‘mobile working’, and ‘hybrid working’.

The aim of this chapter is to start to put the current interest in the shifting location of work into a historical context. It therefore briefly outlines the debates and issues dominating the field before the outbreak of coronavirus, and the debates and issues prompted by the experience of lengthy, often enforced, periods of homeworking with little or no physical access to the office. In particular, the chapter highlights a significant shift in the type of ‘homeworker’ under discussion, the pre-pandemic interest in ‘mobile working’, and the post-pandemic appeal of ‘remote’ and ‘hybrid’ working.

1.2 Pre-coronavirus Debates and Issues

It should be made clear at the onset that carrying out work at home is not new, far from it. Prior to industrialisation, households were not only places of social reproduction but also locations in which much production took place. Farms, workshops, manor houses, and palaces were household economies. As a result, domestic and economic relationships were closely integrated; home and work were not separate spheres of social and economic life. Farmers and rural labourers occupied the same buildings as agricultural machinery and livestock. Apprentices slept beside their benches in their masters’ workshops.

As a result of the industrial revolution, two new relatively autonomous sets of relations came into being (Humphries, 1982; Boxer and Quataert, 2000). The home focused on consumption and the reproduction of labour, while the workplace was devoted to the production of goods and services for sale. As a result, most people left home to go to work and, at the end of the working day, left work to return home. The relationship between the times and spaces of work and non-work became linear, sequential, and chronological. In the main, household relations ceased to be linked to economic production. The separation of the home from the workplace also meant work was no longer an integral part of family life, but a separate external activity.

Although the onset of industrialisation meant that the majority of workers were engaged in work activities outside the home, the domestic sphere remained an important workplace for a number of occupational groups. For example, lawyers and doctors often gave advice and treated patients at home. Similarly, some working-class jobs (especially those performed by women) continued to take place in the home (Davidoff and Hall, 1987; Boris, 1994). For many years, home-located workers engaged in routine manual and industrial tasks were a neglected and exploited group (Boris and Prügl, 1996). Official surveys and censuses tended to undercount their numbers, employers paid them rock-bottom wages, trade unionists treated them as unwelcome competitors to factory-based workers, and business analysts regarded them as a backward and declining anomaly in a modern economy. They were an invisible workforce hidden from public view, but located in the private sphere of the home. Many were women with young children. Migrant and ethnic minority communities were also heavily involved (Boris and Prügl, 1996; Allen and Wolkowitz, 1987; Phizacklea, 1990; Phizacklea and Wolkowitz, 1995; Felstead and Jewson, 2000).

There were, of course, practical limitations to the type of work that could be carried out at home but such restrictions were, to some extent, historically and cu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• About the Author
• 1 Setting the Scene
• 2 Defining Remote Working
• 3 Trends in Remote Working
• 4 Remote Working and the Employer
• 5 Remote Working and the Employee
• 6 The Future of Remote Working
• Index