Heigh-home, heigh-home
The work-from-home / back-in-the-office split looks to have settled. What does this mean for wellbeing?
Are you satisfied with your job?
It can be a surprisingly difficult question to answer. What elements of satisfaction should you consider – your salary, your colleagues, your commute? That free mindfulness class you got an email about? Does ‘making a difference’ matter? Should it?
Maybe you can be satisfied with your job regardless of what your job involves as long as it facilitates a life in which other things can matter – family, leisure time, wider interests. But it’s difficult to disentangle all that: you have more time for family and wider interests if you don’t spend every hour of the day working or commuting, and the quality of your leisure time is likely to be at least partly related to your disposable income. So, difficult.
It’s not a question the UK public answer with a resounding yes, either. But, both satisfaction with work and the importance of it to us have each been slowly creeping up over the last fifteen years.
The chart below looks at the growth in levels of satisfaction and the importance of work, relative to 2011, which is when Trajectory started measuring them. In absolute terms, satisfaction with work has moved from 6.18/10 in 2011 to 6.84/10 in 2024. The proportion of workers who say that work is ‘very important’ has moved from 27% to 40%.
Clearly, this is all to do with the covid-inspired, work-from-home revolution. Overnight, we were freed from the shackles of the workplace, the tyranny of the commute and the humiliation of the futile dash for the lift. We have freedom now, and autonomy. Right?
Unfortunately for that argument, we also have data showing that people who mostly work from home are typically slightly less satisfied with their jobs than those who work in the workplace.
We shouldn’t assume causation here. It’s possible that these people work from home because their jobs are less satisfying, rather than the other way round. And the differences are very small - about 0.1 points in it. But, still…
Home is where the job is
Clearly, for a lot of people, working at home is a big, positive shift.
This disruption to where and how we work remains one of the biggest and most enduring legacies of covid. It undermines the viability of countless businesses and institutions – train services, convenience retail, hospitality, printed papers - that previously depended on commuter footfall. Many, but not all, of those businesses can adapt to new working patterns - as last week’s news about Heineken reopening suburban pubs indicates.
For some workers, this new flexibility represents a sacrosanct right that, if threatened, is enough to prompt them to try their luck with a new employer. It’s part of the current dynamics of the housing market, which sees space – outside and in the home – matter almost as much as location. It’s part of the impetus behind employment trends – like the ‘great resignation’ or quiet quitting – which capture the new relationship between employers and employees.
And despite some high profile attempts to get staff back into the workplace, they don’t appear to be going anywhere.
In May 2020, about 22% of people in the UK worked from home. In itself, that’s remarkable – as a result of the lockdown and furlough, for a brief period four years ago there were more people working at home than in the workplace (20%). Before March 2020, about 10% of the population mostly worked from home.
That was the high point – over the next two years, the proportion of the UK population working from home declined gradually as workplaces reopened. By May 2022 it had dropped to 17%. But over the last couple of years, it’s stabilised, between 14% and 16% every month. About six in ten people in the UK are in work. So that means that about a quarter of the labour market primarily work from home.
This far out from the pandemic, it’s hard to see that ever changing back. But the work-from-homers are clinging to their kitchen tables in spite of the evidence suggesting they might be happier if they got back to the office.
Satisfaction and wider wellbeing
Perhaps the slowest part of all of this data is the enduring, apparently unbreakable relationship between job satisfaction and other aspects of our wellbeing.
On the scatter chart below we plot levels of job satisfaction (the horizontal axis) against overall life satisfaction, just among those that are in work.1
As with all the charts: if you’re reading this in email, the scatter plot looks much better (and is interactive) if you click it.
There’s a very strong relationship. Our satisfaction with our jobs is incredibly closely correlated with our wider satisfaction with our lives. This isn’t going to change.
Interestingly, though, where we work is not really part of the story. As we’ve seen, people working in the workplace tend to be slightly more satisfied with their jobs (and lives) than those working at home. But it’s not a big part of the difference: income, age and gender are much more important predictors of satisfaction.
However, those who’ve switched to home-working since covid do slightly outperform the correlation; their life satisfaction is a little higher than we might expect it to be, based on their job satisfaction. It’s a sign that those who’ve made the switch have done so for a reason. In an era of declining life satisfaction, even a marginal gain might be worthwhile.
What does this mean?
This isn’t going to meaningfully change. I’d argue that we’re now a sufficient distance from the pandemic, and that the trends are sufficiently flat to conclude that the pandemic-driven shift to increased home working is permanent. It doesn’t apply to everyone, and individual workers may move through roles in their career where the balance between workplace/WFH is different, but that core split of 75% of the labour market mostly in the workplace and 25% mostly at home is likely to endure.
Small percentages: big numbers. The proportion of the population that mostly work from home has increased by 6-7%. That’s a small percentage, but accounts for millions of people (in our report last year, we found that there are 4.9m people in the UK who now work from home, but didn’t before covid). These people are concentrated in certain parts of the country and sectors of the economy, magnifying the impact in those places.
The office has changed, forever. The main change is in the idea of what an office is. It used to be something of a necessary evil – you’d have to have a place where people could work. Now it’s a choice. Managers have new layers of decision making about what that space looks like and how it should be organised, where it should be and what amenities it should contain. Many might consider the office to be an amenity.
Workplaces will always matter. For tens of millions of people, this entire discussion is an irrelevance, and probably an irritating one at that. The list of professions whose jobs offer little or no scope for remote working massively outweighs the pretty small proportion of people for whom it is a key concern (although on LinkedIn, that split might be reversed). Often those with the least capacity for home working are the lowest paid, or those who, during the pandemic, were recognised as key workers, or – depressingly frequently – one and the same.
More than this
There’s much more investigation and analysis to be done into this than can be crammed into to a fortnightly newsletter. If you’ve got more questions about changing working patterns and what this might mean for your customers, your staff or your strategy, get in touch – we survey 18,000 people a year on everything from where they work to who they trust and what they value, and an archive of over 100,000 interviews to dive into.
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For those of you interested - you know who you are - the R-squared value is 0.859. The correlation is almost as strong when job satisfaction is measured against satisfaction with family life and leisure time, too.
It would be interesting to see what impact, if any, home working has had on the development of younger employees