A year ago many companies urged their employees to work from home as the COVID-19 pandemic led to lockdowns, forever changing the way people work.
McKinsey Global Institute has examined remote work, analyzing 2,000 tasks and 800 jobs throughout nine countries, and it has found that hybrid work-from-home models are likely to continue for some positions long after the pandemic has subsided.
“The virus has broken through cultural and technological barriers that prevented remote work in the past, setting in motion a structural shift in where work takes place, at least for some people,” the authors wrote in the report.
However, there still are a great number of jobs for which work-from-home isn’t an option. According to McKinsey, these include jobs that must be done at a specific location or require specialized machinery. Service jobs also must be done in public. For the jobs where remote work was possible, McKinsey noted that companies were forced to change the way they operated amid the pandemic. Some of these changes are likely to become permanent.
“Many of such jobs are low wage and more at risk from broad trends such as automation and digitization,” the authors wrote. “Remote work thus risks accentuating inequalities at a social level.”
Remote work isn’t only happening in the office as many schools shifted to distance learning. The pandemic also forced many workers to reconsider their employment. According to a Vox report, there could be an employment migration as people decide to make a change.
“For those companies that are not putting remote work in place in some capacity, over the next few months there’s probably going to be quite a number of people who are jumping ship to go to a more remote job,” career development manager Brie Reynolds told Vox.
The McKinsey report supports Reynolds’ position. According to the company’s analysis, remote work is primarily relegated to highly skilled, educated workers in a few industries, occupations and geographic regions. For its analysis, the U.S. consulting company looked at the United States, Mexico, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, India and China.
Remote work also is more likely in countries with advanced economies, according to the McKinsey report. It can result in changes in transportation and consumer spending. It also can affect how communities decide to allocate funds for infrastructure repairs as traffic patterns change as fewer people drive to work each day.
As companies look to fill vacancies after the pandemic, McKinsey wrote in its report that companies may have to figure out just how to navigate through a hybrid system in which employees work from home for a portion of their schedule.
In its analysis, McKinsey noted that up to 20% of the workforce could successfully work from home three to five days a week. However, the analysis noted that there remain a number of jobs that require in-person work, including those that build customer and colleague relationships, plus training and coaching new employees. McKinsey also noted the jobs that benefit from collaboration will continue to be performed at on-site locations.