Most people want to work from home, particularly on Mondays and Fridays
Research found that the Covid-19 pandemic and associated workplace restrictions had profoundly altered how many people looked at their work environment.
Almost 80% of people would prefer to work from home, particularly on Mondays and Fridays, while more than 42% of white-collar workers who now can work from home would consider moving home as a result.
The findings are contained in new research based on a survey of 1,282 respondents, and more specifically, 896 white-collar workers.
The research, carried out by a team from the Trinity Centre for Transport Research, Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering at Trinity College Dublin and the National Transport Authority, found that the Covid-19 pandemic and associated workplace restrictions had profoundly altered how many people looked at their work environment.
According to the study, published in the , "Given options of various degrees working from the office or home, 77.9% of respondents in the sample showed a preference for some form of working from home."
Of the respondents, those in the Greater Dublin Area were more likely than those outside the capital to always or mostly work from home. Yet this ability to work from home also meant that a significant minority were now open to moving elsewhere, even if it meant still having to go to the office twice a week, with a longer commute, as they would then be able to work from home the other days.
"Up to 42.5% of the white-collar respondents who have the ability to work from home state that they would consider moving," according to the study. "It must be noted that this does not represent 42.5% of the sample, rather those respondents within the white-collar category who had already indicated that it was possible for them to work from home."
Of the working from home options, most wanted to do so on Mondays and Fridays, while just 12% of respondents said working from home had reduced productivity and 19% said the quality of non-work life had decreased. By contrast, almost a quarter of respondents said productivity had increased by working from home and almost a third said the quality of non-work life had greatly increased. A similar percentage of respondents said productivity and the quality of non-work life had somewhat increased.
One of the authors of the study, Dr Brian Caulfield, Associate Professor & Head of Department at the Centre for Transport Research, said the findings indicated that commute and transport patterns would change, with morning and evening rush hour peaks "smoothed out" across the day.
"People want to work from home Monday and Friday, and from a transport network perspective it will probably make us rethink how we travel and what we travel for," he said.
As for the significant percentage of people who would consider relocating from cities, he said: "People would be willing to leave Dublin or Cork or Galway, leave and sell the house, be mortgage-free down the country and do a fairly long commute twice a week. People make that trade-off in their head."
He said this could lead to city centres being reimagined.
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