Australia’s chief statistician David Gruen expects that people will continue to work from home for at least part of the week in the post-pandemic environment. The head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics says this will require employers to reduce their office space in CBDs, despite the push to get workers to return to offices. Gruen adds that the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted rapid growth in Australia’s digital economy, and this will need to be reflected in the national accounts data. ABS figures released in August 2021 show that 40% of people now work from home, compared with about 30% prior to the pandemic.
“It’s generated new ways of working which people will sometimes find congenial relative to their modes of working before the pandemic,” [Gruen] said….
“To the extent that people spend less time commuting into the centre of cities, and spend a much larger proportion of their time working from home, there’s going to be an adjustment in the amount of office space needed in the centre of cities”…
“We obviously want people to be in the office, and imbibing the culture of the organisation, especially people who are new to the organisation. But we can also provide flexibility for people to spend some proportion of their week working from home.”
The benefits of having a higher proportion of staff working remotely are obvious:
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It eliminates the need for workers to waste money, fuel and time travelling into central locations to work,
Because it reduces demand, it forestalls the need to undertake costly infrastructure investment.
It provides greater work/life flexibility.
It facilitates decentralisation – something policy makers have been trying to achieve for decades.
That said, there are also costs, most notably younger workers missing out on on-the-job training, mentoring and the comradery that comes from onsite work.
Regardless, most recent surveys show that the overwhelming majority of employees want to continue working remotely for some of the work week.
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Therefore, a hybrid work model will likely become the norm for many office workers and should be encouraged.
Leith van Onselen is Chief Economist at the MB Fund and MB Super. He is also a co-founder of MacroBusiness.
Leith has previously worked at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and Goldman Sachs.
