A poll done by Morning Consult on behalf of Bloomberg News in May 2021 showed that 39% of U.S. adults would consider quitting if they weren’t able to work from home. Millenials and GenZ respondents showed 49%.
Update April 2022: 64% of global workers said they would consider quitting rather than return to the office.
See also:
- A different survey found nearly half of employees are likely to move to work remotely
- And another found two-thirds of remote workers want to continue to work remotely
- Not everyone can work from home, see inequality of remote work
Links to this note
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35% of American Workers Have the Option to Work Remotely Full Time
According to a recent survey from McKinsey & Company, American workers say they have the option to work part time or full time from home (58% and 35% respectively). That’s roughly 55 million people in the US.
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54% Percent of Unemployed Job Hunters Are Looking to Work from Home
The March WFH Research survey results show that 54% of unemployed respondents are either exclusively looking for jobs that allow them to work from home or prefer jobs that allow them to work from home.
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§ What Is the Market Value of Working Remote?
We can come up with a valuation of remote work by looking at a few signals: what you would forgo, what do you gain, what others gain, and what others lose.
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Remote Jobs Rose to Nearly 15 Percent of All High-Paying Job Listings
An analysis by Ladders found that the percentage of high-paying job listings ($80,000+) in the US and Canada that were remote increased from 3.69% in Q4 2019 to 14.67% in Q3 2021.
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4.3 Million People Quit Their Job in August 2021
The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that 4.3 MM Americans quit their jobs in August 2021, up from 4MM in July. The quit rate is highest it’s been since the statistic became available in 2000.
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Quit Rates Declined to Pre-Pandemic Levels
It might be the end of the the Great Resignation. A survey from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics found that quit rates fell to 2.4% in April 2023 after peaking at 3% a year ago in April 2022. Hires and total separations also fell during that time period.
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Remote Work Resulted in a 30% Increase in Hours Worked and 20% Decrease in Productivity
A study of 10,000 workers at an Asian IT company found that when comparing before the pandamic and during (the work from home period), the number of hours worked increased by 30% (including 18% increase outside of normal working hours, but the average output remained the same. This led the researchers to conclude that the overall productivity of remote work declined by 20%.
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89 Percent of Employees Said They Experienced Occupational Burnout in the past Year
A survey by Visier found that 89% of employees experienced burnout in the past year. The primary factors that contributed were workload (being asked to do more work, faster, work-life balance), culture (toxic workplace, micromanagement, lack of support from managers or co-workers), and world events (COVID-19 pandemic, police brutality, climate change).