On Census Day 2011, just 3.7 per cent of Australian workers worked from home (a total of 364,000). While this number rose to 4.1 per cent (431,000) by 2016, this increase can hardly be called a revolution.
Looking only at census data we’d suspect that the working-from-home revolution never happened. The numbers would be much higher if the census wasn’t held on a Tuesday. Anyone working in an office can attest that Monday and Friday are the days when most staff work from home. We know from various studies that more and more Australians take to working from home at least occasionally.
As Australia transitions from a manufacturing economy towards a knowledge economy, more and more people can work from home. A laptop and smartphone are all the tech you need.
Of course, individual employers need to trust their staff enough to do work even while they aren’t under the watchful eyes of their supervisors. The public sector extends much less trust into their workers than the private sector, it seems. While the public sector makes up 16 per cent of the workforce, it makes up only 4 per cent of the working-from-home cohort. Can our public servants simply not be trusted? Or is this the result of hierarchical organisations shying away from innovation and from giving up control of their staff?
Whether you have the capacity to work from home in the first place depends largely on the industry you are in. It is no surprise we have nobody building prefabricated houses, producing mattresses or ginning cotton in their living room. Many farmers technically work from home, as their home and business address are identical. So, it’s no surprise the agriculture jobs all have high working-from-home rates. The non-agriculture industry with the highest share of workers staying at home are document preparation services (proofreading, etc.) and creative artists, musicians and writers.
It’s too cumbersome to look at each of the 1300 jobs that officially exist in Australia one at a time. Let’s group these jobs by skill level instead. The Australian Bureau of Statistics assigns a number from one to five to each job indicating how much formal training one must have received before they are allowed to do a certain job.
On average, working from home is a privilege of the most highly educated (and high-income-earning) workers. While skill level 1 workers make up 28 per cent of the workforce, they make up 49 per cent of those working from home. Skill level 5 workers make up 18 per cent of the workforce but only 5 per cent work from home.
The economy is creating skill level 1 jobs at record speed. About half all new jobs we added in the previous decade were categorised as skill level 1. This pattern won’t change in the coming decade. We will see plenty of highly skilled jobs and plenty of low-skilled jobs emerge while the number of middle-skilled jobs stagnates. Adding so many new skill level 1 jobs will further intensify the working-from-home trend.
If more people will work from home in the future more regularly, this will change housing preferences, especially for the highly skilled and well-paid part of the workforce. A decent home office will become a necessity in the houses of the highly skilled workers. We aren’t talking about tiny study nooks or a laptop on the kitchen table. The highly skilled workers of the middle suburbs in our large cities will want a separate room with plenty of space to set up a sizeable desk (the sales of standing desks and ergonomic chairs for home will grow significantly).
Let’s have a think about what these additional bedrooms should look like. We know that 60 per cent of the population that worked from home are women. Since women still tend to be the primary carers in families, this doesn’t surprise. Working from home makes the co-ordination of child rearing and work tasks a bit more manageable. The new study rooms that will be demanded by well-to-do families are most likely going to be used by working and multi-tasking mums.
If I was a property developer, I’d commission a study into working-from-home preferences and needs of working mums and use these findings to ensure that my buildings fulfil the needs of this important demographic. With women outperforming men on all levels of education, we will see more couples where the woman out-earns the man. These high-income women will be unlikely to give up their careers and will want to return to the workforce soon after birth. A well-designed home (and an employer who trusts their staff) will enable such lifestyle preferences.
Ultimately, developers operating in the middle suburbs who are targeting the highly skilled and well-to-do part of the workforce will need to add an extra bedroom (one that’s functional and beautifully designed) to their offerings.
This is as true for apartment as it is for houses. While the average number of people per household is going down, the need for more bedrooms is increasing for the richer half of our workforce. The working-from-home trend will be one driver for increased demand for more three and four-bedroom apartments in the middle suburbs.
Simon Kuestenmacher is co-founder and director at The Demographics Group. Research by Hari Hara Priya Kannan.
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