Australia’s top WFH cities revealed: it’s here to stay

The census has offered an insight into the massive social and cultural impact of working from home | BEST JOBS, PLACES TO WFH

If ever there were a people predisposed to working from home, it is Australians.

It is the biggest social shift to have been effected by the pandemic. It is the phenomenon of working from home. The most recent census figures – from August 10 last year – show that 2.5 million workers, then 21 per cent of the workforce, were working from home.

This proportion peaked in locked-down Sydney at 39 per cent. Melbourne wasn’t too far behind at 29 per cent. Parts of Sydney topped 60 per cent of workers working from home: Balmain was ground zero for this movement at 68 per cent. The best Melbourne had to offer at this time was North Fitzroy at 55 per cent. Other cities, suburbs and communities trailed off into the distance by this measure. In Whyalla, Mount Isa and Port Augusta, barely 2 per cent of the workforce worked from home.

Five years earlier, work from home was a mere curiosity amid the census’s 60-plus questions. Barely 5 per cent of the workforce – in “normal times” – worked from home. This was the preserve of older consultants, contractors and maybe the odd literary type. Back then, working from home was something done in life’s later years, perhaps servicing a single client or writing the great Australian novel. Not any more.

We have had the capacity to work from home for more or less 20 years, ever since the advent of access to the internet via dial-up. In fact the proportion of the workforce working from home remained at 5 per cent at every census between 1996 and 2016.

The reason WFH never took offbefore the pandemic is that it was controlled by a cultural blockage. If a co-worker back then announced they intended “working from home tomorrow” it was regarded as code for “a bit of a day off”; no one asked too many questions. It took a pandemic sustained across two to three years mandating workers to work from home for this movement to gain traction. This Australian census is an insight into the social and cultural impact of WFH. The proportion of workers working from home in non-lockdown cities was up on the long-term Australian average of 5 per cent but nowhere near the levels of Sydney and Melbourne: Brisbane was 18 per cent, Adelaide 10 per cent, Perth 8 per cent and Hobart 7 per cent.

In lifestyle places within easy reach of the lockdown capitals the proportion of the workforce working from home was higher: Castlemaine in Victoria’s Goldfields region and Byron Bay in northern NSW, for example, were both 26 per cent.

The question that remains is the extent to which newly learnt WFH behaviours might be relinquished by workers across this year and next.

Clearly the necessity to work from home for pandemic reasons has diminished during the 15 months since the census was conducted. But has the whole WFH experience left the workforce – now empowered by a skills shortage – with a taste for a different way of delivering workplace value?

For many, Zooming in is far more preferable to commuting five days a week. What seems to be evolving is a hybrid model of working from home Monday and Friday, commuting to the workplace Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

But not every worker has the capacity to work from home. This much was evident in the census results that match WFH with industry in 2016 and last year.

In 2016 just 6 per cent of workers in finance and insurance ser­vices worked from home; last year this proportion was 66 per cent. Here is a sector that enthusiastically embraced WFH.

In accommodation and food services (that is, hospitality), just 2 per cent of workers worked from home in 2016, whereas by last year this proportion was 4 per cent. There just isn’t the scope in this sector to work from home. (That 2-4 per cent figure probably comprised accounting functions in the hospitality sector.)

Other “exposed” sectors where WFH was enthusiastically embraced by workers includes professional services (was 13 per cent, now 55 per cent) and information, media and telecommunications (was 7 per cent, now 52 per cent).

Unsurprisingly, just over a quarter of agricultural workers have always worked from home and this did not change during the pandemic.

I don’t think WFH in Sydney and Melbourne, for example, will revert to long-term proportions. We have come too far. Workers have invested in Zoom rooms, learnt new tech, adjusted their lives, realised the human wastage of daily commuting. Plus, and I think this especially applies to younger workers, there’s a consciousness about carbon emissions and a general anxiety (such as mental health concerns) associated with regular commuting.

This is not to say that the CBD is dead. There has been no diminution in the rate of growth in knowledge workers throughout the pandemic. Plus there is a proximity value in, if not a requirement for, many businesses (and workers) to be located close to the stock exchange, to the law courts, to Parliament House, to corporate head offices and the like.

I suspect the proportion of workers working from home in Sydney and Melbourne, and in their attendant lifestyle haunts such as Castlemaine and Byron Bay, is steadily reducing from their census peaks. And that the proportion working from home in Adelaide and Perth is perhaps rising as local workers cross-reference with “but the Melbourne office is allowed to work from home”.

The outcome could well be a position where the capital cities converge on roughly 15 per cent of workers working from home going forward. This assessment will be evident when the results of the 2026 census are published in October 2027. If this broad assessment is correct, then the net effect of the pandemic and the lockdowns is a 10-percentage-point uplift in the proportion of workers working from home.

On today’s workforce figures this takes 1.3 million workers out of the daily commute and increases the dwell time in the family home, in the suburbs, in the lifestyle zone (tree change and sea change) and thus mightily changes the rhythm of everyday life.

Less synchronised intracity movements demanding peak-load infrastructure; more local-area “buzzing about” perhaps using bicycles, scooters, trams, ride-share services and, who knows, maybe even walking to local – and now activated – shops. Toss in autonomous vehicles by 2030 and the suburbs take on a different form and function.

There’s another tectonic force silently pushing for this concept of a greater dwell time (via WFH) in the lifestyle-suburbs zone. And that is the millennial generation now pushing into their late 30s and early 40s, which coincides with the pre-teen-family stage of the life cycle.

What is now required by this ageing echo of the baby-boom generation is a separate house on a separate block of land – with a Zoom room. The (mostly) millennials are using WFH to jazz up, to makeover, to reinvent the role, the purpose, the functionality of the suburban home.

After every sustained global calamity there is an opportunity and a requirement to rethink the model of human endeavour. Daily commuting into and out of a single CBD is probably not a smart basis for city planning and especially at scale. New tech is enabling interactions (and problem solving) that do not require a face-to-face meeting every time or even every day. A new generation cresting into their 40s throughout the 2020s presents an opportunity to boldly reimagine a better way of conceptualising and managing cities, of delivering workplace value and of meaningfully participating in family life.

If ever there were a people predisposed to working from home, it is the Australians. We may not have invented the concept of the three-bedroom dwelling on a quarter-acre block, but we made it famous because we (including Darryl Kerrigan) love it. We also enthusiastically embraced sea change and tree change as idyllic lifestyle models. More recently we took up inner-city living, which remains a popular lifestyle for many Australians.

However the idea of living in the suburbs, in the lifestyle zone on and beyond the city edge, or even farther afield, and delivering workplace value via Zoom is surely the next iteration of our national obsession with lifestyle.

The WFH numbers might rise and fall over time depending on the demand for labour, but based on newly released census data it is evident work from home is now an integral part of the Australian way of life. And that’s because collectively we think it delivers a better quality of life.

Bernard Salt is founder and executive director of The Demographics Group. Research and data by data scientist Hari Hara Priya Kannan.