More than 3 million workers eye a return to the office

Major firms in Melbourne and Sydney CBDs are preparing to welcome back a flood of workers from February and March.

With lockdowns hopefully a thing of the past, employers in the major CBDs have asked workers to return to the office in February or March. Picture: NCA Newswire / Gaye Gerard

Major firms in Melbourne and Sydney CBDs are preparing to welcome back a flood of workers from February and March as employers ask millions of staff who have worked from home during the pandemic to spend some time in the office after the summer break.

Survey data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed 41 per cent of employed Australians regularly worked from home in August, with an estimated 25 per cent doing so most of the time, or about 3.2 million people.

The latest ABS data compared with the 4-8 per cent of workers who worked most of their hours at home between 1989 and 2008; that figure climbed as high as an estimated 37 per cent during the ­national lockdown in April 2020.

With Delta lockdowns ending in October and November, Jon Williams, a partner at management consultancy Fifth Frame, said many large employers based in the city centres of Sydney and Melbourne had decided to delay the return to the office until after the summer break, but were keen to get people back.

Mr Williams said in the short term, the working from home ­experience had been “overwhelmingly positive” for employers and workers “but in the medium to long term, that’s where there are concerns about being able to monitor staff members’ mental health, and about the longer term impact on productivity,” he said.

The open question, he said, was how much of the pandemic shift to remote working would stick over coming years, and how to manage what could prove a structural change in working habits.

 

“Everything is about ‘how do we land on a permanent model that will work for all of our ­people’,” Mr Williams said, noting that some employees – particularly recent recruits – valued spending time in person with more senior colleagues as they learned their trades.

The ABS said its surveys showed the main reason people worked from home during 2015 to 2019 was to catch up on work. During the pandemic, respondents selected “other” as the primary reason – an answer the ABS said was consistent with ­pandemic-related reasons.

Close to two-thirds of managers and professionals were working from home regularly in August 2021, compared with a quarter of people across other ­occupations, the latest figures showed.

Other than the working from home trend, ABS head of labour statistics Bjorn Jarvis said “there haven’t been similarly large changes in other working ­arrangements such as working Monday to Friday only”.