Category: Work From Home Economy

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Remote workers holding 2 jobs shows a ton of jobs aren’t really 40 hours per week

Man coding on two computers
One computer for the first job, another for the side gig.

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Entrepreneurialism is a treasured American value, unless you work for a company.

After all, what’s more entrepreneurial than working two jobs when you could work just one? Some remote workers have done just this, but because of American work culture, they’ve kept it a secret.

The Wall Street Journal recently highlighted several white-collar workers who shuffle two or more full-time jobs, carefully aligning their schedules to avoid meeting overlaps and doing their best to keep their multiple gigs secret from each other.

Many of the workers in the article noted that only a small share of their time at their first job was spent doing productive work, enabling the multiple-job bait and switch. According to the Journal, one software engineer said “he was logging three to 10 hours of actual work a week back when he held down one job,” with the rest of the time spent on extraneous meetings and busywork.

While the six people interviewed by the Journal are naturally not a representative sample, the idea that there’s so much dead time in many occupations that it’s possible to do multiple “full-time” jobs at once suggests that it may be time to rethink the 40-hour work week.

Americans work more hours than most developed countries, but they probably don’t need to

Workers in the US already log a lot of hours at their jobs. This chart, based on data from the OECD, shows the average number of hours worked in 2020 among workers in the G7 advanced countries:

But as the anecdotes highlighted by the Journal suggest, for many white-collar workers, much of that time at the office may be wasted. Non-essential activities like excessive meetings or a flood of emails and messages from colleagues can take up a larger part of the day than core productive tasks.

Think of work like watching an NFL game and how much “sport” it actually contains. Kirk Goldsberry and Katherine Rowe estimated in an article at FiveThirtyEight that the average football game lasts for over three hours, but only includes 18 minutes of actual football. The rest of the broadcast time is filled with clock stoppages, half-time reports, and so many commercials.

The fifth Zoom meeting of your day that may not be essential to your job, and could be more like the fifth time you see that beer commercial in the third quarter of the Buffalo Bills game.

One of the greatest 20th-century economists predicted we’d be working 15 hours a week by now

In a famous 1930 essay, “Economic possibilities for our grandchildren,” the British economist John Maynard Keynes observed the enormous leaps in productivity over the previous couple centuries stemming from the rapid technological progress of the industrial revolution.

He concluded that work of the future would take less time.

Within 100 years, he predicted, output per worker would be so great that only a minimal effort would be needed to provide for the basic needs of the entire population. To distribute that work, Keynes predicted “we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter – to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while.”

More recently, several companies and countries have started experimenting with a four-day work week, finding that workers stayed just as productive while improving well-being. Of course, as Keynes’ prediction above underscores, broader adoption of shorter hours has remained elusive for decades.

As seen in the G7 chart above, that 15-hour work week, or even a more modest four-day week, has not yet come to pass, at least not officially. If someone can do two 40-hour jobs per week in something close to 40 hours, that means they are doing roughly 20 hours of work for each. It’s not far off Keynes’ prediction, except it’s an absurd distortion of his hopes for his proverbial grandchildren (he left no children behind when he died in 1946).

Instead of a 40-hour job being replaced by a 15-hour one, it seems we’ve replaced it with two.

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Use this Goldman Sachs data to convince your boss you should work from home and travel less for meetings

remote worker laptop cafe

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  • Goldman Sachs found productivity jumped by 3% during the pandemic, especially in jobs that worked remotely.
  • Productivity is measured by looking at how much output workers produce per hour on average.
  • To be sure, people may have been more productive last year, but they were also burned out.
  • See more stories on Insider’s business page.

If you’re eager to return to the office, this data isn’t for you.

But, if you’re one of the nearly 40% of workers who wants to keep working from home so much that you’d consider quitting your job rather than return to the office, Goldman Sachs has some data that could help your case.

The investment bank found that productivity in the US economy increased just over 3% per hour since the start of the pandemic, largely in industries that adapted to remote work and less travel. That’s more than double the 1.4% per hour growth in the period prior.

Productivity is the measure of goods or services workers produce per hour on average. Many companies have been able to cut costs on things like office rent, furniture and equipment, holiday parties, client events, and work travel. With the continued evolution of business models, including automation and increased worker efficiency, Goldman Sachs expects to see productivity to rise by about 4% by 2022.

Gains were highest in jobs like IT, professional services, and product development that were able to accommodate virtual meetings and did away with in-person costs associated with travel and entertainment. Right now the cost of rental cars, gas, hotels, food, and airfare are all on the rise, making travel, whether for work or pleasure, even more expensive.

While price inflation is likely temporary, the psychological effects of working from home will last much longer. On the positive side, many remote workers are happier, and women and people of color have greater feelings of security and freedom from sexism and racism in the workplace.

To be sure, working from home comes with its own set of problems. At the same time American workers were more productive, they were also more burned out. Part of the World Health Organization’s definition of burnout is diminished performance.

When building your case to work from home and travel less, it could help to cite your mental health and psychological engagement, in addition to what you were able to accomplish over the last year and the money you saved your employer by doing all of that from home.

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People are going to spend up to 10% less in cities because of working from home, study says

New York outdoor dining
People dine at an outdoor Soho restaurant on March 21, 2021 in New York City.

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  • Spending in major metro areas will drop by 5% to 10% because of working from home, UChicago researchers said.
  • A cutback in commuting will hit urban spending on food, shopping, and entertainment, they added.
  • This could lead to tax raises or job cuts in cities that are just recovering from the COVID-19 recession.
  • See more stories on Insider’s business page.

The post-pandemic economy will look different from the one seen in February 2020. In a word, it will be emptier. Gone are the days of an office-based 9-to-5; instead, workplaces are rolling out plans for hybrid telecommuting and even fully remote work.

But where work-from-home will benefit Americans in reducing commute times and granting extra flexibility, nobody knows just how much it will hit the urban economies that used to support office workers in the before times. University of Chicago researchers have an idea, or at least an estimate.

The post-pandemic shift to work-from-home setups will decrease spending in major metropolitan areas by 5% to 10%, researchers Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven Davis said in a working paper published on Wednesday. The shortfall could even reach 13% in densely populated areas like Manhattan, the team added, citing their own survey data.

“As these workers cut back on commuting, they will spend less on food, shopping, personal services, and entertainment near workplaces clustered in city centers,” the economists said. “Central business districts will see considerably larger spending drops relative to the pre-pandemic levels.”

Such a spending drop would present a major challenge for cities looking to recover from the pandemic’s economic fallout. Consumer spending counts for roughly 70% of economic activity and is a particularly important economic driver in areas that faced strict lockdowns throughout the health crisis.

Retail sales – a popular gauge of Americans’ spending habits – surged to record highs last month as a new wave of stimulus checks and the relaxing of some economic restrictions boosted activity. The measure is expected to climb even higher in April, but as stimulus dries up, Americans’ spending will settle into a new normal.

Cities have little to counter a permanent drop in metro-area spending. Where the federal government can spend at a persistent and growing deficit, state and local authorities have to balance their budgets. The drop in spending forecasted by the team of economists could force cities to either lift taxes or cut spending and risk more economic harm.

What is challenging for urban economies could be a benefit to how good people are at their jobs. Widespread telecommuting is projected to lift productivity by 4.8%, according to the study. Half of those gains reflect savings in diminished commuting times.

Still, those likely to benefit from more remote work aren’t the ones who need the boost. Employer plans suggest that the extent of telecommuting will rise with education and earnings, the team said. The benefits of persistent work-from-home policies “will be broadly felt but flow mainly to the better educated and highly paid,” they added.

With economic data and experts warning of an uneven economic recovery, such disparities would only exacerbate the hiring and income gaps that plagued the country before the COVID-19 recession.

Read the original article on Business Insider