https://hbr.org/2023/12/research-the-growing-inequality-of-who-gets-to-work-from-home Harvard Business Review Home Subscribe Cart Sign In Hi, Guest [ ] [ ] CLEAR * * * * * * * SUGGESTED TOPICS * * * Explore HBR * Latest * The Magazine * Ascend * Podcasts * Store * Webinars * Newsletters Popular Topics * Managing Yourself * Leadership * Strategy * Managing Teams * Gender * Innovation * Work-life Balance * All Topics For Subscribers * The Big Idea * Data & Visuals * Reading Lists * Case Selections * HBR Learning * Subscribe My Account * My Library * Topic Feeds * Orders * Account Settings * Email Preferences * Log Out * Sign In * * * * Subscribe Latest Podcasts The Magazine Ascend Store Webinars Newsletters All Topics The Big Idea Data & Visuals Reading Lists Case Selections HBR Learning My Library Account Settings Log Out Sign In Your Cart Your Shopping Cart is empty. Visit Our Store Guest User Subscriber My Library Topic Feeds Orders Account Settings Email Preferences Log Out Reading List Reading Lists [HBR_logo_b] Hybrid work Research: The Growing Inequality of Who Gets to Work from Home An analysis of online job postings found that remote-work opportunities increasingly skew toward the highly paid and highly educated. by * Peter John Lambert, * Nicholas Bloom, * Steven Davis, * Stephen Hansen, * Yabra Muvdi, * Raffaella Sadun, and * Bledi Taska by * Peter John Lambert, * Nicholas Bloom, * Steven Davis, * Stephen Hansen, * Yabra Muvdi, * Raffaella Sadun, and * Bledi Taska December 19, 2023 [Dec23_14_2] Synchro Shoot/Stocksy * Tweet * Post * Share * Annotate * Save * Get PDF * Buy Copies * Print Summary. There is a large and growing divide in terms of who gets to work from home. Research on job postings found that remote work is far more common for higher paid roles, for roles that require more experience, for full-time work, and for roles that require more education. Managers should be aware of this divide, as it has the potential to create toxic dynamics within teams and to sap morale. * Tweet * Post * Share * Annotate * Save * Get PDF * Buy Copies * Print Leer en espanol Ler em portugues Remote work has exploded since the pandemic struck, and employees like it. In speaking to hundreds of managers about this development, one concern crops up again and again: The shift to remote work is highly unequal. Front-line staff with modest paychecks rarely enjoy the benefits of working from home. Instead, they commute every workday to engage customers and coworkers, operate machinery, and look after facilities. In contrast, highly paid professionals and managers often work from home two or three days a week -- saving time, money, and aggravation. Business leaders rightly worry that this divide could hurt morale among front-line staff, undermine perceived fairness, and create new rifts in the workforce. Just how big is the divide in opportunities to work from home? And where is it largest? To provide answers, we turned to a database of online job ads in the United States. Our research confirms that remote-work opportunities skew strongly towards the highly paid. These opportunities are also more common for those with more education and more experience. They are rare for part-time workers. On each dimension, the divide is much greater now than in 2019. That leads us to suggest how managers might respond. To carry out our analysis, we first obtained a near-universe of all U.S. online job ads from Lightcast (scraped daily from thousands of job listing websites, public job boards, company websites, etc). We sampled 10,000 of these job ads and had each one read by multiple humans and classified according to our criteria and instructions. The readers assessed whether an advert says the job allows for fully remote work or a hybrid arrangement (e.g., two days per week at home, and three in the office). This classification task is nontrivial, because language usage evolves and differs across occupations and organizations. Working-from-home, WFH, hybrid, remote working, telework, flexible work location are just some of the terms used to indicate remote work in job ads. Many ads also use negation -- as in "Remote Work: No" or "We don't allow work from home." Human readers can cut through this linquistic complexity and, in most cases, classify job ads with high confidence. Next, we trained a large language model (LLM) to replicate the human classifications. We tested the model on a part of our sample that it was not trained on and found that it achieves a 98% accuracy rate in replicating the human classifications. Armed with our highly accurate LLM, we applied it to hundreds of millions of job postings over the past decade. In this way, we created reams of monthly statistics on work-from-home opportunities by occupation, industry, city and more. (We make these statistics available at www.wfhmap.com , the largest and most accurate source of statistics on U.S. job postings that offer remote work.) So what did we find? In short, a great divide in opportunities to work from home. Pay Levels First, as Figure 1 shows, remote-work opportunities are rare in jobs with annual pay around $30,000. These jobs cover roughly the bottom quartile of the earnings distribution. As we move up the earnings scale, the share of job ads offering hybrid or fully remote work gradually rises. As of 2023, the share is about 10% of jobs that pay $60,000, 20% of those that pay $100,000, and above 30% for jobs that pay around $200,000. Equally striking is the fact that work-from-home opportunities rise much more sharply with pay in 2023 than in 2019. The link between salary and ability to work from home is a new phenomenon. offering hybrid or remote work increases as salaries rise. In 20 19, about 1% of job postings in the $20,000 salary range offered remote or hybrid work; in 20 23 that share only increased to 2%. In 20 19, nearly 8% of jobs in the $200,000 range offered remote or hybrid opportunities, and that share jumped to 30 percent in 20 23. Sources: w F h map.com and LightCast.io. See more HBR charts in Data & Visuals Education Turning to education, Figure 2 shows that hybrid or remote work is rare in jobs that require no more than a high school education. Jobs with greater educational requirements offer more opportunities for remote work. Nearly 30% of adverts that specify the need for a post-graduate degree also offer the opportunity to work remotely at least some of the time. These jobs make heavy use of computers and often involve activities (data analysis, reading reports, writing memos, and the like) that can performed effectively at home or other remote location. The education divide in opportunities to work remotely is also much stronger in 2023 than in 2019. This bar chart shows the share of job postings offering hybrid or remote work, by educational requirement, for the years 20 19 and 20 23. Just 1.6% of jobs requiring only a High school education offered work from home in 20 19, which barely increased to 1.9 percent in 20 23. Of jobs requiring an associate's degree, 1.9 percent offered work from home opportunities in 20 19, which increased to 6.2 percent in 20 23. At the Bachelor's degree level, 4.9 percent of job listings in 20 19 offered remote or hybrid work, which jumped to 14.9 percent in 20 23. Of jobs requiring a Master's degree, 7.1 percent offered work from home in 20 19, which more than tripled to 27.1 percent in 20 23. At the doctorate level, 16.8 percent of job postings offered remote or hybrid work opportunities in 2019, jumping to 29 percent in 20 23. Sources: w f h map.com and LightCast.io. See more HBR charts in Data & Visuals Work Experience Figure 3 highlights another striking aspect of the divide: Jobs that require more experience offer more opportunities to work remotely. As of 2023, only 3% of adverts for entry-level jobs (requiring less than one year of experience) offer remote work. That makes sense, because entry-level workers typically need more training, monitoring, and mentoring -- activities that can benefit greatly from face-to-face interactions in the workplace. Moving up the experience ladder, remote-work opportunities become more abundant. For jobs that require at least seven years of experience, more than one-quarter of the adverts say remote work is allowed. These experienced workers tend to be older individuals with more family responsibilities, bigger homes, and less need for in-person mentoring. The experience divide is also much larger in 2023 than in 2019. This bar chart shows the share of job postings offering hybrid or remote work, by years of experience required, for the years 20 19 and 20 23. Just 2.4% of jobs requiring less than a year of experience offered work from home in 20 19, which only increased to 4.2 percent in 20 23. Of jobs requiring 1 to 3 years of experience, 5.3 percent offered remote or hybrid work in 20 19, jumping to 10 percent in 20 23. Of jobs requiring 4 to 6 years of experience, 5.9 percent offered work from home opportunities in 20 19, which more than tripled to 22.9 percent in 20 23. The greatest leap occurred in jobs requiring 7 to 9 years of experience, of which 5.1 percent offered remote or hybrid work in 20 19, increasing to 34.2 percent in 20 23. At a requirement of 10 or more years of experience, 6.7 percent of job postings in 20 19 offered work from home, jumping to 27.6 percent in 20 23. Sources: w f h map.com and LightCast.io. See more HBR charts in Data & Visuals Full-time Versus Part-time There is also a clear divide between part-time and full-time jobs. As of 2023, about 3% of adverts for part-time jobs feature remote-work opportunities, as compared to more than 10% for full-time jobs. This divide, too, is much larger in 2023 than in 2019. How should managers and executives respond? First, managers and executives should recognize and acknowledge the work-from-home divide. The concerns about "them and us" when it comes to working arrangements are grounded in reality. Second, consider aligning the working arrangements of managers with those of their front-line staff to avoid perceptions of unfairness within teams. This already happens in many organizations. According to our Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes, mangers in front-line industries like retail, food services, and accommodations have fewer work-from-home days than managers in finance and information services. That's because onsite work teams benefit from onsite managers. Third, consider other forms of flexibility for employees who must work onsite. Compared to a traditional five-day workweek at eight hours per day, a four-day workweek at 10 hours per day cuts weekly commute time by a fifth. That lets front-line employees enjoy some of the savings in commute time reaped by white-collar employees as they shifted to more work from home. Fourth, consider pay adjustments to compensate for the highly uneven benefits associated with remote work. Most employees see working from home two or three days a week as a valuable job amenity -- one that might come with less wage growth for a spell. For employees who must work onsite, a one-time upward pay bump for employees may be warranted. Statistics extracted from millions of job postings, and survey data as well, provide compelling evidence that the pandemic led to a new, large divide in opportunities to work remotely. The divide cuts sharply across groups of workers defined by pay levels, education, and experience. This divide is new, but because remote work has proved practical and beneficial in many jobs and tasks, it will likley endure. Business leaders must recognize it and manage the consequences. Read more on Hybrid work or related topics Remote work, Leading teams and Compensation and benefits * PL Peter John Lambert is a Ph.D candidate at the London School of Economics. * Nicholas Bloom is a professor of economics at Stanford University. * SD Steven Davis is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. * SH Stephen Hansen is an associate professor of economics at Imperial College Business School. * YM Yabra Muvdi is a Ph.D. student at ETH Zurich's Law, Economics, and Data Science Group. * Raffaella Sadun is the Charles E. Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. * BT Bledi Taska is an economist at SkyHive. * Tweet * Post * Share * Annotate * Save * Get PDF * Buy Copies * Print Read more on Hybrid work or related topics Remote work, Leading teams and Compensation and benefits Partner Center Latest Magazine Ascend Topics Podcasts Store The Big Idea Data & Visuals Case Selections HBR Learning Harvard Business Review Home Subscribe Explore HBR * The Latest * All Topics * Magazine Archive * The Big Idea * Reading Lists * Case Selections * Podcasts * Webinars * Data & Visuals * My Library * Newsletters * HBR Press * HBR Ascend HBR Store * Article Reprints * Books * Cases * Collections * Magazine Issues * HBR Guide Series * HBR 20-Minute Managers * HBR Emotional Intelligence Series * HBR Must Reads * Tools About HBR * Contact Us * Advertise with Us * Information for Booksellers/Retailers * Masthead * Global Editions * Media Inquiries * Guidelines for Authors * HBR Analytic Services * Copyright Permissions Manage My Account * My Library * Topic Feeds * Orders * Account Settings * Email Preferences * Account FAQ * Help Center * Contact Customer Service Follow HBR * Facebook * Twitter * LinkedIn * Instagram * Your Newsreader Harvard Business Publishing * About Us * Careers * Privacy Policy * Cookie Policy * Copyright Information * Trademark Policy Harvard Business Publishing: * Higher Education * Corporate Learning * Harvard Business Review * Harvard Business School Copyright (c) Harvard Business School Publishing. 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