Depending on the Industry, WFH May Be Approaching Saturation

While many workers are toiling from home during COVID-19, not every occupation was accustomed to remote work before the pandemic.

Looking at office-using occupations across the 35 largest US MSAs, Cushman & Wakefield found that the highest rates of remote work were found among the advertising (14.4%), art and design (17.7%) and media occupations (22.1%). Sales professionals also had higher work from home rates compared to other occupations. Eighteen percent of sales professionals for the real estate industry report mostly working from home, though that percentage is probably higher among residential real estate professionals.

It is not likely, though, that these occupations will settle in at those percentages, C&W concluded.

“Thus, the likely future WFH take-up rate has been expanded by the experience of 2020—there will be no going back to the prior equilibrium,” it said.

The average occupation had a maximum remote work share of about 30% across the top 35 markets. But sometimes this percentage was as high as 80%. “This suggests that even before the crisis, most occupations were well-below their theoretical ceiling on average,” according to Cushman.

On the other hand, many occupations won’t ever move into a full WFH environment but will move closer to where they were before COVID.

Cushman notes that media and communications, where 22.1% reported usually working from home in 2019, may be approaching a saturation point. Other fields that had a high percentage of teleworkers in 2019 were media and communication equipment workers (16.6%) and other healthcare practitioners and technical occupations (15.1%).

In fact after COVID-19, every worker, company, industry and market will be finding a new equilibrium. “The ‘efficient frontier,’ so-to-speak, of WFH had never been fully achieved, even among industries or occupations that had higher take-up rates, or utilization, of WFH pre-COVID-19,” according to Cushman.

People in some white-collar occupations, like life science, physical science and social science technicians (for which the 2019 remote work rate equals 4.1%) are more limited in their ability to work remotely.

Cushman says that for other occupations, like public relations (which had a 14.4% telework rate in 2019), the workplace dynamics for companies hiring these individuals may have already adjusted to large remote work shares and may be approaching a plateau.

Just as specific sectors are more compatible with remote, some occupations make more sense to be in the office.

For instance, Christopher Rhie, an associate principal with the Los Angeles office of global firm Buro Happold, says the financial sector wants to be in the office. “Goldman Sachs built a giant tower just across the water [from New York City] in Jersey City, and nobody wanted to go there,” Rhie says. “That was how strongly the global financial sector workforce wanted to be on Wall Street. So even moving just across the Hudson River was too much of a leap. So that’s why it’s going to be highly dependent on the industry.”