1 The COVID -19 Pandemic and the Future of Telecommuting in the United States Deborah Salon

2025-04-28 0 0 1.24MB 54 页 10玖币

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The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Future of Telecommuting in the United States 
 
Deborah Salon  
School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85281  
Email: dsalon@asu.edu  
 
Laura Mirtich 
School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85281  
Email: lmirtich@asu.edu 
 
Matthew Wigginton Bhagat-Conway  
Department of City and Regional Planning, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599   
Email: mwbc@unc.edu  
 
Adam Costello 
School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85281  
Email: astiffe@asu.edu 
 
Ehsan Rahimi  
Department of Civil, Materials, and Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL 60607  
Email: erahim4@uic.edu  
 
Abolfazl (Kouros) Mohammadian  
Department of Civil, Materials, and Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL 60607  
Email: kouros@uic.edu  
 
Rishabh Singh Chauhan  
Department of Civil, Materials, and Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL 60607  
Email: rchauh6@uic.edu  
  
Sybil Derrible  
Department of Civil, Materials, and Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL 60607  
Email: derrible@uic.edu  
  
Denise da Silva Baker 
School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85281  
Email: denise.silva@asu.edu 
 
Ram M. Pendyala   
School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85281  
Email: Ram.Pendyala@asu.edu  
   

ABSTRACT

This study focuses on an important transport-related long-term effect of the COVID-19

pandemic in the United States: an increase in telecommuting. Analyzing a nationally

representative panel survey of adults, we find that 40-50% of workers expect to telecommute at

least a few times per month post-pandemic, up from 24% pre-COVID. If given the option, 90-

95% of those who first telecommuted during the pandemic plan to continue the practice

regularly. We also find that new telecommuters are demographically similar to pre-COVID

telecommuters. Both pre- and post-COVID, higher educational attainment and income, together

with certain job categories, largely determine whether workers have the option to telecommute.

Despite growth in telecommuting, approximately half of workers expect to remain unable to

telecommute and between 2/3 and 3/4 of workers expect their post-pandemic telecommuting

patterns to be unchanged from their pre-COVID patterns. This limits the contribution

telecommuting can make to reducing peak hour transport demand.

Keywords: remote work, work from home, telecommute, telework, COVID-19, disruption,

survey

MOTIVATION

The COVID-19 pandemic gave many workers extended experience with working from home.

They learned how to telecommute effectively, and they learned what they do and do not like

about it. Employers also learned how to manage remote employees, and they learned what they

do and do not like about having remote employees. Because both workers and employers

learned that they like some aspects of remote work arrangements, many observers have argued

that there will be a permanent shift toward more telecommuting, even after the pandemic is

behind us.

When US workers can safely return to the workplace, will they return to their pre-COVID

commuting patterns? If not, who among them will adopt a “new normal”? How might this change

the environmental impact of our transportation system? What are the implications for worker

productivity and quality of life? Will the “new normal” improve or diminish societal equity? These

questions motivate this research.

Research on the determinants of telecommuting prior to the COVID-19 pandemic

investigated the importance of employment characteristics (e.g., job type, industry, employer

size, length of tenure, and employer policies), demographics (e.g., education, income, gender,

household composition, and race/ethnicity), attitudes, and the built environment (e.g.,

accessibility, urban/rural) (Asgari et al., 2014; Singh et al., 2013; Tang et al., 2011).

Telecommuters tended to be older (Peters et al., 2004; Thériault et al., 2005; Walls et al., 2007),

male (Sener and Bhat, 2011; Thériault et al., 2005; Van Sell and Jacobs, 1994), and well-

educated (Peters et al., 2004; Van Sell and Jacobs, 1994; Walls et al., 2007). A number of

studies point out that the factors associated with having the option to telecommute may differ

from those determining how often a worker actually chooses to do so (Pouri and Bhat, 2003;

Sener and Bhat, 2011; Singh et al., 2013; Walls et al., 2007).

Telecommuting’s impact on travel

Telecommuting has been widely studied as a strategy for reducing travel and its undesirable

consequences such as traffic congestion and poor air quality. Despite hopes that remote work

may be an effective travel reduction strategy, prior literature reports mixed findings. Some find

that telecommuters travel about the same amount or even more than their counterparts who

work in person (Allen et al., 2015; Choo et al., 2002; Zhu, 2012; Zhu et al., 2018). Others have

found a reduction in travel associated with telecommuting (Choo et al., 2005; Henderson and

Mokhtarian, 1996; Shabanpour et al., 2018; Zupan, 1994). These effects are modest, however,

and some note that the reduction in commute miles for a small number of people is simply not a

large enough change to produce substantial travel reductions across the population (Salon et

al., 2012; Walls et al., 2005). An oft-cited reason for this underwhelming reduction in travel is

that telecommuters, freed from a daily commute, are willing to live further from the workplace

and therefore take longer trips when they do visit their workplaces or other destinations (Rhee,

2008). Even if the reduction in vehicle miles traveled is small from telecommuting, some authors

emphasize that remote work still eases congestion by giving remote workers the freedom to

drive at non-peak hours and can reduce the number of high-emission “cold starts” made by

drivers (Shabanpour et al., 2018; Su et al., 2021; Zupan, 1994), thereby providing benefits even

in the absence of substantial travel reduction.

Telecommuting’s impact on personal and professional well-being

Aside from reducing travel, there is substantial interest in telecommuting as a means of

improving individual outcomes for employees, both at work and in their personal lives.

Numerous studies have found that pre-pandemic telecommuting was associated with higher

worker productivity. Two literature reviews of the subject found that productivity gains are

associated with telecommuting in most research (Allen et al., 2015; Van Sell and Jacobs, 1994).

One study estimates productivity gains from telecommuting around 20% (Frolick et al., 1993),

while others report a productivity increase of unspecified magnitude (Soenanto et al., 2016;

Tustin, 2014). Especially before the COVID-19 pandemic, however, telecommuters were likely a

self-selected group with personal and job characteristics exceptionally well-suited to remote

work. This means that these pre-pandemic estimates of productivity gains may not apply to

pandemic-era telecommuters.

Outside of the workplace, telecommuting also influences workers’ personal lives. This

influence is often positive, with remote workers reporting higher job satisfaction (Allen et al.,

2015; Masayuki, 2018; Tustin, 2014; Van Sell and Jacobs, 1994), lower job turnover (Allen et

al., 2015), and higher life satisfaction (Hornung and Glaser, 2009; Masayuki, 2018; Tustin,

2014) than in-person workers. However, some point out that fully remote work does not provide

the best quality of life for many employees (Virick et al., 2010), and a small literature on work-

family conflicts among telecommuters finds inconsistent patterns on whether such conflicts are

eased or intensified by remote work (Allen et al., 2015; Hornung and Glaser, 2009; Sarbu,

2018). Moreover, some negative effects of telecommuting on well-being have been reported,

including poor work-life balance (Grant et al., 2013; Rhee, 2008), social isolation (Allen et al.,

2015; Bentley et al., 2016; Hager, 2018; Van Sell and Jacobs, 1994), and stress due to

technological challenges (Tustin, 2014).

There have been a number of studies of telecommuting during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many have focused on disparities in access to telecommuting, since working from home during

the pandemic protected workers from virus exposure. Key disparities in the ability to work from

home during the pandemic included those between educational attainment groups, income

groups, race/ethnicity groups, and job types (Bick et al., 2021; Gould and Kandra, 2021; Ray

and Ong, 2020; Ward and Kilburn, 2020). Ray and Ong (2020) find that most of the

race/ethnicity disparity can be explained by disparities in income, educational attainment, and

job type. Barrero, Bloom, and Davis (2021) focus on the future of telecommuting, and argue that

pandemic-era telecommuting will “stick” due to a combination of technological advances and

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1TheCOVID-19PandemicandtheFutureofTelecommutingintheUnitedStatesDeborahSalonSchoolofGeographicalSciencesandUrbanPlanning, ArizonaStateUniversity,Tempe, AZ85281Email:dsalon@asu.eduLauraMirtichSchoolofGeographicalSciencesandUrbanPlanning, ArizonaStateUniversity,Tempe, AZ85281Email:lmirtich@asu.eduMatt...

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