Telework versus home business: two realities, different opportunities
How does working from home change the way we organise our lives – and what’s the impact on our well-being? According to the WORKANDHOME project, the answers to these questions are likely to depend on whether you are self-employed, running a small business from home, or an employee. “We found that homeworking is positively related with leisure time satisfaction of both men and women,” explains Darja Reuschke, the principal investigator of the project hosted by the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom. “However, this finding applies to people who are employees, rather than those who are self-employed. This might be due to the different nature of homework in these two scenarios.” Funded by the European Research Council (ERC), WORKANDHOME studied trends in home-based working and businesses in Europe and investigated their wider impact on lifestyles, entrepreneurship and opportunities.
A massive shift
While the project kicked off well before the pandemic, it was able to study how it reshaped some of these trends. “In the initial lockdown periods of spring 2020, home-based working in the United Kingdom increased eight-fold to about 43.1 % of all workers,” Reuschke notes. “We also found that about 9 out of 10 employees who worked at home during the pandemic would like to continue doing so in some capacity going forward, with almost half wanting to continue working at home often or all the time.” “Companies should think about how they can maintain these benefits going forward as they can contribute to improved well-being – especially in terms of leisure time satisfaction – of employees,” she adds. The WORKANDHOME team studied behavioural patterns and changes by combining different data collection tools. A large-scale survey conducted in three British cities (Birmingham, Brighton and Hove, and Leeds) studied the daily travel patterns of homeworkers. To collect data, the researchers developed a GPS tracking app that also asked users questions about their well-being in real time. They also analysed data from a variety of secondary sources such as surveys and other administrative data sets collected by national statistics agencies. “One interesting data source we explored was social media: we used a network of freelancers on Twitter to study where creative entrepreneurial activity happens within a city,” says Jed Long, one of the project’s investigators.
Different, not less, mobility
One of the more surprising findings of their research was that overall daily travel activity was not affected by home-based work and self-employment. “This may be evidence supporting the so-called ‘rebound effect’ which suggests that individuals replace commutes with other types of travel (e.g. for recreation and leisure) if commutes are eliminated due to homeworking,” Long explains. He believes future policy should address the changing mobility needs of homeworkers: “Those in charge of managing transportation infrastructure in general, and specifically public transit, should think carefully about how this growing segment of the population might differentially use these services, and plan with these changes in mind.” The team also looked at the role of digital tools in driving home-based entrepreneurship. They found important gender differences in this field. “There is evidence that future growth of microbusinesses and digital entrepreneurship will increasingly consist of women. Therefore, policies that encourage and foster the work of women entering the digital entrepreneurial sector should be implemented,” Reuschke concludes.
Keywords
WORKANDHOME, homeworking, self-employed, home-based working, pandemic, travel patterns, digital entrepreneurship, microbusinesses
