While it’s perhaps fair to say that the wholesale surge toward remote working that was triggered by the Covid pandemic has not endured post-pandemic, it is equally fair to say that remote working is far more common today than it was before 2020.

Research from Harvard Business School explores which places are actually best for remote working, whether in terms of industry, location, or even skill set.

Growing demand

Over the past four years, the prevalence of job listings offering the option of remote work for one or more days per week has experienced a remarkable surge in the United States. According to data analysis, the number of such postings has increased by over three times during this period.

Meanwhile, countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom have witnessed even more astounding growth, with job openings soaring by a factor of at least five.

However, it is worth noting that this trend is not universal. In certain cities such as Miami, Savannah in Georgia, and Memphis, the rate of job listings advertising remote work options has either decelerated or stabilized.

“There has been a discrete change,” the researchers explain. “The notion that we will go back to a point in which at least some firms will not commit to remote work—we’ve passed that moment. Having said that, we are also clearly not, at the other extreme of remote work, seeing a universal type of practice that every firm is going to apply.”

Understanding the demand

In collaboration with market analytics firm Lightcast, the researchers developed a novel algorithm called the “Work from Home Algorithmic Measure” or WHAM, to identify the prevalence and nature of remote work.

To train WHAM, 10,000 text excerpts were labeled by a team of experts to identify remote work language in job postings. This training data was then used to enable WHAM to process more than 250 million job listings and categorize them according to location, job type, industry, and more. The result is a powerful tool for parsing the intricacies of remote work trends and patterns.

The findings suggest a huge amount of variation across industries, cities, and also occupations. For instance, jobs based in places like New York and San Francisco tend to be more likely to offer remote working opportunities than those based in cities in the south of the country, such as Miami.

There were also considerable differences according to the profession. The finance, insurance, information, and communications industries exhibit the highest proportion of remote workers, as reported by the authors.

Furthermore, jobs that demand computer use and education prerequisites tend to offer remote work options, as opposed to roles that necessitate face-to-face customer interactions. For instance, pre-pandemic, a meager 5% of job advertisements with “computer and mathematical” requirements cited remote work as an option, which is set to surge to over a third by 2022.

Culture is key

The corporate culture in each organization was also found to play a big role in whether remote work was offered or not. In the automotive industry, for instance, very few companies offered remote work prior to the pandemic, but by 2022 Honda offered it to around half of new engineering hires. This wasn’t the case at Ford, however, for whom only one-sixth of new hires were given the option, while Tesla famously oppose it altogether. Similar patterns were found in other industries too.

“There is so much variability in the decision to commit to remote work, even for companies that are in the same industry and compete for the same type of talent,” the researchers say. “That tells you the decision depends on whatever makes sense for the company at that point in time in terms of strategy, technology, management processes that they already have, and probably the culture.”

The findings show that finding a job where remote working is an option depends heavily on the location, the profession, and the culture of the individual organization. The authors continue to believe, however, that providing remote work is likely to remain important to help firms attract the talent they need.

“More and more, this will become one element in the value proposition that companies have to create for prospective employees,” they explain. “And, in part, you will compete for talent based on whether you offer remote work, which clearly is appealing for certain types of talent and certain types of demographics.”