Back in March, Gov. Greg Abbott issued a directive that would have put an end to remote work for state employees but ended up backtracking on that action just a few weeks ago when he signed a bill into law that will now allow state agencies to develop their own remote work policies.
This bill was strongly supported by the Texas State Employees Union, which surveyed agencies around the state. Most claimed that their remote work policies had no or positive impacts on productivity.
Lauren Bauer is an economic studies fellow at the Brookings Institution, and she’s been tracking some developments with remote work and the American workforce. She joined Texas Standard to discuss some of her findings. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: For this research, I gather you looked at people aged 25 to 54, and you noted that there’s been a big uptick in remote work for these folks since pre-pandemic. That’s no big surprise there, but could you say more about that? What sort of upticks are we talking about?
Lauren Bauer: That’s right. It’s no big surprise, but the numbers are big.
So our best estimate is that in 2019, pre-pandemic, only about seven percent of the workforce was teleworking. When the pandemic hit, it went to more than 50 percent in the spring of 2020.
It’s come down since then and has stabilized at a little less than one in three American workers are teleworking some part of their workday.
Are there particular groups of workers that seem to be benefiting the most from these remote work policies, according to y’all’s findings?
Absolutely. Now that telework is more widely available, we’re seeing many different workers availing themselves of this option.
The highest telework rates are for well-educated workers. Perhaps surprisingly, more than 40% of both men and women who have at least a bachelor’s degree report that they’re teleworking. After them, it’s the parents of young children.
And again, and perhaps surprisingly, both fathers and mothers report higher rates of telework than those with older children or no children at home. And in this case, Texas looks like the U.S. with higher rates of telework for parents of young kids and those with high levels of education.
You obviously knew where I was going to take this because I’ve been curious about just how Texas compares with the rest of the country.
Yeah. No, it looks right in line with the rest of the country.
Telework is higher for parents with young kids and those with high levels of education. And both moms and dads, men and women in those groups, like once you condition on having a bachelor’s degree or condition on a kid under five at home, they look really similar to each other. And that’s surprising and interesting.
Well, let me ask you first, because I have some questions about this, but what did you find surprising and interesting about that finding?
I think that it’s just, it’s less about the gender differences. I think people during the pandemic made a lot of assumptions that telework was better for women. But actually what we’re seeing is telework is better for parents.
Telework is more available to people who are more highly educated. And when you’re looking at it through that lens, men and women are behaving pretty similarly to each other.
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It’s that education differential was what stood out to me. What accounts for it?
I think it’s the different kinds of jobs and job opportunities, and they’re just different kinds of things.
Not everyone needs to go to the grocery store or go to these frontline jobs if you have higher levels of education. And so there’s more opportunity in that job market to have access to telework.
Well, that stands to reason for sure. The coronavirus is obviously what nudged a lot of companies and organizations toward remote work. But I have heard some conversation around the idea that that threw the economy into a short recession. And I’m curious how the labor force has recovered in the years since.
Well, telework didn’t cause the recession. COVID caused the recession. So it wasn’t telework.
So it wasn’t telework that didn’t have a negative impact on the economy itself?
No, telework helped the economy climb out of the recession by making work available at a time when we were expected to be doing social distancing and protecting ourselves and our neighbors from disease.
So the public health emergency instigated interesting, necessary, accelerated opportunities for there to be more work opportunities at a time when people were very worried that the economy was going to continue to collapse. And instead, because of these technologies, because of the flexibility, we were able to rebound much more quickly.
Now, I want to ask about these arguments that have been made since the pandemic, especially by, well, many managers feel that they are not getting the sort of productivity, they’re not hitting the marks as they used to.
And there’s been a growing feeling, at least in the past couple of years, that we need to get people back into their job sites. And there is no substitute for getting to work together in person. And I’m wondering what these trends, if anything, say about that argument.
I mean, that’s certainly something that I believe. I love being in an office with my colleagues, collaborating and working together, and that can be productivity-enhancing.
It’s also true that I love my days at home where I can write by myself without interruption, and that’s productivity-enhancing.
Telework is not a substitute for good management and good management practices. And I think, in either event, good management, good teamwork, good business practices… Telework does not solve those problems.
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Yet at the same time, I know that for years, leading up to the pandemic, there had been a real push among a lot of workers groups saying we shouldn’t be forced to come into the office. And there had been pushback, obviously, from a lot employers saying, “yeah, you really need to be here to make things happen.”
And so I’m wondering if the pandemic has, on a sort of a fundamental level, changed the landscape of where we work and how we do our work for the long haul, or if we’re talking about a gradual drift back into the office. What’s your sense?
I think that what the pandemic showed is that flexibility is important to all kinds of workers.
And going back to this presumption that women were taking extra advantage of the flexibility that happened because of COVID… But what the evidence shows is that there are not huge gender differences here in the take up of telework. And we also have seen, really, increased labor force participation among these groups where flexibility is one of the reasons why.
And so I would try to stay away from this bifurcation of return-to-office-five-days-a-week or telework-all-the-time with workplace flexibilities that increase productivity and make it more likely that people want to even enter the labor force in the first place.
Where do you see this trend ultimately going? Do you think that more of us are going to be eventually returning to the workplace? Are we going to see more hybrid workers? Where do see this trend going?
Well, I do think, as I said, telework has sort of stabilized post-pandemic at about 28% of the workforce, either working fully remotely or in a hybrid situation. And I don’t know what it would take to, you know, destabilize that number in either direction.
