Contents

 In this project, we compare productivity in onsite work and remote work. The impact of remote work on productivity can vary greatly depending on a variety of factors including the nature of the work, the individual worker's circumstances and preferences as well as the tools and technology used. Some people might experience a decrease in productivity while working remotely due to factors like distractions at home, lack of work-life boundaries, communication and collaboration challenges and technical issues. Is there really a drop in productivity? Are they willing to sacrifice that let down in productivity and continue remote working? Or are they willing to report at their respective work locations. Let's take a look at what the data says.

Firstly, we consider how many people like the concept of remote working. There are different metrics for that such as time preferred to work remotely in the future or imagining a hypothetical scenario where COVID-19 is eradicated and whether the employees would like to stay in their current trajectory. Given below are some histograms for the same:

Why do people prefer off-site work?

There is no straight-forward answer to this as it is just a sum of all contributing factors. But let's dive into some of the best factors. 

The data delineates a predilection among the majority for remote work, primarily attributed to the diminished time requisite for commuting. As elucidated by the chart, the paramount advantage of remote work is the substantial reduction in time traditionally earmarked for both commuting and preparatory activities associated with conventional on-site employment. Consequently, the question arises: what exactly do they do with the 'extra' time that they obtain then?  

Let's take a look at some of the best and worst aspects of remote working now. To make it easier, just click the Play Button.

Time-Allocation

Now that we learned some of the prominent advantages of remote-working, let's take a look at how the homo-sapiens make use of the additional time. 

Our team took the trimmed mean(10%) of each activities - Preparing and commuting, Working, Personal and family time, Caring and domestic responsibilities on a day of on-site work and remote work. Given below are some bar-charts and histograms of the above-mentioned activities. Trimmed mean was utilized so as to make our analysis more robust and less sensitive to outliers.

Delving deeper into how remote workers utilize their extra time, our robust analysis using a 10% trimmed mean revealed noteworthy insights. The added time from remote working does not go into extended work hours. Instead, the increase in available time is significantly allocated towards personal and family activities, which see a rise from 23.7% of a day's time in an onsite work environment to 28.7% in a remote work setup.

Additionally, there is a marginal but notable increase of 1.8% in time spent on caring and domestic responsibilities. This suggests that remote work not only provides more opportunity for work-life balance but also facilitates a better distribution of time towards domestic responsibilities. Our analysis provides a granular view of how the transition to remote work has positively affected employees' time management, favoring a more balanced and holistic approach to work and life.

Conclusion

Our analysis has demonstrated a clear preference among the workforce for the concept of remote working. This preference remains strong even when considering the possibility of a post-COVID-19 scenario, indicating a shift in employee work preferences that extend beyond the pandemic's influence.