The Allocation of Time and Remote Work — With Evidence on Employee Engagement and Remote Work

The proportion of employees who work remotely has surged from under 5% to over 60% between January to March 2020, converging to roughly 28% of days working from home versus in the office as of 2023. Motivated by these large structural shifts in the nature of work, this paper studies the allocation of time among workers across jobs that vary in their remote intensity. Drawing on the American Time Use Survey between 2019 and 2022, I document three main results. First, time allocated to leisure increased and to work decreased among more remote jobs with no significant change in home production. Second, these changes were concentrated among males, singles, and those without children. Third, these declines in labor supply cannot explain the recent decline in productivity; in contrast, sectors with greater remote work intensity exhibited greater productivity growth. In addition, I will also present results from a complementary paper that draws on employee engagement and labor market data from over 70,000 workers. While there is a positive association between always WFH and satisfaction, it vanishes after controlling for employee compensation, occupation, demographics, and workplace environment characteristics (e.g., feeling appreciated at work). Employees who always WFH also have a higher intention to leave their job than employees who never work from home. In contrast, less frequent WFH arrangements relate to higher satisfaction but no difference in intention to leave, and their impact is limited relative to workplace environment characteristics.

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