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Canadians on average work from home the most and it may be because we put a high value on personal freedoms.
That is the conclusion of a study across 34 countries, which analyzed the factors that influence the tendency to work from home. It found that ‘individualism’ was the key to whether working remotely became entrenched or petered out quickly after the initial pandemic lockdowns.
The research on what drives working from home was co-authored by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and King’s College London along with other international scholars for the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research. Their data came from two surveys that looked at the differences in rates of working from home across countries including cultural, economic and industrial influences. Looking at data from April 2023, the researchers found that at 1.7 days per week, Canadians topped the list of days worked from home and were at almost double the all-countries average of 0.9. The U.K. was second at 1.5, followed by the U.S. at 1.4. In contrast, many large industrial European and Asian countries were lower, such as Japan at 0.7 days and France at 0.9.
Economic and demographic factors had a bearing on the tendency to work from home. For example, some jobs and industries lend themselves more readily to working from home than do others, so it’s no surprise that the researchers found work from home variations between different places as a result of their industrial structure and that cities tend to have a high proportion of workers in ‘knowledge industries’ who can work away from an office. Still, the researchers found only a limited impact between factors such as this when they looked at which countries were most likely to have embraced working from home. In fact, potential factors including lockdown stringency, population density, industry mix and GDP per capita combined only accounted for about one-quarter of the variation between countries when it comes to remote work.
The top factor that explains the variation between countries when it comes to working from home is ‘Individualism’, which explained one-third of the total. The broad definition of this is the way that individuals in a society put a priority on their own ambitions and independence above the collective goals and unity of the group. To measure this, the researchers followed something called Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions Framework. Doing this, they looked at four survey questions that show the preference for various attributes of an ideal job, asking workers to rate how important it is to them to do work that is interesting, have a job that is respected by their family and friends, have sufficient time for their personal and home lives and have job security. All things being equal, they hypothesized that high scores on these questions indicate that workers emphasize self-reliance and expect individuals to take care of their own needs while low scores suggest community ties and collective well-being matter most.
It is plausible there would be a link between individualism and working from home. To work from home successfully a worker needs to be able to operate without close contact with a manager on a daily basis. As well, those who want to work from home indeed are putting an emphasis on their own time and work-life balance, perhaps (although not necessarily) worrying less about what that means for their organization’s goals. Certainly, they do not put the highest value on seeing their colleagues in person on a day-to-day basis. Still, based on the questions in the survey, rather than focusing on individualism, a better way to put it might be to say that Canadians value quality of life, specifically their personal life, and that means they want to work from home. In turn, Canadian employers perhaps recognize and respect this and are open to allowing it more than in other countries.
Given that Americans are thought to value personal freedom so highly, one surprise from the study is that the U.S. ranks third when it comes to working from home. Perhaps that is explained by the fact that as well as valuing individualism there is also an emphasis on community values in that country.
Although the study did not look into regional variations within Canada, it did so across the U.S. and the conclusions there are interesting. Lacking data on individualism within the country, they used (perhaps controversially) data on voting patterns and specifically the share of votes for Joe Biden in 2020 to measure cultural-political differences.
They found that working from home depended on industry mix as well as on population density and ‘Biden voters’ (the proxy for individualism). Industry was the most important factor overall, but population density was more important for college graduates who disproportionately tended to have remote-friendly jobs.
Their findings showed that the likelihood of working from home was positively correlated with the share of Biden voters even after accounting for industrial mix, wages, population density and many demographic factors.
Attitudes toward working from home continue to evolve with both workers and employers struggling to find the best mix. Clearly, however, attitudes and culture play a big part in terms of what workers want. Organizations that want to foster happy and productive workforces would be advised to respect that.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify that the data on how often employees work from home are expressed in days per week.