Brits Home Working Spend More Time Doing Job

An official report has highlighted the benefits to employers of staff working from home during the Coronavirus pandemic.

The report from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on Monday revealed that Britons are spending more time on their job when they work from home, doing on average 6 hours of unpaid overtime a week.

And the study found home workers were less likely to take time off sick.

Remote working

The ONS study of working habits during the Coronavirus pandemic, found that of the employed population, 35.9 percent did some work at home in 2020, an increase of 9.4 percentage points compared with 2019.

This also includes a change in the type of people who worked from home in 2020, and equates to more than 11 million people.

This means that a surprising number of British workers still continued to travel into work during the pandemic.

People who mainly worked from home were less than half as likely to be promoted than all other workers between 2012 and 2017, when controlling for other factors, the ONS found.

It also found that people who mainly worked from home were around 38 percent less likely on average to have received a bonus compared with those who never worked from home between 2013 and 2020, when controlling for other factors.

Unpaid overtime

People who completed any work from home did 6.0 hours of unpaid overtime on average per week in 2020, compared with 3.6 hours for those that never work from home.

The ONS also found that there is considerable regional variation in homeworking, not all of which is explained by differences in the types of industries that operate in each region.

Homeworkers were more likely to work in the evenings compared with those who worked away from home in September 2020.

The sickness absence rate for workers doing any work from home was 0.9 percent on average in 2020, compared with 2.2 percent for those who never worked from home in their main job