‘Permanent’ work from home jobs on the rise

Work-from-home job ads, including those offering “permanent” work from home (WFH), have almost doubled over the past nine months, with indicators the rise is continuing post-lockdown, new data shows.Research from data analytics firm The Purpose Bureau found job ads offering temporary and permanent WFH options had increased 95 per cent from March 1 to December 31, 2021.

Firms less than two years old, which tend to recruit far more than their small share of the economy would suggest, were also 41 per cent more likely to offer remote working than mature firms.

The research used natural language processing to analyse online hiring activity, and, while not always able to distinguish temporary from permanent WFH offers, Purpose Bureau CEO Nick Kamper said it was clear that permanent remote working had become a feature of the employment landscape.

“We are seeing a substantial rise in firms offering WFH as a permanent fixture, particularly by younger firms under two years old,” he said.

Professional services had the highest proportion of WFH offers, making 798 offers every 10,000 ads, followed by administrative jobs (628) and media and technology (590).

One IT consultancy in the Brisbane CBD advertised recently that a senior developer job was “100 per cent WFH” while another in Sydney offered a permanent role with a hybrid work model.

An ad this week for a civil design engineer in Sydney also pitched a “flexible, trust-based culture where people WFH regularly”.

 work from home chart
 

The ads increased from 290 per 10,000 job ads in March to a peak of 574 in September, when Victoria and NSW were in lockdown. While dropping slightly since then, numbers were still at 565 by the end of the year.

“The proportion of job ads that included a work from home provision has remained elevated even after the harshest restrictions were lifted in NSW and Victoria,” Mr Kamper said.

“We are expecting it to hang on. It will drop a bit, it’s just inevitable. But there will be a structural increase in temporary and fixed remote working.”

Mr Kamper said that it was noticeable that firms aged two years or less had far more WFH offers than firms five years or older, with 589 offers per 10,000 job ads compared to 489 per 10,000 respectively.

“Younger firms are tomorrow’s firms. In a year or two years time, as those firms mature, if we see the same trend, we’re going to see them do it even more,” he said.

This could have broader effects on the economy, including for rents and prices for commercial leases, he said.

Firms with above-average ratings from online employee reviews were almost three times as likely to offer WFH arrangements compared to those with a low rating.

Australian Human Resources Institute chief executive Sarah McCann-Bartlett said the data correlated with the Institute’s informal surveys of members, which showed part of the reason employees were leaving in recent months was because their firms did not offer WFH.

“Voluntary turnover is increasing month by month and employers understand that they need to be providing the flexibility that employees are demanding,” she said.

She said before the omicron outbreak employers had been expecting to introduce regular WFH arrangements in 2022 as part of a hybrid model that included some time in the office.

“That has been put on hold in some states, but employers were trialling those new models as a permanent feature, knowing that there would have to be tweaks as we found out what the right balance was.

SOURCE: https://www.afr.com/work-and-careers/workplace/permanent-work-from-home-jobs-on-the-rise-20220109-p59mup

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