Employee preferences for working from home in Australia

Date

2023

Authors

Vij, A.
Souza, F.F.
Barrie, H.
Anilan, V.
Sarmiento, S.
Washington, L.

Editors

Advisors

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Type:

Journal article

Citation

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2023; 214:782-800

Statement of Responsibility

Conference Name

Abstract

We surveyed 1,113 Australian employees with jobs that have some capability of being done remotely at least some of the time. Survey respondents were presented stated preference experiments where they were offered a choice between alternative working arrangements for their present job that varied in terms of ability to work remotely and wage rates. This data was used to develop and estimate a discrete choice model of worker preferences for remote working. We found that the average worker in our sample would be willing to forego roughly 4 - 8 per cent of their annual wages to have the ability to work remotely some workdays and/or workhours. However, we found considerable heterogeneity across our sample. Roughly 55 per cent of the sample were not willing to forego wages to have the ability to work remotely, while roughly 20 per cent were willing to forego 16 - 33 per cent in annual wages for the same. We found that attitudes towards the impacts of remote working on human relations were a significant predictor of these differences. Workers who did not value the ability to work remotely were more concerned about negative impacts on their relationships with their colleagues, supervisors, and the firm as a whole, as well as opportunities for learning and career advancement.

School/Discipline

Dissertation Note

Provenance

Description

Data source: Supplementary materials, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2023.08.020

Access Status

Rights

Copyright 2023 The Author(s). This is an open access article under the CC BY license. (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

License

Grant ID

Call number

Persistent link to this record