UK employees work from home more than most global rivals, study finds

The Guardian

24-05-2025

UK workers continue to work from home more than nearly any of their global counterparts more than five years after the pandemic first disrupted traditional office life, a study has found.
UK employees now average 1.8 days a week of remote working, above the international average of 1.3 days, according to the Global Survey of Working Arrangements (G-SWA), a worldwide poll of more than 16,000 full-time, university-educated workers across Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa that began in July 2021.
Hybrid working patterns – in which the week is split between the office and another remote location such as home – have become established as the dominant model in advanced economies for staff who are able to carry out their roles remotely.
This is particularly true in English-speaking countries including the UK, US, Canada and Australia, according to the most recent G-SWA, which was conducted between November 2024 and February 2025. Conversely, such arrangements are rare in east Asia, where office-centric culture prevails, and most full-time workers in Japan and South Korea still commute daily to the office.
The popularity of home working in the UK has previously been attributed to the cost and length of commuting, particularly in London and south-east England.
'This isn't just a post-pandemic hangover – British workers have clearly decided they're not going back to the old ways. Remote work has moved from being an emergency response to becoming a defining feature of the UK labour market,' said Dr Cevat Giray Aksoy, a G-SWA co-founder and associate professor at King's College London.
'This shift is forcing businesses, policymakers, and city planners to reimagine everything from office space to transport to regional growth,' added Aksoy, who is also an associate research director at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
Despite the introduction of strict return-to-office mandates at a handful of large companies, including the retail company Amazon and the asset management firm BlackRock, home working levels have stabilised in the UK since 2023, in what the researchers called a 'labour market equilibrium'.
Men and women work from home at similar rates in every leading region of the world, the study found, although the desire for home working is strongest among women with children. Parents surveyed said they were more likely to adopt hybrid work, while those without children prefer either fully office-based or fully remote working models.
Younger respondents showed a stronger preference for working from the office, as a way to get noticed by senior colleagues, or to learn informally from their peers.
'Hybrid work is no longer the exception, it's the expectation,' Aksoy said, adding that the research had not found any strong evidence that remote work came at the cost of productivity for organisations.
This could not, however, be said for fully remote roles. 'Its impact on productivity varies dramatically depending on the type of job and how it's managed,' Aksoy said. 'In many cases, fully remote roles are concentrated in call centres or data entry, jobs that are already under pressure from automation and AI.'
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The findings came as a separate poll from King's College found less than half (42%) of workers would comply with an employer's requirement for them to return to the office full-time, compared with 54% in early 2022.
Women and parents were most likely to resist strict return mandates, researchers at the Global Institute for Women's Leadership at King's and its business school found. By late 2024, 55% of women said they would seek a new job if required to return to the office full-time.
Researchers have previously suggested that some companies have issued strict return-to-office mandates as a way to shed excess staff hired under fully remote arrangements during the pandemic.
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