Work from home.

Survey data suggest that people like working from home, which helps lower firms’ overheads and carbon emissions, but evidence on the impact on productivity is mixed. The Freespace index, which tracks office usage in big corporations worldwide, shows that occupancy is about half its 2019 levels for both workspace stations and meeting rooms. Kastle data, which tracks fob access to US offices, particularly in big professional services businesses, shows that occupancy returned to only about half of pre-pandemic levels in mid-October. A survey by Munich-based think-tank Ifo showed that in August, a quarter of employees in Germany still worked from home for at least part of the time.

In Japan, footfall was 7 per cent below pre-pandemic levels, while in the UK, it was down 24 per cent. Across major advanced economies, office trips are more popular on the middle days of the week, while Monday and Friday tend to show significant drops in attendance. According to Google figures, cities hosting financial and business districts had a more considerable loss of office footfall than other major population areas. The significant shift to working from home «presents challenges for dense urban centres that are organised to support a large volume of inward commuters and a high concentration of commercial activity», said Aksoy.

In the UK, the Office for National Statistics survey showed that more than a fifth of UK workers was using a hybrid working model in early October, essentially unchanged since the spring.

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