How Remote Workers Are Counted Changes Results
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How Remote Workers Are Counted Changes Results
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WASHINGTON, D.C. — Remote work became one of the defining economic stories of the pandemic and continues to shape the conversation about the future of work and cities. But even on a seemingly simple question — how many people are working from home — surveys conducted by different entities during the pandemic produced estimates that ranged from about one in five workers to more than half of the workforce working remotely.
While some survey choices that led to these divergences have been fixed, other choices continue to differ and thus contribute to varying estimates of who is working remotely, and how often, today.
In a recent paper in the Review of Income and Wealth, we found that the discrepancy results from choices about what surveys measure, whom they include, and how they ask the questions.
A Gallup-partnered study, the Remote Life Survey (RLS), shows just how those choices can move the headline work-from-home number of 53.5% to potentially much lower rates — and why precision in measurement matters to leaders who make data-driven decisions about work.
The RLS, conducted by web using the probability-based Gallup Panel in October–November 2020, asked U.S. adults the following:
“In the past month, about how often did you work from home as part of your job?”
Never
Once or twice
About once a week
3–4 times a week
I always worked from home.
Respondents were also asked a parallel question about their pre-pandemic work-from-home habits before Feb. 1, 2020, with a slightly expanded scale that added “A few times a year” and “About once a month” to capture the lower frequencies more common before the pandemic.
Among workers who were employed at the time of the survey, the RLS study found that the percentage working from home varied considerably, depending on how that circumstance was defined. At the strictest end, 31.6% said they always worked from home. Expanding the definition to include those working remotely 3-4 times a week brought that figure to 41.2%. Adding those who worked from home about once a week yielded 46.9%, and including those who did so once or twice in the prior month produced the broadest estimate of 53.5%.
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In other words, the RLS alone can generate a range of more than 20 percentage points simply based on where you draw the line. The rightmost RLS data point shown in Figure 1 reflects the broadest definition — sometimes or always working from home — which totals 53.5% and includes all respondents who worked remotely at least once in the prior month.
Yet during the same period, the U.S. Current Population Survey (CPS), the government’s flagship labor force survey, reports that only about 20% of workers were teleworking. Estimates from other academic and private surveys fell between those of the RLS and CPS. These include Gallup’s COVID-19 tracking data, the Real-Time Population Survey in partnership with the Dallas Federal Reserve (Bick et al.), and the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes (SWAA) in partnership with researchers from Stanford University and the Atlanta Federal Reserve (Barrero et al.). These results were generally in the high 30s to high 40s in the same fall 2020 time frame.
The RLS shows how much the topline depends on the definition of remote work: counting only those who always work from home produces a much lower estimate than counting anyone who worked from home at least once in the prior month. The full paper examines four main sources of divergence: mode of data collection, inclusion of self-employed workers, occupational composition, and survey administration and design — particularly whether surveys count total remote work or only pandemic-induced remote work. Each one nudges the estimate a few percentage points, and together they account for most of the gap between the highest and lowest estimates.
The fourth source of divergence is easy to overlook: even within a single survey, how you define working from home changes the headline number considerably.
As the earlier figure shows, the RLS alone produces estimates ranging from 31.6% to 53.5%, depending on where you draw the definitional line, from always working from home to working from home at least once or twice in the previous month. Many surveys often make similar but undisclosed definitional choices related to the sampling or question wording, for instance, which means two surveys asking ostensibly the same question may be counting respondents differently before any other methodological differences come into play.
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Web-Only Versus Mixed-Mode Surveys
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