I don't care if I never get back, part 2

In my last post, I discussed a question about whether you would like to work from home after the coronavirus pandemic was over.  Blacks were more interested in working from home and more educated people were less interested.   The survey also contained some questions about how different aspects of your job had changed since the beginning of the pandemic, so I compared racial and educational groups on these.  An alternative approach would be to look for group differences in the difference between people who reported working from home more than they had before the pandemic vs. those reporting working from home the same (or less, in few cases).  I looked and didn't see much of anything, but given the sample size, there's very little power to detect interactions, especially for race.  However, I think that the simple comparison is meaningful because even people who were not currently working from home had experienced it and in most cases were still affected by it because of having co-workers who were working from home.  That is, the great majority of people in jobs where it was possible to work from home were experiencing a workplace in which people weren't all in the same place at the same time.

 All of the questions had a more/less/the same format, so I summarized them as percent more minus percent less.  

                                       non-black            black

Flexibility in hours             +28                        +18
Job security                          -11                       -5
Balance work/family             -1                        -13
*Connected co-workers        -45                       -22
Opportunities to advance    -16                        -12
Know what's expected         -15                       -9
Productive                             +0                         +3
More hours                          +14                        +16

Satisfied with job                  -6                          +2

The biggest difference (and the only one that is statistically significant) is in feeling connected to your co-workers.  Both blacks and non-blacks say that they are less connected, but the drop among blacks is only about half as large.  One possible explanation is that they felt less connected before the pandemic, so they had less to lose.  But more blacks reported an increase in feeling connected (16% compared to 8%).   It seems likely that remote work led to an increase in the importance of formal relative to informal communications.  That could mean that people who hadn't been near the center of things now felt like they were being consulted more or hearing sooner than they had been.  Blacks also did relatively better in knowing what your supervisor expected, opportunities to advance, and feeling productive, although none of the differences were statistically significant.  So these differences give some support to the account in the New York Times story that I criticized last time--the idea was that remote work meant that blacks could focus on doing the job rather than on trying to break into the "old boys' club."

                                        high school            some college     BA+

*Flexibility in hours             +8                        +18                     +30
*Job security                          -1                       -2                      -15
Balance work/family             -36                       -25                  -50
*Connected co-workers        -36                      -25                   -50
Opportunities to advance    -11                        -14                   -17
*Know what's expected         -3                       -10                    -19
Productive                             +3                         +4                 -1
*More hours                          +4                        +8                   +19

Satisfied with job                  -9                         -0                    -6

For education, there are several statistically significant differences:  more education workers report more increase in flexibility, but more drop in connectedness, knowing what's expected, and job security.  There's little or no difference in reported productivity, but more educated workers report more increase in hours worked.  I would say that the differences in connectedness and knowing what's expected are because interaction at work isn't just a matter of socializing or team-building, as the Times articles suggest, but also sometimes involve exchanging complex information, which is harder to do effectively in remote work.  Exchanging complex information is likely to be a bigger part of the jobs done by more educated workers, which accounts for the differences.  The combination of increased flexibility and increased hours also seems likely to be due to a difference in the kind of jobs:  more educated workers are more likely to have open-ended jobs.  It's also interesting that the relative increase in work hours is almost exactly balanced by a relative decline in job security--if workers are putting in more hours, employers may think they don't need as many.  

Common sense suggests that remote work will have different effects for different people, depending on personality, type of work, family situation, and lots of other things.  Moreover, it's not hard to think of ways in which it could enhance workers' power against employers and other ways in which it could reduce it.  So I'm not sure why the Times has become so attached to an interpretation in which remote work is an unambiguous good.  (Since I wrote my first post, it ran another story about the alleged benefits of remote work, this one saying that people were more productive outside the office).

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]