MobilityWays has analysed the responses of 10,325 commuters in the UK to reveal that, for the third year in a row, more people are choosing sustainable commutes. Yet again, the number of employees commuting by driving alone has decreased, while more sustainable modes overall have continued to increase in popularity.
One of the most fascinating trends from Commuter Census 2024 was the shift away from home working – both in practice and in preference. Just 26% of respondents said they would consider working from home as an alternative to their current commute – a fall of 42% compared to 12 months earlier.
Meanwhile, employers are increasingly enforcing full-time office working: 41% of respondents said they were no longer working at home at all, while the average number of working-from-home days has dropped to 1.6 days a week this year from 1.8 in 2023.
Are people fed up with working from home?
Four years on from the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, it appears people are finally bored with working from home.
Possibly the most remarkable result from Commuter Census 2024 is that just 26% of respondents said they would consider working from home as an alternative to their current mode of commuting – a whopping 42% decrease compared to last year.
Does this mean that people want to work full time in the office?
Despite the above, almost a fifth (17%) of people would still work from home five days a week if they had the choice – an increase by three percentage points from last year. However, hybrid working is by far the preferred choice of employees.
Much like last year, the preference among workers is to be at home three times a week (20%), with twice a week coming a close second (19%). 15% of people would prefer to never work from home, making it the fourthmost popular option.
This, of course, means that more than four in five people still want some form of home working.
But are employers listening? Since the pandemic, the average number of days working at home is steadily decreasing, plunging from 1.8 a week last year to 1.6 this year. Only 11% of respondents want to work from home just once a week, making it the least popular option, yet this is the way the office/home work split is trending.
Susan Clews, Chief Executive at Acas, said: “What we have at the moment is a slight impasse – for example, research last year from The Centre for Economic Policy Research found that while 20% of workers want to work at home five days a week, another 20% want to work rarely or never from home.”
Read the full 28-page Commuter Census 2024 now by clicking here.
