Men over 45 are working fewer hours. New research

This article was originally published in Fast Company.

There are no shortages of anecdotes when it comes to people sharing strong opinions about remote work and its effects on productivity and the tendency to slack off. These narratives are important, but they may not tell the whole story. Fortunately, newly available data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) by the Bureau of Labor Statistics provides some insight.

MEASURING TIME SPENT IN DIFFERENT ACTIVITIES

The ATUS is the only federal survey providing data on the full range of nonmarket activities, including the amount of time people spend on paid work, childcare, volunteering, and socializing. Individuals in the ATUS are drawn from the sample of respondents in the Current Population Survey as they are exiting.

One of the major benefits of the ATUS is that it measures a wide array of activities, not just time at work, like many existing surveys. This allowed me in my research to differentiate between work, leisure, household chores, childcare, and more.

Another major benefit of the ATUS is that it collects detailed 24-hour time diaries in which respondents report all the activities from the previous day in time intervals. These records are not only more detailed but also more reliable than standard measures of time allocated to work available in other federal datasets that require respondents to recall how much they worked over the previous year or week. These diaries contain much less noise than typical survey results.

UNCOVERING CHANGES IN TIME USE AMONG REMOTE WORKERS

Drawing on ATUS data from 2019 to 2022 among employed workers between the ages of 25 and 65, my new research paper documents new trends on time use, distinguishing between those in more- versus less-remote work jobs.

To measure remote work, I use an index by professors Jonathan Dingel and Brent Neiman at the University of Chicago, reflecting the degree to which tasks in a given occupation can be done remotely versus in person.

WORK TIME SHRUNK BY NEARLY AN HOUR

The first main result is that time allocated to work activities declined by nearly an hour among remote workers in 2022, relative to their 2019 trend before the pandemic, and time allocated toward leisure grew by about 40 minutes. The remainder of the time appears to have gone toward activities that are not otherwise classified, which might reflect scrolling on social media.

Your first instinct might be that time at work, of course, declined, but that’s because people are simply spending less on their commutes. While that is true, it doesn’t explain the sustained decline in time at work and increase in leisure from 2020 to 2022.

Furthermore, I ran separate models to differentiate between “pure work” and “work-related activities”—the latter including travel time to work. All of the changes in time at work come from “pure work,” rather than other categories related to travel or other income-generating activities.

But what’s even more striking is that the decline in work and rise in leisure is concentrated among males, singles, and those without children. In fact, single males over the age of 45 in remote jobs experienced a nearly two-hour decline in time allocated to work in 2022, relative to 2019, and over an hour increase in time allocated to leisure. This demographic divergence demonstrates the heterogeneity in responses to remote work.

Compare these patterns with those among women and caregivers. I found that college-educated women allocated an additional 50 minutes per day to work in 2022, relative to 2019. Among non-college-educated women, there were no statistically significant changes. I also found a nearly 30-minute-per-day increase in work among women with children. At least some of that increase in work is coming from a decline in home production activities, such as taking care of children and doing chores around the house, among the college-educated women.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PRODUCTIVITY AND THE LABOR MARKET

Do these results on remote work—especially for single males—simply reflect the phenomenon of quiet quitting, where employees disengage from work while remaining employed?

While more research is needed, the short answer appears to be no. In fact, I found that remote workers reported higher satisfaction with their lives and felt better rested. Remote workers also did not report more time allocated toward interviewing for other jobs. Cumulatively, these facts imply that changes in time use—at least since 2019—are not driven by disengagement.

These results have important implications for the debate about productivity. My other research has found that hybrid work arrangements may offer the best of both worlds.

For example, my research with Jason Schloetzer at Georgetown University using data from Payscale shows that the positive relationship between remote work and job satisfaction is statistically significant for hybrid workers only after accounting for differences in corporate culture. And even then, corporate culture dwarfs the economic significance of remote work.

Similarly, my work with Raj Choudhury, Tarun Khanna, and Kyle Schirmann at Harvard Business School using data from a randomized experiment in Bangladesh shows that workers on a hybrid schedule—working some days at home and some in the office—are more creative, send more emails, and feel like they have a better work-life balance relative to their fully remote or fully in-person peers.

It’s clear that remote work is not a one-size-fits-all phenomenon. While there are many benefits of remote work that come in the form of breaking down barriers and heightened flexibility, there are also new challenges that must be managed.

Crucially, we must be responsible to put into practice the right habits and processes to manage our time so that it does not drift away. Business leaders should help inculcate a culture of excellence by focusing on outcomes—not simply measures of hours worked—and lead by example.