Mondays, not Fridays, appear to be the least popular day in the office in the UK
It has been intriguing to follow the discussions about the return to office work, after an extended period — for many — of working from home. The best commentators now routinely mention that only a minority of workers can, even theoretically, work remotely (from home or elsewhere). As I tend to point out, if you are a dental nurse, bus driver, warehouse worker, theme park assistant, or bartender, you need to be either close to your customers, or close to some non-trivial equipment, and so by definition can’t work from home.
There are also many workers who might be theoretically able to work from home, but either their employer or they themselves prefer not to. Indeed, many employees — when surveyed — seem to suggest that they would quite like a balance: work from home (and avoid all the hassle of getting into the office) on some days; work in the office (and benefit from the social relationships, water cooler conversations, and team work) on others.
However, a myth seems to have taken hold that people are particularly reticent to show up at the office on Fridays. Or at least it appears to be a myth if one looks at one fairly comprehensive source of information on this: Google’s Community Mobility Reports. While the indices that Google publishes are relative to the same weekday during their baseline period (in early 2020), they can still give us an indication of how people are (or are not) returning to office work.
Fridays, it turns out, are in fact quite popular. It is Mondays when many fewer people show up at work in their offices. Looking at the Google’s “Workplace” mobility index in the period from 1st of September to 15th of October, only 80 local authorities (20% out of 360) saw fewer people returning to offices on Fridays than Mondays. In contrast, in 280 local authorities, relative mobility on Fridays was higher than on Mondays.
Is there anything that characterises the differences, I hear you ask… Well, one pattern is shown in the attached chart. Workers in London and other cities have been much less likely to return to the office, and the difference between Mondays and Fridays seems particularly sharp in non-London core cities (such as Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow and Sheffield). Perhaps there’s a correlation with commuting times or challenges (I may look at this later, based on the Demos dataset); but there’s definitely one with the type of work people do.
Almost by definition, cities are places — yes, for entertainment, hospitality, retail, and so on — but definitely also for office workers. At the local authority level, the more educated the population, the less likely they are to have returned to the office (either on Mondays or Fridays, or any day in between). [The R-squared on that correlation is 46%, so pretty large, with a P-value of less than .0001, so highly “statistically significant”.] The explanation is clear: occupations requiring higher levels of education — such as managerial, technical, or professional tasks — are typically much more feasible to carry out remotely. Similarly, the higher the proportion of the local population that regularly uses the internet (for personal or work purposes), the lower the “workplace” mobility relative to pre-pandemic levels.
So it seems that remote work — for those who can choose it — has become fairly entrenched, considering that we are now well out of lockdowns (for the time being, at least.) The absolute size of the phenomenon may not be as large as suggested in the chart shown. Somehow, observing (the disastrous) London traffic every now and then, it is hard to believe that workplace mobility in the capital is still more than 40% below January 2020. The traffic conditions depend, however, drastically on other factors, too, such as roadworks, the degree of public transport usage, and even weather. Regardless, the impact on the economic geography of cities would appear very significant.
