With virtually all of America in various forms of shutdown, record numbers of working Americans are now making the commute from one room in their home to another.

According to CivicScience data from the last 30 days, 23% of Americans who were employed for pay pre-pandemic are working from home due to the crisis.

 

Among just those working from home right now, 42% say they are more productive working from home, while 58% would still opt for the office in terms of productivity.

But, overall,  just because more people are working from home doesn’t mean more people think they’re being more productive at their jobs, when looking at the data among all adults.

But there is one segment of the working population who are finding themselves more productive at work while in their pajamas: parents without school-age children at home. 

Parents with kids at home who need schooled right now are more likely to report they are more productive at an office than their non-school-age parent counterparts. Interestingly, non-parents report similar levels of being more productive at an office than those schooling kids at home right now.

One group who’s finding the whole “work from home” thing not so great are men.

Pre-coronavirus, 40% of women said they were more productive working at home. That number has inched up in the last few months. But men? They say they are 15% less productive working from home since the beginning of 2020.

And age tells a fascinating story. Conventional sentiment would align younger generations with being more attuned to working from home. But in the last 45 days Gen Z workers reported a significant decrease in productivity.

A large marker of whether or not someone thinks they are more productive working from home is how closely they follow trends in health and wellness. Employers who plan on keeping their staff at home for a while longer might want to take a crack at providing health and fitness opportunities for their workers.

Also notable: Workers at large companies (5,000 or more employees) say they were much more productive working from home pre-coronavirus than employees at mid-sized companies. This was by a 35% margin.

Those numbers have flipped since the coronavirus. Mid-sized company employees are finding working from home is a productive endeavor at a – one guess – 35% higher rate than employees at large-sized companies. Why the flip? Will this continue post-coronavirus? These are questions CivicScience will be tracking in the coming months.

There has certainly been much talk about how the coronavirus is going to change things going forward. Sure, we might not shake hands for the foreseeable future and telemedicine is certainly going to continue to rise, but this whole work-from-home thing? While many working Americans report slightly lower levels of productivity, general comfort with returning to work isn’t growing.

In the last few weeks, more and more working adults say they won’t be comfortable going back to work for 6 months or more.