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The potential for remote work depends on the mix of activities undertaken in each occupation and on their physical, spatial, and interpersonal context. We used MGI’s workforce model based on the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) to analyze more than 2,000 activities in more than 800 occupations and identify which activities and occupations have the greatest potential for remote work. We have analyzed the potential for remote work-or work that doesn’t require interpersonal interaction or a physical presence at a specific worksite-in a range of countries, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
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In this article, however, we aim to granularly define the activities and occupations that can be done from home to better understand the future staying power of remote work. For their part, employees are struggling to find the best home-work balance and equip themselves for working and collaborating remotely.
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Companies are pondering how best to deliver coaching remotely and how to configure workspaces to enhance employee safety, among a host of other thorny questions raised by COVID-19. Remote work raises a vast array of issues and challenges for employees and employers.
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Remote work thus risks accentuating inequalities at a social level. Many of such jobs are low wage and more at risk from broad trends such as automation and digitization. Some of their jobs require collaborating with others or using specialized machinery other jobs, such as conducting CT scans, must be done on location and some, such as making deliveries, are performed while out and about.
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More than half the workforce, however, has little or no opportunity for remote work. The virus has broken through cultural and technological barriers that prevented remote work in the past, setting in motion a structural shift in where work takes place, at least for some people. If remote work took hold at that level, that would mean three to four times as many people working from home than before the pandemic and would have a profound impact on urban economies, transportation, and consumer spending, among other things. More than 20 percent of the workforce could work remotely three to five days a week as effectively as they could if working from an office. Our analysis finds that the potential for remote work is highly concentrated among highly skilled, highly educated workers in a handful of industries, occupations, and geographies. The future of work in Europe: Automation, workforce transitions, and the future geography of work, McKinsey Global Institute, June 2020 The future of work in America: People and places, today and tomorrow, McKinsey Global Institute, July 2019 Jobs lost, jobs gained: Workforce transitions in a time of automation, McKinsey Global Institute, December 2017. Building on the McKinsey Global Institute’s body of work on automation, AI, and the future of work, we extend our models to consider where work is performed. Now that vaccines are awaiting approval, the question looms: To what extent will remote work persist? In this article, we assess the possibility for various work activities to be performed remotely. Although many people are returning to the workplace as economies reopen-the majority could not work remotely at all-executives have indicated in surveys that hybrid models of remote work for some employees are here to stay. Now, well into the pandemic, the limitations and the benefits of remote work are clearer.
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