Remote, Office, or Hybrid? Employee Preferences for Post-Pandemic Work Arrangements | The Conference Board of Canada

This newly released 39-page paper reveals employee preferences for office, remote, or hybrid work in a post-pandemic environment and shares factors influencing those preferences. It found that employee preferences vary widely along the virtual–office work continuum. The continuum is based on the number of days workers prefer to work from home, ranging from 0 to 5. On the one end of the continuum (0 days per week) are those employees (23%) who want to return to full-time work at the office. At the other end are those (28%) who want to work remotely 5 days per week. On average, employees in this sample would like to spend half of their time working at home and half at the office. Table 3 on page 9 touches on how employees preferences for different work arrangements are in part determined by where workers fall on a work-life interface continuum: 1) integrators are those who blur work and family boundaries (e.g., work and family role performance is not tied to a specific time and place) and are more likely to prefer remote work. 2) segmentors strive to preserve clear lines of distinction between work and family and utilize the “office” as one way to achieve that goal. While the population surveyed is limited to 10k+ employees from across Canada, the report provides one reference for ideas as firms develop remote work and hybrid work strategies.