The productivity of working from home: Evidence from Japan

Working from home has become much more prevalent across advanced economies during the Covid-19 pandemic. This column uses survey data from Japan to explore how widely working from home has been adopted across industries and how productive employees are at home. It finds that the overall contribution of working from home to labour input is surprisingly small. Even where firms adopted the practice, many employees did not exploit it; and even those who did work from home did not necessarily do so throughout the week. The firm survey responses suggest that across industries, the average productivity of employees when working from home relative to at the workplace is 68.3%, which is similar to the findings from an employee survey. The results suggest that there is room for improvement to make working from home more feasible.

Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, working from home (WFH) has been increasingly implemented in major advanced countries. Before the crisis, the percentage of workers participating working from home was approximately 10% in major advanced countries. The number of workers who conduct their jobs at home increased suddenly in March 2020. But productivity at home compared to the usual workplace – which is a key parameter in assessing the impact of WFH on the economy – has not been well understood.

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