HOP – An Occupational Indicator for the Potential of Working from Home

Abstract Working from home (hereinafter referred to as WFH) is becoming increasingly important as the growing availability of modern information and communication technologies enables many employees to decide where (and when) they work. Nevertheless, certain occupations cannot be undertaken outside of the workplace. Work relying on digital devices such as smartphones or laptops and an internet connection can be done relatively easily from home. WFH is hardly possiblein occupations that require social proximity or physical presence (e.g. to monitor and control machines, systems or devices, or to provide services to people). If the potential for WFH in an occupation is not considered, analyses of the actual use of WFH and its impact on employment or wages, will lead to biased estimates. There are other indicators for the potential of WFH in occupations. However, we see the necessity for an indicator that meets the following four criteria is apparent. First, given that respondents’ subjective assessments of their ability to WFH are inherently linked to their normative beliefs and personal preferences, the indicator should be based on objective, rather than subjective, assessments. Second, the possibility for WFH does not depend directly on the job tasks, but rather on whether the working conditions of the occupation allow a comparable working environment to be set up in a location other than the designated workplace. Third, it is essential to avoid categorising occupations as either completely suitable or unsuitable for WFH, given that working conditions in all occupations render WFH more or less probable. Fourth, this implies that not only the presence of selected (appropriate) working conditions, but the evaluation of all typical working conditions in an occupation is necessary to determine whether an occupation can be performed from home. In this paper, we, therefore, develop a novel indicator for occupation-specific WFH potential, which we call ‘Home Office Potential’, short HOP. HOP indicates for each occupation, relative to all others, whether it is possible to set up a work environment other than the designated workplace. HOP, thus, complements other WFH indicators that are based on subjective assessments of respondents or on information on tasks performed at work. To this end, we utilise information on working conditions from the German expert database BERUFENET. We provide the HOP for aggregates according to the Classification of Occupations in Germany (KldB-2010) and the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO-08). Information on the WFH potential for up to 1,200 occupational units is available, thus demonstrating a significant advantage of using expert data as opposed to survey data. To assess the construct validity, a range of analyses were conducted. The findings of these analyses demonstrate that HOP is appropriate for evaluating the feasibility of working from home in a given occupation.