Leesman Home Working Survey and Analysis

In response to the COVID-19 global outbreak, economists estimate that UK GDP will fall by up to 30%. Forecasting the impacts of such an unprecedented pandemic is near impossible due to the ambiguity around the demise of the virus, and the ability to measure its societal and economic impact is years if not decades off. We are able to measure the impact from an employee / employer perspective. As a result of the country-wide lockdown, organisations have been forced into the world's largest ever home working experiment. What may be common practice for some is an entirely new way of working for the majority.

52% of Leesman's global database of employee workplace experience, comprising of more than 740,000 respondents, have little or no experience working from home in their present roles. When looking at only the UK, this figure increases to 55%.

As the world's leading authority on employee experience, Leesman's deployment of a rapid response survey and subsequent academic insight allows the UK to take the lead in understanding the impact of home working on the economy and society. In addition, it will also aid individual organisational exit strategies from lockdown, enabling employers to make data-led decisions on who can return to existing working environments first, based on the measured effectiveness of working from home.

On a micro level, Leesman provides a depth of analysis that will show an organisation exactly how its workforce has coped and been supported while working from home, while on a macro level, Leesman's front line empirical data can benchmark this against global statistics relating to workplace effectiveness, experience and productivity.

As a nation, the UK has been told it is lagging behind other European countries' productivity levels for years. As we eventually enter the winter of this discontent and move into a united recovery, we will be looking to up these socio-economic levels like never before. By understanding how effective we have been, we are able to look at how effective we can be by benchmarking data from home working against office-based work.

The extension for impact funding will enable Leesman to analyse the data from the 145,000+ responses received so far to the Home Working survey. This analysis will be shared through a series of webinars we will host and in a research publication we’ll create and publish in Q1 2021 to share the findings of our research, allowing all organisations to understand the global impact on work activities and effectiveness of working from home.