Five ways we think office work will change

The majority of people think that the world of office work has changed quite radically due to covid, surveys for the BBC suggest.

At the start of the coronavirus pandemic many office-based workers worked from home during lockdowns.

As pandemic restrictions eased, workers in England were urged to gradually return to the office.

But bosses and the general public think future work will not be as office-based as before the pandemic.

More bosses think that people won't be going back to the office at pre-pandemic rates than the general public.

In the short term, people in England could be told to work from home once again if the government adopts its "Plan B" to deal with Covid through the autumn and winter.

In the rest of the UK, staff are still advised to work at home where possible.

Almost two thirds of people want to work from home at least some of the time, the surveys suggested.

Firms, which are competing for staff in a tight labour market in some sectors including health and hospitality, seem to be responding to this trend.

There has been a rise in job adverts that mention working from home, and applications for jobs with remote working shot up, recruitment firm Reed said in August.

Despite the appetite for working from home, the majority of bosses and the general public think that young people could find it more difficult to progress in their career compared with people going into the office.

In August, chancellor Rishi Sunak warned young people that home working may hurt their career.

However, many young people want to work from home at least some of the time, research suggests.

Nearly half of people living in London want to work from home some of the time after the Covid pandemic.

However, a quarter in the capital say they never want to work from home.

This is a lower percentage than in many places in Britain.

5. People in Scotland are the most likely to never want to work from home

In Scotland, for example, more than four in ten people never want to work from home after the pandemic.

This rate gets lower in the North, the Midlands, Wales, the South and the East.

The BBC commissioned polling organisation YouGov to survey 1,684 working adults and 530 senior leaders in business about their predictions and opinions on working from home. YouGov also re-ran a previous survey of 2,500 British adults, first conducted in March 2021, about their current working from home situation.