The online conversation around working from home and remote work jumped from a daily average of 15k to over 800k. This is now settling back into a rhythm of circa 85k on weekdays, as the affected continue to share experiences.

In addition to people searching Google for remote work-related queries, this trend is backed up spectacularly by the social data. At the beginning of March, conversation online turned to sharing tips, asking questions, and highlighting experiences. 

After we find a trend in consumer behaviour, be that through search intelligence (search listening), social data, or first-party client data, it is very rare that the story ends there. I was curious about the specific elements of remote work that people were searching for online:

Managers took to Google to find resources to support their new challenges. Interestingly hiring remains a high priority, even in these uncertain economic times.

Hiring, onboarding and managing remote employees each represent unique challenges and pose their own sets of questions. From taxes, to interviews and culture, the new normal is more ‘new’ than ‘normal’ for many of those affected.

Employees were quick to upgrade their home office environment.
(Data: Google Shopping Trends)

Whilst adapting their ways of working, habits, and routines, workers also took to the digital shops to upgrade their home offices. The below data from Google shopping searches shows increased interest in more ergonomic solutions such as desks and webcam equipment.

A few months later, we now have a white-collar workforce equipped with the resources and skills to work remotely on an ongoing basis. And with only 9% of affected workers in the UK wanting to go back to the office full time, we wanted to explore what is and isn’t working for new remote workers.

Firstly, we collated over 22 million articles, tweets, Instagram posts, and more to analyse in Brandwatch. These were filtered into personal conversation, which was then split into those finding remote work to be easier, and those finding it more difficult.

We didn’t have a particular hypothesis one way or the other, but interestingly to us, the overall split was perfectly even.

Breaking down the overall conversation about the difficulty of remote work into the constituent professions revealed the careers who were finding remote work more challenging.

However, peeling back another layer revealed that not all careers are dealing with the changes of remote working equally. Understandably, medical professionals and sportspeople will struggle to work remotely more than software developers. Although they appear to have taken to the changes most easily, 45% of software developers were also finding the changes hard. It seems that no careers have been spared from some level of struggle.

Underlying drivers of the conversation revolved around work-life balance changes.

To explore the division in opinion, we took to the topics cloud. Here, it appears that those thriving in the remote world were spending more time with their families, and socializing (we assume online!). This led to an increased feeling of productivity compared to when in the office. Though the key driver of the struggling group is that they have found themselves working longer hours!

Want your people take to remote life? Make sure they’re clocking out on time and spending some time on their hobbies and families.

Female employees were more likely to express dissatisfaction with their new working arrangements.

The world has changed, and it seems like some managers and employees are handling it better than others. Core drivers of traditional job satisfaction still hold true; being well equipped, work-life balance and well informed are as relevant as ever.