Omicron variant increases employee interest in remote work, survey says

A new survey shows that 64% of U.S. wage earners are “more interested in working remotely” due to the omicron variant of COVID-19.

The Frontier Communications survey of 1,002 employed Americans, conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk early this month, also found that 28% of respondents had not yet returned to the office and 20% said their employers had gone fully remote for the future.

“The most desired work style was full-time in-person accounting for 44% of respondents; however 64% of respondents said that Omicron and other variants had made them more interested in working remotely,” the survey reported.

Of the employees surveyed, 56% said they currently are working in-person, compared to 16% hybrid and 28% fully remote.

Among those who desire to work in person, 49% said they would quit their job if they could not be on-site for their jobs.

An additional 54% of respondents said that their company was requiring a vaccine and 16% said their company was requiring vaccination and a booster.

The survey’s respondents included 138 part-time employees and 864 full-time workers. While 156 respondents were in hybrid work arrangements and 272 were fully remote, the remaining employees were working on-site. The survey’s margin of error was plus or minus 3 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.

The Importance of the Great Return survey, looking at the impact of Omicron on workplace habits, confirmed and updated a previous survey that Frontier ran in August.

That first survey of 1,000 employees found that 45% said hybrid work would be the best way of enticing them back to the office.

Less than half felt happy about returning to the office at that time, but managers were 14% more likely to be happy about it than standard employees.

Respondents to the first survey also said their top fear of returning to the office was unvaccinated co-workers.

For more information, visit The Washington Times COVID-19 resource page.