The changing nature of work

Since 2020, working from home has become a more prominent feature of the UK labour market. What began as an emergency response to limit the spread of COVID-19 has now settled into a lasting shift: around one in three workers continue to spend at least part of their week working remotely, according to the Annual Population Survey.

Recent research has shown that this shift may have consequences for worker well-being, productivity and urban structures. But why do workers continue working from home?

This work uses Time Use Survey data to explore how time allocation between activities differs between remote and office workers.

Future work will use ONS Public Sector Time Use Data to study how time use across work-related activities differs between home workers and office workers.

This work analyses over 7,500 time use diaries from working-age adults, collected by the UK Office for National Statistics between 2020 and 2025.

The diaries are detailed reports of how people spend their time, recording what they did in ten-minute intervals and how much they enjoyed it.

• Commuting time: Remote workers spend around 65 minutes less travelling per day than those in the office, corresponding to at least 70% less transport time than their counterparts working from the office. Much of this time is reallocated to other activities: an extra 20–35 minutes of sleep, about 25 minutes more unpaid work, and roughly 10 minutes more health-related leisure. Remote workers also devote around 20 minutes less to paid work than when they are office-based. This result is driven by non-graduate workers: in the sample of graduates only there is no difference between workers in the office and at home work in terms of time in paid work.
• Structure of the day: Home workers are less likely to log on early in the morning (8–10am) or at lunchtime, and more likely to be working in the late afternoon (4–5pm).
• Enjoyment and self-perceived productivity: While commuting is among the least-liked activities, workers report lower instantaneous enjoyment when working from home than when working in the office. They are also less likely to report being fully productive when working from home compared on-site workers.
• Gender: Both men and women spend more time on unpaid work when working from home: around 25 minutes more per day on average.

Understanding how people use their time when working remotely is essential for designing effective labour market and productivity policies. This project offers the most detailed evidence to date on how remote and office-based workers organise their days, how work patterns have evolved since the pandemic, and what this means for well-being and performance. The findings will inform discussions on flexible working, productivity measurement, and the future of work in the UK.

This work has also informed the Home-based Working Committee’s October 2025 report.

Foliano, F., Riley, R. and Brown, L. ‘The Changing Nature of Work: What can we learn from Time Use Diaries’ Session 2.2 Work & Wellbeing, 2026 Annual Conference of the Scottish Economic Society, University of Glasgow, 13-15 April 2026

Foliano, F., Riley, R. and Brown, L. ‘The Changing Nature of Work: What can we learn from Time Use Diaries’ UNSW-ESCoE Conference on Economic Measurement 2025, Contributed session F: Labour, 8-9 December, Sydney

Foliano, F. ‘Changing nature of work’ Work reimagined: Data, decisions and daily life, ESRC Festival of Social Science, 7 November 2025, King’s College London

Foliano, F. The changing nature of work: What can we learn from time use diaries? Remote Work Conference, Stanford University, October 2025.

Foliano, F., Riley, R., Viernes, M and Brown, L. ‘The Changing Nature of Work: What can we learn from Time Use Diaries’, CRIW Conference on The Changing Nature of Work, Spring 2025, Alexandria, VA 6-7 March 2025

Brown, L., Foliano, F. Riley, R. and Viernes, M. ‘The Changing Nature of Work: What can we learn from Time Use Diaries?’ CRIW Pre-Conference: The Changing Nature of Work, Summer 2024, Cambridge, MA, 17 July 2024