How Asia is bucking the work-from-home trend amid a looming office market boom
- A confluence of factors including less virus-induced disruption than other regions and smaller homes has limited Asia’s take-up of telecommuting
- While landlords and investors in Western economies worry about the impact of working from home, their Asian counterparts fret about a rise in office development
Surveys and polls have struggled to keep up with the dramatic changes wrought by Covid-19. When it comes to the mass work-from-home experiment brought about by lockdowns and social distancing restrictions, though, clear trends emerged early on in the crisis which point to significant differences even among Western economies hit hard by the pandemic.
The findings of a survey published by Morgan Stanley in July revealed that only one-third of British office workers had returned to their usual workplace, compared with 70 to 83 per cent in the largest European economies.
In Asia, on the other hand, working from home is much less prevalent due to a confluence of factors. For starters, the region’s office markets have not had to contend with the level of virus-induced disruption in Europe and America.
Just over two weeks after Britain entered a prolonged lockdown on March 23, Wuhan was lifting the world’s largest mass quarantine. As early as late March, 60 per cent of Chinese office-based employees were already back at their desks, according to one report.