Workers insist the traditional 9-5 is over, as more than half want to continue working from home

LinkedIn, in partnership with Marie Claire, commissioned a survey of 2,000 UK adults who are currently working from home due to Coronavirus. Of those surveyed, 3 in 5 respondents (63%) agree that, following-Covid, the traditional 9-5 working day is over.

For those who were able to keep their jobs and continue to work remotely, the pandemic forced companies to switch to remote working almost overnight. While there was a period of adjustment - over half ( 56%) of UK workers felt more anxious or stressed working while from home at the start of lockdown[1] - the past few months have also pushed forward the flexibility that workers want to see.

Flexible working

According to the LinkedIn survey, the ideal set-up would be to work from home three days a week (27%), while a third want to go into the office just one day a week and one in six (17%) never want to go back to the office at all.

Two thirds of those surveyed are ready to make some big sacrifices in order to pursue a career which enables them to spend more time at home - nearly a third (32%) would move to a different industry, 19% would take a 10% pay cut and 30% would even adopt an entirely new career. Research also found that women (11%) are twice as willing to take a 50% pay cut in order to work at home than men (5%).

With many accustomed to this new norm of working from home, 43% believe their work/life balance will suffer when returning to the workplace and over half (52%) are concerned about contracting coronavirus in the office.

The desire for a new type of work structure is further supported by recent LinkedIn platform insights, which found job searches for remote working had increased by 60% globally and views for remote jobs were 2.5 times higher in May 2020, compared to March 2020.

In-demand remote jobs

With more workers seeking some degree of flexible working, LinkedIn has identified the top 15 most applied for remote jobs in the UK:

1.  Data Entry Specialist
2.  Customer Success Specialist
3.  Product Manager
4.  E-Commerce Manager
5.  Key Account Manager
6.  Community Manager
7.  User Experience Designer
8.  Technical Business Analyst
9.  Executive Assistant
10. Business Intelligence Developer
11. Project Manager
12. Software Test Analyst
13. Senior Data Scientist
14. Content Writer
15. Customer Service Advisor


[1] Survey of 2,003 UK adults who are working remotely from home due to lockdown in the UK, conducted by Censuswide between 20 – 27 April 2020.