LOS ANGELES – When LA and the rest of the world switched to teleworking during the pandemic, there was a surprising side effect. Some workers did more. A global survey of 830 LA employees who worked from home during COVID found that Angelenos spent about 2% more time on productive work. Those with a 40 minute or longer commute showed the most gains.
“People with longer commutes prior to the COVID report are more productive,” said Joseph Sherlock, lead researcher at the Duke Center for Advanced Hindsight who worked with the LA County Metropolitan Transportation Authority on the study. The two organizations are tracking that data this month with a teleworking research pilot project involving 1,500 Metro employees. Many of them have expressed a desire to continue working from home 60% of the time once the restrictions are lifted.
What you need to know
- Metro works with the Duke Center for Advanced Hindsight to create incentives for successful teleworking
- In a recent remote work survey, 500 Metro employees said they were more productive from home
- Metro employees want to continue teleworking 60% of the time once restrictions are lifted
- Teleworking is one of many strategies Metro is pursuing to reduce traffic from single-occupancy vehicles
You are not alone. According to the Brookings Institution, half of the country’s working adults are currently teleworking and are expected to continue doing so in the near future. This is having a significant impact on transit agencies across the country, including the Metro, which saw the number of drivers drop by 90% at the beginning of the pandemic and continues to struggle to get drivers to return.
With a service area of 1,433 square miles, Metro is the second largest transit agency in the country, but it doesn’t exist solely for the provision of bus and rail transportation. Since it is re-imagining itself as a mobility provider as part of its Vision 2028 strategic plan, it is equally interested in promoting alternative modes of transport such as bicycles and carpooling – or not moving at all, such as staying home to work.
“When I first mentioned at a leadership meeting that we should try to encourage people to telework, people said, ‘Doesn’t that mean they telework instead of driving buses and trains? “Said Joshua Schank, Metro’s chief innovation officer.” The perspective we’ve taken is the vast majority of the trips people make in this county are people alone in cars. People are asking us to advise against it. “
Approximately 75% of commuter journeys and 60% of all journeys are made alone, according to the US Census Bureau.
When voters approved the permanent increase in sales tax to expand public transport, known as Measure M, in 2016, “they didn’t want more people to use public transport,” Schank said. “They wouldn’t mind that, but what they want to see is less traffic and less pollution and fairer solutions.”
Promoting teleworking is one way of achieving a seemingly counterintuitive goal for a transit agency.
Metro’s teleworking research pilot program is designed to see if working from home can reduce traffic and the number of trips in single-use vehicles. However, teleworking will only affect traffic if people are happy and productive while teleworking.
Metro’s first remote working study with the Duke Center was part of a larger survey in 88 countries and 44 states that examined the factors that influence a person’s success at home work.
“Many factors predict your happiness and productivity,” said Sherlock, adding that a good home office environment with a desk and second screen helps, as well as having access to the outdoors and an employer who supports remote working.
Lower productivity resulted from several factors, including workers with children under five who did not have childcare, lack of technical resources, lack of human interaction and poor self-control.
“There’s this whole ecosystem around you that predicts or doesn’t predict success at work from home,” said Sherlock, whose survey asked people about their remote working environment to see what factors helped them work or do well hold them back. “There is a very clear connection between self-control and productivity and happiness. People who are better able to stay at work do better. ”
As part of the new telework pilot, Metro is investigating strategies to promote the compatibility of work and family, the redesign of the home office, task management, the challenges of satisfaction and virtual connections. Optimizing the telework experience to make people more productive “could be a solution for transport,” said Avital Shavir, senior manager, Metro Office of Extraordinary Innovation.
The trick is to determine what incentives are motivating this type of behavior change. Among the ideas Metro could experiment with: real-time personalized trip planning that could suggest warm weather cycling or a discount for carpooling.
“Teleworking is something we thought about before the pandemic because Metro wants to do more than just encourage people to use public transport,” Shavir said. “We want to promote better mobility, better accessibility and better results in terms of congestion, the environment and equity.”
Metro uses 1,500 of its employees as the basis of its research, but wants to work with other employers that have at least 1,000 employees in LA County to back up their findings.
Metro hopes to launch a commuter challenge program this summer that will offer different incentives for transportation than just driving this fall.
