{"id":606826,"date":"2022-07-16T10:00:01","date_gmt":"2022-07-16T08:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=606826"},"modified":"2022-07-15T15:10:35","modified_gmt":"2022-07-15T13:10:35","slug":"heading-into-the-office-three-days-a-week-is-the-new-work-from-home-normal-in-south-africa-study","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/business\/606826\/heading-into-the-office-three-days-a-week-is-the-new-work-from-home-normal-in-south-africa-study\/","title":{"rendered":"Heading into the office three days a week is the new work-from-home normal in South Africa: study"},"content":{"rendered":"

Discovery’s Insure\u2019s new Work From Home Index shows that South Africans are currently – on average – travelling between work and home three days a week.<\/p>\n

“Our analytics team has watched with keen interest as people changed their movement patterns during Covid-19 in line with the peaks and dips of the infectious waves we experienced,” said Discovery Insure chief executive, Anton Ossip.<\/p>\n

“Our interest isn\u2019t at all random or purely for curiosity\u2019s sake. As an insurer seeking to protect our clients from risk, it is important to understand how these risks are changing or emerging over time and how this impacts our clients.”<\/p>\n

The chief executive said Discovery created a Work From Home Index using telematics driving data to look at how clients have shifted from working predominantly from home to returning to the office.<\/p>\n

He said that the starting data point for the index was a pre-Covid baseline set in February 2020 \u2013 the month before the first officially diagnosed case in South Africa and just prior to the subsequent level five hard lockdown.<\/p>\n

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How it works\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

“The two dominant destinations on which to base our measurements were intuitive \u2013 an individual\u2019s home and their work environment. Here we could compare detailed location data,” said Ossip. “A \u2018home\u2019 location was determined as being the place where our clients spent the night hours of most weekdays. This was also based on the end location of their last driving trip for each day.”<\/p>\n

He said that the team then defined a \u2018work\u2019 location as one that had a driving trip link to a specific location and back home again within a day.<\/p>\n

“To define these \u2018work\u2019 trips, we needed to identify certain criteria that made sense. For example, a client would need to have left their home in the morning on a weekday to go to \u2018work\u2019 at some other location, where they would then have stayed for a number of hours, before returning home by the end of the day.”<\/p>\n

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What the data shows\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Work From Home Index shows a clear shift to hybrid working in 2022.<\/p>\n