Investigating commuters' working from home attitudes and its explanatory factors after the lifting of COVID-19 prevention and control policies

Abstract

In the context of the lifting of COVID-19 prevention and control policies, investigating commuters' attitudes toward working from home (WFH) and its explanatory factors would contribute to the design of more reasonable WFH arrangements in post-COVID-19. This study aims to investigate the group differences and subjective and objective explanatory factors of commuters' attitudes toward WFH after the COVID-19 prevention and control policies have been lifted.Using a natural experiment of the lifting of anti-pandemic measures in Kunming, China, we surveyed 338 commuters and divided them into WFH attitude preference and non-preference clusters based on the K-means algorithm. The proportion of these two clusters was 44.7% and 55.3%, respectively. Descriptive statistics showed that the higher the level of perceived risk or the greater the decrease in commuting satisfaction, the larger the proportion of respondents who belong to the WFH attitude preference cluster. In addition, respondents' attitudes toward WFH differed with commuting attributes and socio-demographic attributes.Furthermore, the binary logistic regression model results showed that high-perceived risk commuters were more likely to fall into the WFH attitude preference cluster than low-perceived risk commuters; Metro and e-bike commuters were more likely to belong to the WFH preference cluster than active commuters; Commuters with higher levels of education have a more positive attitude towards WFH. Given that these subjective perceptual variables, commuting characteristics, and socio-demographic characteristics were related to commuters' attitudes toward WFH, the arrangement of WFH should be more inclusive in post-COVID-19.