The COVID-19 pandemic that began in March 2020 reshaped how we live and work. As office buildings shut down and sent employees home, many turned empty bedrooms or crowded kitchens into their own home office.
Nearly 13% of full-time employees now work entirely from home, while another 28.2% have a hybrid schedule with some time at home and some time at their employer’s building, according to WFH Research. The best work-from-home conditions include low costs, reasonable comfort and a high level of security, according to WalletHub.
In order to find out the states that provide the best conditions for working from home, WalletHub compared the 50 states and the District of Columbia across 12 key metrics. The data set ranges from the share of workers working from home to internet cost and cybersecurity, in addition to factors like how large and how crowded homes are in the state.
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10 Best States for Working from Home
- Delaware
- Utah
- Maryland
- Connecticut
- New Jersey
- District of Columbia
- Georgia
- Arizona
- Washington
- Colorado
Alaska, North Dakota and Montana came in at the bottom end of the rankings.
“The demand to work from home should continue to be strong throughout the rest of 2023 and increase into the future,” says Joseph Broschak, Associate Professor, University of Arizona. “Employers were forced to allow employees to work from anywhere during the pandemic, and that experiment largely proved successful.
“Trying to un-ring that bell and bring employees back into offices on an ongoing basis…may be frustratingly difficult as many employees have gotten a taste of remote work as a viable work arrangement.”
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“The data coming out of the forced switch to virtual work is fairly consistently showing increases in productivity, job satisfaction, and work/life balance. Many of the perceived dangers such as cultural fit, retention, and ‘quiet quitting’ have generally not been found in larger samples,” says Joel Nadler, Ph.D., a senior associate with Aon and a former professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.
