What Makes Work from Home Work? Evidence on Telework and Worker Tasks

The use of telework greatly and abruptly increased during the pandemic, and as offices reopened, telework decreased but not immediately to its previous levels. Variation in the continued use of telework has led researchers to study the characteristics of workers and firms that are associated with telework. This paper uses a novel source of task data in the Occupational Requirements Survey (ORS) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to find patterns of tasks associated with telework. The ORS task data, while not useful in its collected state as semi-structured text, is classified into standardized categories of work activities available through O*NET using a sentence-transformer model. Exploring the relationship between telework and tasks, we find the relationship between telework and tasks generally confirms expectations. Furthermore, there is a meaningful variation across jobs within an occupation, suggesting that employers are arranging work weighing the costs and benefits of telework.