Work from Home: A Task-Based Perspective

The use of telework has greatly fluctuated over the years since the pandemic. 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 is collected as semi-structured text and is not suitable for further analysis in its raw state. We classify these tasks into standardized categories of work activities available through O*NET using a sentence-transformer model. We find the relationship between telework and tasks generally confirms expectations. Furthermore, there is a meaningful variation in tasks across jobs within an occupation, a source of variation that many other data sources are not able to capture. These results suggest that the ORS task data can be leveraged to better understand employers’ decisions regarding the composition of tasks within jobs as it relates not only to telework but also to other employer decisions regarding occupational requirements.