Work-from-Home Jobs Surge in Australia: New Data Reveals 1 in 10 Ads Offer Remote Work

Working from home, at least part of the week, has become the new normal for millions of Australians, with new data showing remote roles are more popular than ever.

Australia’s biggest employment website, Seek, has revealed one in ten job advertisements now mentions work from home options. The most common remote roles include occupational therapists, accountants, property managers, speech pathologists, and admin officers.

“Post COVID we saw a massive peak in work from home offerings, and it has since come down, but recently over the past couple of months we have seen that turn up,” Seek chief economist Blair Chapman said.

The uptick has been strongest in cities with long commutes, with workers embracing the flexibility remote work provides. “I live an hour away from the city so it’s great, also just life admin, not having to take a day off to get a fridge delivered or anything like that,” one worker said.

The data shows job advertisements offering work from home options attract significantly more applicants. “If work from home is offered in an ad, we do see more applicants,” Chapman said.

However, not everyone is sold on remote working, with some employees preferring the office environment. “I’d rather be in the office to be honest,” one worker said, while another added they were “pretty much always in the office.”

Some employers remain wary of the arrangement, with trust issues driving increased surveillance. “We’ve got big trust issues in the workplace at the moment,” Professor Gary Martin from the Australian Institute of Management said. Increasingly, employers are installing monitoring software on workers’ laptops to track productivity. “They can tell when someone works from home, whether they’re online or offline,” Martin said.

While the software sometimes reveals workers slacking off at home, it also shows some employees are more efficient away from the office. For workers in hands-on industries like trades and delivery services, working from home simply isn’t an option. “Nah! Not in elevator installation,” one tradie said.