Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the work-from-home trend, with significant variations in location, industry and firm size. These shifts have significantly affected economies and societies but traditional data cannot be easily tracked. This paper presents a method for measuring office attendance and examines its trends and characteristics. To this end, we first introduced the working-at-office ratio, which is the percentage of people going to an office compared to the pre-COVID-19 period, considering 74 office submarkets in six major Japanese cities. We captured mobility trends in office buildings using rich Global Positioning System-based mobile location data combined with specific office location data. Subsequently, we demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed indicators by comparing them with other mobility data and office attendance indicators. Finally, we examined the relationships between the working-at-office ratio and the characteristics of the office buildings and tenants in each submarket. The findings indicated that factors, such as the proportion of large buildings, concentration of specific sectors, and tenant size, were significantly related to office attendance, with these relationships evolving over the duration of the pandemic. Our approach provides real-time, granular insights into office attendance trends, which are crucial for anticipating future work paradigms.
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Data availability
The data supporting the findings of this study are not publicly available without the consent of or a license agreement from X-Locations Inc. and Sanko Estate Co., Ltd. For details on licensing and access to these data, please contact Makoto Sakuma at msakuma@nli-research.co.jp.
Notes
Kastle Systems, “Back to Work Barometer.” Retrieved from https://www.kastle.com/safety-wellness/getting-america-back-to-work/. Accessed 2 November 2022.
Envoy, “Return to Workplace Index.” Retrieved from https://envoy.com/content/return-to-workplace-index/. Accessed 2 November 2022.
Locatee, “How Are Offices Around the World Dealing with COVID-19?” Retrieved from https://locatee.com/en/blog-post/offices-around-the-world-covid19/. Accessed 2 November 2022.
Photosynth, “Ofisushukkinjyoukyou ni kansuru Chousa Repooto (Survey Report on Office Attendance Rates).” Retrieved from https://photosynth.co.jp/topics/2021/office_report202107/. Accessed 2 November 2022 [In Japanese].
Kastle Systems, “Back to Work Barometer.” Retrieved from https://www.kastle.com/safety-wellness/getting-america-back-to-work/. Accessed 2 November 2022.
Dingel and Neiman (2020) mapped the proportion of WFH-feasible people in the United States and 85 other countries. Based on the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) survey in the U.S., the authors classified occupations as likely or not to be able to WFH and used data on the percentage of employees by occupation to calculate WFH feasibility by region. The authors' methodology has been extended to other regions (Alipour et al. 2023; Saltiel 2020) and applied in empirical studies, such as those by Alipour et al. 2021, Althoff et al. (2022), Brough et al. (2021), Glaeser et al. (2022), Liu and Su (2021), Mongey et al. (2021), and Ramani and Bloom (2021).
NTT DOCOMO’s Mobile Spatial Statistics. Retrieved from https://mobaku.jp/. Accessed 2 November 2022 [In Japanese].
The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications “Communication Usage Trend Survey.” Retrieved from https://www.soumu.go.jp/johotsusintokei/statistics/statistics05.html. Accessed 2 November 2022 [In Japanese].
We believe that the setting would be more effective if we could set the duration of the stay to at least a few hours for a precise measurement of office attendance. However, the LAP allows only “more than 5 min” as the duration to be set for the length of stay, with the primary aim being to exclude mere passersby.
The tsubo is an area unit unique to Japan roughly equal to 3.3 m2.
See page 12 for the explanation on weights used to calculate the WAO ratio in Table 1.
Occupied floor space is the floor space (tsubo) of an office building that is leased from a landlord by a tenant and is calculated by subtracting the available vacant floor space (tsubo) from the total leased floor space (tsubo).
Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, “Mobility and Engagement Index”.
https://www.dallasfed.org/research/mei. Accessed 2 November 2022.
Golden Week holidays occur in late April to early May, a period that includes several national holidays. Many people take paid vacations and combine them for an extended break.
The Obon holiday is when the Japanese traditionally welcome their ancestors (on August 13th) and bid them farewell (on August 16th). The Japanese can take a long holiday at this time of the year.
Xymax Real Estate Institute, “Office Space per Person 2022” Retrieved from https://www.xymax.co.jp/english/research/images/pdf/20230120.pdf. Accessed 14 April 2023.
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We are grateful to X-Locations Inc. for providing us with the mobile location data. This work is supported by the Sanko Office Foundation.
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This study was funded by the Sanko Office Foundation. Data for this study were provided by X-Locations Inc., and Sanko Estate Co., Ltd. Toyokazu Imaseki is an employee of Sanko Estate Co.
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Sakuma, M., Matsuo, K., Tsutsumi, M. et al. Measuring office attendance during the COVID-19 pandemic with mobility data to quantify local trends and characteristics. Asia-Pac J Reg Sci 8, 185–237 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41685-023-00324-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41685-023-00324-4