DATA released recently has shown that an average of three days per week are popular for people to be physically travelling between work and home.
Discovery Insure’s new Work From Home Index has revealed that Tuesdays and Wednesdays are the two most common days for people to travel to work.
“Our analytics team has watched with keen interest as people changed their movement patterns during Covid-19 in line with the peaks and dips of the infectious waves we experienced,” said Discovery Insure chief executive, Anton Ossip.
“Our interest isn’t at all random or purely for curiosity’s sake. As an insurer seeking to protect our clients from risk, it is important to understand how these risks are changing or emerging over time and how this impacts our clients,” he added.
Ossip said to understand these patterns, they developed the Work From Home Index, which uses market-leading telematics driving data to look at how motorists have shifted from “working predominantly from home” to “returning to work” locations.
He explained that the starting data point for the index was a pre-Covid baseline set in February 2020, the month before the first officially diagnosed case in South Africa and just prior to the subsequent level five hard lockdown.
How does the Work From Home Index measure destinations and driving trends?
“To define these ‘work’ trips, we needed to identify certain criteria that made sense. For example, a client would need to have left their home in the morning on a weekday to go to ‘work’ at some other location, where they would then have stayed for a number of hours, before returning home by the end of the day,” said Ossip.
Index findings reveal a stark contrast between “home” vs “work” travels in hard lockdown compared to present day.
“Our data team has graphically represented the ‘work’ and ‘home’ trends and findings reveal that during the last couple months of this year, around 80% of people are now working at their ‘work’ locations again, compared to data on the pre-Covid levels,” said Ossip.
“By contrast, people were most certainly home-based between March and May 2020, correlating directly with the initial hard lockdown.
“In terms of patterns observed more recently from our data, the Work From Home Index reveals a newfound sense of ‘freedom’ so far this year.
“People are now able to choose where and when they go into work in the instances of highly infectious waves of Covid being recorded.”
