When Amanda Doherty looks back on her schedule before she started working remotely, she hardly recognises her life.
“I live in Derry but worked in Belfast, and before the A6 was upgraded, you’d be over two hours in the morning, two hours back, sitting in traffic constantly,” she says, referring to the road connecting the two cities.
“On top of that I was away all the time – in the few weeks before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, I was in Birmingham, Glasgow and London three times in a period of a month and a half, two months.
“You were getting up at four in the morning to drive to the airport, travel to London for a two-hour meeting, travel back.”
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A senior public servant for a UK-wide community funder, Doherty now works from home several days a week.
“I do much more, and I am so much more productive because I’m not travelling,” she says. “Personally, it’s been really helpful to me because my parents are older, so I can be there for them more, and my husband and I have two rescue dogs, one of whom had been particularly badly treated, and she’s come on so much more with me being at home.”
Doherty is among about 17 per cent of the Northern Irish workforce working remotely either full or part-time, according to a 2023 study by Ulster University.
As an employee but also a senior manager, she considers herself “a champion of it because I’ve seen the benefits to me personally and professionally, but I’ve also seen how it’s supported colleagues of mine”.
Yet research by the university shows Northern Ireland has a lower level of remote working than either the Republic or the UK overall, where the rates are 34 and 31 per cent respectively.
Work is under way on the figures for last year, but Dr Eoin Magennis, an economist at Ulster University, says he expects them to be “pretty similar”.
“Northern Ireland is still, I think, lower than most parts of the South bar the Border region, and compared to most regions in [Britain], it’s at the bottom of the numbers,” he says.
Magennis puts this down to three main reasons: the type of jobs available, the size of firms and the management culture in Northern Ireland.
“We don’t have as high a concentration of workers in some of the sectors that are particularly prone to higher levels of hybrid and remote working, like professional services or ICT.”
Northern Ireland, he says, also has “predominantly small firms” with fewer than 100 employees which “tend to be less prone to allowing their staff to work remotely, unless they’re in particular sectors”.
On management culture, he says surveys consistently show fewer Northern Ireland businesses willing or “happy to have home workers as part of their business model going forward”.
“Management teams or owner managers are less open to it. They may tolerate it, but they’re not exactly keen on it.”
This is evidenced in the figures on online job adverts offering remote or hybrid working, as quoted in Ulster University’s 2023 report on remote working on the island of Ireland.
Researchers found that in 2019, on average 1-3 per cent of such advertisements offered this option, whereas by January 2023 a “significant divergence” had emerged, with a much higher proportion of jobs offering such arrangements in the UK and the Republic (20 per cent and 16 per cent respectively) compared to 6 per cent in Northern Ireland.
When I log off, I am present for my own family in a way I don’t think I would be if I was constantly driving four hours here, there and everywhere
— Emma Kevitt
This is despite the fact that, according to Magennis, “the evidence appears to be there’s no major difference either way in terms of productivity ... you tend to be as productive at home as if you’re based in the workplace”.
In the longer term, warns Magennis, this could affect recruitment and retention levels for Northern firms.
“Are we missing out on an opportunity? We may well be.”
Making the most of that opportunity could be employers south of the Border. Magennis feels the figures on remote working in the North are “probably bolstered by a number of people who are in the labour force survey as residents of Northern Ireland but are actually working in the South”.
The 2023 report noted that remote and hybrid working has “made cross-Border commuting more practical”. When other benefits of working in the Republic are taken into account, “there is the potential for a theoretical increase in cross-Border working across a range of occupations”, it adds.
Emma Kevitt is in such a position. A former sales director, she moved home to the Derry/Donegal border in 2017 after 20 years’ working in the US. She now works fully remotely as a marketing and lead-generation director for a global IT company based in Portlaoise.
“I suppose companies down south, there’s obviously just a lot more opportunity,” she says. “My job in itself may not exist up here [in the North], so I’m very lucky, but it’s down to the company’s mindset ... if the role allows it, it can be life-changing.”
With two young children, working remotely has been a “game-changer” for Kevitt.
“Do you know what it boils down to? I don’t have Sunday night fear. When I log off, I am present for my own family in a way I don’t think I would be if I was constantly driving four hours here, there and everywhere.
“I’m up and down regularly – when I say regularly, I mean once every two months – but it’s great. I block off two days, go down, do an overnight, come back up, and it’s lovely.
“Our attrition rates are fantastic. People don’t leave, because they don’t have those same stresses.”
This is one of the ways in which remote working is good for employers as well as employees, both Kevitt and Doherty emphasise.
Town planner Lucy Mulgrew is rarely in the same room as her colleagues. The 24-year-old, from Aughnacloy in Co Tyrone, works remotely for a firm which takes on contracts for UK councils including Dumfries and Galloway in Scotland and Oldham, Greater Manchester.
“It’s definitely opened up opportunities I wouldn’t have had,” she says of working remotely.
“At the time, trying to get a graduate planner job in Northern Ireland was quite hard, so I was open to anything. I wouldn’t have got a graduate job, at least not very easily, in the public sphere.”
Her previous job was fully office-based; now, aside from travel to visit sites, she mainly works from home, though she does have the option of meeting other colleagues from Northern Ireland at a company hub in Belfast.
“Having experienced both, there are definitely pros and cons,” she says.
The situation is similar for those working in the IT sector.
Adam Cherry, from Broughshane, Co Antrim, is a software engineer with a firm in Ballymena who works from home three days a week.
“It’s just a bit lonesome because there can be days when you’re just left to your own devices, and you don’t have any social interaction with other employees,” he says.
For Cherry, that lack of social interaction outweighs any benefits of working from home.
“At home there’s almost a sense of cabin fever,” he says.
“A lot of people may not have a dedicated office space, and for myself, it’s just a makeshift bit of the livingroom area, so when my partner comes home in the evening, what do we do, we’re sitting about the livingroom. So for me, it almost feels as if you’ve almost been stuck in one room the entire day.
“I value more human interaction. I much prefer being face-to-face for meetings, it’s better than over a Slack call or a Messenger call.”
Derry-based Doherty believes remote working is here to stay. The question is around “that dynamic of virtual versus face-to-face, and I don’t think we’ve tackled that,” she says.
“One thing you do lose with remote working is that relationship-building, particularly for new staff starting in the organisation, so you need to get that balance right,” she says.
Emma Kevitt’s company is exploring hybrid working, where employees can work with colleagues in local hubs a few days a week “so it’s like our office, but it’s not the office”.
“This is the next level of remote – it’s how you can work remotely, but also be part of something social, part of a team, not just one person working at a desk somewhere, but how can you create little remote hubs that are part of your company?”
This, she says, is the future. “It’s a different world. It’s back on the companies and employers. Do you want access to good talent? Then you have to be flexible.”
“This isn’t going away,” says Eoin Magennis. “So, I think the interesting challenge for the North is, do we embrace it more fully?”
