The conversation has shrunk a lot since its peak in March and April 2020, but it remains high compared to historical levels. In April of this year, mentions were 821% higher than they were in April 2019.

It’s no surprise when it’s a topic that affects a significant chunk of many people’s lives today. Many have become accustomed to the WFH life, while others are craving a return to the office.

We decided to take a look at the sentiment of the conversation to see what we could find out.

When we look at the average across all of our mentions, it’s not been a pretty conversation. Net sentiment has always been negative, and seems to have gotten more so as time goes on.

Does this mean people are anti-WFH?

Not necessarily. The negative conversation does include people who don’t like working from home, but also those who don’t want it to end, or feel attempts to curtail it are unsafe.

While it’s hard to gauge the popularity of working from home, what we do know is that it’s an emotive subject that people feel very strongly about. Looking at the April 2021 mentions we could categorize for emotion, we found:

• 43% were joyful
• 33% were angry
• 14% were sad
• 5% were fearful
• 5% were disgusted

In other words, the working from home debate is invoking a lot of feelings.

To get an idea of how this looks in different places, we also broke down our data by country.

There are stark differences between countries here. The French working from home conversation, and to a lesser extent the Spanish one, has been incredibly negative from the off.

According to Mélanie Corolleur, our Senior Field Marketing Manager for France and DACH, this is because working from home was much rarer in France compared to other countries. Therefore workers and managers were not technically or mentally prepared for the shift. She suspects the negativity could be from different expectations between employees and employers, too.

Mélanie also offered an explanation for the big fall into negativity France saw in October of last year. She said this is likely a negative response to a statement from President Macron in which he said WFH would not be mandatory.

In comparison, the conversation in the US and the UK was relatively positive at the start, while net sentiment hasn’t changed as drastically since.

But the commonality all these countries share is that their WFH conversation has become more negative over time. The topic is clearly a fraught one, and companies should tread carefully when making any decisions about the matter.

What should we cover next?

Is there a topic, trend, or industry you’d like us to feature in the Brandwatch Bulletin? We want to hear your ideas to make sure our readers are getting what they want. We may even ask to interview you if you’re involved with the topic.

Send any and all ideas to [email protected] and let’s talk.

Thanks for reading

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Stay safe,

The Brandwatch React team