The Work Trend Index survey was conducted by an independent research firm, Edelman Data x Intelligence, among 31,092 full - time employed or self - employed workers across 31 markets between January 12, 2021 to January 25, 2021. This survey was 20 minutes in length and conducted online, in either the English language or translated into a local language across markets. At least 1,000 full - time workers were surveyed in each market, and global results have been aggregated across all responses to provide an average. Each market is evenly weighted within the global average. Each market was sampled to be representative of the full - time workforce across age, gender, and region across a mix of work environments (remote vs. non - remote, office settings vs. non - office settings, etc.), industries, company sizes, tenures, and job levels. Markets surveyed include: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Philippines, Poland, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States, and Vietnam. Privacy Statement Microsoft takes privacy seriously. We remove all personal and organization - identifying information, such as company name, from our data before analyzing it and creating reports. We never use customer content — such as information within an email, chat, document, or meeting — to produce reports. Our goal is to discover and share broad workplace trends that are anonymized by aggregating the data broadly from those trillions of signals that make up the Microsoft Graph. Survey Methodology