Work from home

How common has working from home become in Europe?

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The pandemic has created quite a shift in how we work. A lot of companies and employees have discovered that working from home offers a lot of advantages. Although some companies have reverted back to working from the office completely, some have made it the norm to work from home at least half the time.

This map shows us the percentage of employed persons that worked from home at least half the days worked in 2021. We have to keep in mind, that a lot of people had to work from home in 2021 due to the lockdowns, not necessarily because the company prefers it. It would be really interesting to look at these statistics again post-pandemic.

As we can see, there are some strong geographical differences. More workers in western and northern Europe worked from home than in eastern and especially south-eastern Europe. There are quite a few factors that can influence this: government policies, working culture and the dominant sectors. Countries with a higher share of office workers, will most likely have a higher share of people working from home. Whereas countries where there is a higher share of people doing physical labour, will have a more difficult time working from home.

Romania (2.4%) and Bulgaria (2.8%) have by far the lowest share of employed people that worked from home at least half the time. Ireland has by far the highest percentage, where about a third of the employed people worked from home at least half the time in 2021.

This map does only shows people that worked from home at least half the time. The Eurostat dataset only differentiates between employed people that worked at home at least half the time, some time, or never. To be considered someone that works at home sometimes, you’d have to work from home at least one hour in a four-week reference period. One hour is an extremely small amount and this means that the group of people that work from home ‘sometimes’, can’t be considered people that work from home on a regular basis. And that’s exactly what I’m interested in for this map. I want to show how common working from home on a regular basis has become. This would mean at least one day every week from my point of view. One hour in a four-week period is not enough. In that case, the share of employed persons that worked from home at least half the time, gives a more reliable view than the percentage that worked from home sometimes (even if it’s just an hour).

So, how about people that worked from home in total? We would see a very similar map in that case. The countries on the above map, where less than 11% worked from home half the time, would still be at the bottom. Of these countries at the bottom, the highest percentage of people working from home, would be 15.5% (Spain). The only exception would be Slovenia. Although 10.6% worked from home at least half the time, 23.1% worked from home in total in Slovenia.

For the countries with a higher percentage of people working from home at least half the time, the ranking would also be quite similar if we would include all workers working from home. The only difference would be Switzerland, which would rank 4th with 44.1% of people working from home. The highest ranking country would be the Netherlands, where 57.6% of employed people worked from home at some point in 2021. This is also the only European country where a majority of employed people have worked from home at some point in 2021.