Before the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, 17 percent of U.S. employees worked from home 5 days or more per week, a share that increased to 44 percent during the pandemic. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the remote working trend, as quarantines and lockdowns made commuting and working in an office close to impossible for millions around the world. Remote work, also called telework or working from home (WFH), provided a solution, with employees performing their roles away from the office supported by specialized technology, eliminating the commute to an office to remain connected with colleagues and clients. What enables working from home?

To enable remote work, employees rely on a remote work arrangements that enable hybrid work and make it safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. Technology supporting remote work including laptops saw a surge in demand, video conferencing companies such as Zoom jumped in value, and employers had to consider new communication techniques and resources. Is remote work the future of work?

The response to COVID-19 has demonstrated that hybrid work models are not necessarily an impediment to productivity. For this reason, there is a general consensus that different remote work models will persist post-COVID-19. Many employers see benefits to flexible working arrangements, including positive results on employee wellness surveys, and potentially reducing office space. Many employees also plan on working from home more often, with 25 percent of respondents to a recent survey expecting remote work as a benefit of employment. As a result, it is of utmost importance to acknowledge any issues that may arise in this context to empower a hybrid workforce and ensure a smooth transition to more flexible work models.

The pandemic forced millions of people to change the way they work. Wherever possible, companies embraced remote work to keep their employees safe and their businesses open during shelter-in-place orders. Working remotely during a crisis is totally different, even for companies that were already distributed. Fear, stress, and distractions created a less-than-ideal work environment for the hundreds of thousands of people working from home for the first time.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, over 80 percent of Canadian employees were working primarily at external workplaces. This decreased to 27 percent during the coronavirus pandemic. Indeed, only six percent of employees were working remotely for most of the time before the outbreak of the pandemic. The share of employees working both in home office and at their workplace, did not change significantly, declining from 12 percent to 14 percent.

In 2020, one in two companies in Poland do not yet know what kind of remote work hours will be applied after the COVID-19 pandemic. However, of those who do plan to work remotely, 15 percent will implement home office two days a week. Nevertheless, seven percent of companies do not intend to introduce remote working after the pandemic ends.

For further information about the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, please visit our dedicated Facts and Figures page.

When asked which changes in the work environment will persist after the COVID-19 vaccines are adopted, 90 percent of respondents state that they are likely to allow employees to work remotely at least part of the time. Sixty-five percent state that more flexibility on when people work will be a defining feature of the work environment. This means that organizations must ensure that employees have the technical equipment that suits their needs and the ability to navigate a digital work environment. Furthermore, these numbers implicate that some of the measures organizations had to adopt due to the COVID-19 pandemic are becoming an integral part of the work environment and are not necessarily temporary.

According to a survey conducted by the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW), just over half of responding companies in the information sector stated that none of their employees had worked from home before the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. During the pandemic, the share of companies that had none of their employees working remotely decreased to 26 percent (as of June 2020).

The most important benefit of working remotely in the U.S. post-COVID-19 in 2021 was that people could be with their family. At the same time, for 79 percent of respondents, being allowed to work from home meant that their employer cared more about them.

EFE07 - Effects of Covid-19 on Remote Working of persons aged 15 years and over. Published by Central Statistics Office. Available under the license Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY-4.0).Effects of Covid-19 on Remote Working of persons aged 15 years and over...

Online searches regarding home office and remote working have surged worldwide since the global coronavirus outbreak. As companies worldwide have started moving workers to remote work setups, online interest in teleworking policies and setups has grown exponentially since February 2020, peaking in mid March. Search interest has gone down since then, but still remain at higher levels from pre-corona time. For further information about the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, please visit our dedicated Facts and Figures page.

PWLBRW20 - Employees aged 18 years and over who availed of remote working in the previous 12 months by frequency of remote working in a typical 4 week period, a typical period pre COVID-19. Published by Central Statistics Office. Available under the license Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY-4.0).Employees aged 18 years and over who availed of remote working in the previous 12 months by frequency of remote working in a typical 4 week period, a typical period pre COVID-19...

In more than one half of surveyed companies in Russia, remote working was not possible or was not possible on paper prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a survey conducted in the first quarter of 2021. Moreover, only 17 percent of respondents confirmed that remote working arrangements were available to some extent in their companies prior to the lockdown.

PWLBRW01 - Employees aged 18 years and over by whether they availed of remote working in their employment in the previous 12 months / pre COVID-19. Published by Central Statistics Office. Available under the license Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY-4.0).Employees aged 18 years and over by whether they availed of remote working in their employment in the previous 12 months / pre COVID-19...

Following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns, software engineers' daily life was disrupted and they were abruptly forced into working remotely from home. Across one exploratory and one confirmatory study ($N$ = 482), we tested whether a typical working day is different to pre-pandemic times and whether specific activities are associated with activity-specific satisfaction and productivity. To explore the subject domain, we first run a two-wave longitudinal study, where we found that the time software engineers spent doing specific activities (e.g., coding, bugfixing, helping others) from home was similar to pre-pandemic times. Also, the amount of time developers spent on each activity was unrelated to their general well-being, perceived productivity, and other variables such as basic needs. In our confirmatory study, we found that activity satisfaction and productivity are predicted by activity-specific variables (e.g., how much autonomy software engineers had during coding) but not by activity-independent variables such as general resilience or a good work-life balance. Additionally, we found that satisfaction and autonomy were significantly higher when software engineers were helping others and lower when they were bugfixing. In contrast, autonomy was lower during meetings and when writing emails. Also, contrary to anecdotal evidence, software engineers' satisfaction and productivity during meetings was not lower compared to other activities. Finally, we discuss implications for software engineers, management, and researchers. In particular, active company policies to support developers' need for autonomy, relatedness, and competence appear to be particularly effective in a WFH context.

The study seeks to contribute to programs in Transportation Demand Management (TDM) and Commute Trip Reduction (CTR), with the specific aim to reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and to increase related co-benefits in the forms of reduced traffic congestion and environmental pollution. The study explores lessons learned from the Covid-19 pandemic when a large proportion of the population was forced to work from home as the result of lockdown policies implemented at the beginning of the outbreak. The pandemic-induced natural experiment on teleworking afforded rich information on who future commuters might be who could be targeted to continue to telework successfully after the pandemic subsides. Data come from a 4,506-respondent survey administered in the Spring of 2020. Of those, 2,174 lived in Puget Sound and had been forced to switched from working away from home to working from home. Respondents who reported being equally or more productive as they worked from home were older professionals, living with a partner but not with children, and not working in the education sector. From the TDM and CTR perspectives, it was promising to find out that respondents who drove to work before Covid were more likely to report being equally or more productive when working from home. In contrast, respondents who walked to work were less likely to be more productive when working from home. The study provides useful information on the types of commuters who could be encouraged to continue working from home once the pandemic is under control.

Some of the practices that were introduced by Russian companies due to COVID-19 were planned to introducing on regular basis. According to the survey, 36 percent of companies looked into keeping remote work after the pandemic, while 46 percent stated they would keep online training. At the same time, more than one half of respondents expected to return to the previous model of work. For further information about the coronavirus (COVID-19), please visit our dedicated Facts and Figures page.

Research Data concerning individual preferences of working from home versus at the onsite office

Effects of Covid-19 Restrictions on Remote Working of persons aged 15 years and over

BackgroundAfter the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, employees in Europe increasingly worked from home. In the German public sector, many employees experienced working from home for the first time. Concurrently, employees could use job crafting activities to alter job demands and resources while working from home. This exploratory case study aims to shed light on how public service employees craft their job demands and job resources, and how they perceive job satisfaction and productivity while working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. A novel theoretical approach is applied to explore crafting activities that target specific job demands and resources when working from home, using a combined framework of resource-based job crafting based on the Job Demands–Resources model and time-spatial job crafting.MethodsQualitative telephone interviews were conducted with employees from different public sectors in Germany between December 2021 and February 2022. According to the COREQ guidelines, the 12 semi-structured interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and content-analyzed using MAXQDA.ResultsThe results suggest that employees, who were new to working from home, developed personal crafting strategies for their flexible work environment. These strategies supported them in coping with hindering job demands (e.g., measures regarding work-related availability or interruptions) by optimizing their working conditions. Additionally, employees used strategies to increase their social resources (e.g., initiating meetings with colleagues) and structural resources (e.g., installing additional work equipment, planning of office days and working-from-home days). The use of given job resources and optimization of job demands are closely linked to the time-spatial demands fit. Thereby, the time-spatial demands fit is used to combine workplaces, work hours, or work tasks with the provided resources and demands to achieve an optimal work environment, which also facilitates employees' productivity and satisfaction.ConclusionThe results enrich the resource-based and time-spatial demand job crafting research by adding specific job crafting strategies utilized by public service employees. Furthermore, the results highlight job crafting strategies for enhancing job satisfaction and productivity when working from home in the post-pandemic world, thus offering valuable insights for researchers and practitioners.

As of 2021, about one-quarter of French recruiters surveyed were willing to extended the remote working conditions offered to job applicants after the end of the COVID-19 crisis. Only two percent of the recruiters in question count on reducing the conditions offered to applicants after the end of this health crisis.

This statistic shows the percentage of workforce that will remain permanently remote post-COVID who were not remote before COVID. A quarter of respondents said they will move at least 10% of their office employees to permanent remote positions. This is not surprising as CFOs are under pressure to tightly manage costs, and they see an opportunity to achieve the cost benefits of a remote workforce.