After a rapid increase in the proportion of people working from home in the Corona years 2020 and 2021, the rate has since declined slightly across Europe. However, it is still noticeably higher than before the crisis. In Luxembourg, meanwhile, the proportion of people who “usually” work from home has almost fallen back to pre-crisis levels.
For many years, people talked and debated about keywords such as home office or “teleworking”. However, until the Corona crisis in 2020, it was only a reality for a minority of the working population. In Luxembourg, as in the rest of Europe, the rate had remained almost unchanged for years. Between 2010 and 2019, there was hardly any movement in the proportion of people who “normally” work from home.
In 2019, just 14.4 percent of employed people across Europe worked from home “sometimes” or “usually.” With the advent of Corona, this changed all of a sudden. From one day to the next, a huge proportion of employees suddenly had to work from home for health reasons. In the second year of the crisis, this figure had shot up to 24 percent.
The jump was also remarkable in Luxembourg, where more people were already working from home before the crisis due to the structure of the economy and the financial centre: in just one year, it rose from 33.1 to 47.6 percent. In no other EU country was their share higher in 2020. Even the daily traffic jams on the way to work had become shorter.
Since the highs in those years, the share of employed people who “sometimes” or “usually” work from home has fallen slightly. In 2023, according to the latest available Figures from Eurostattheir share was 22.2 percent in the EU Member States and 40.1 percent in Luxembourg. In Luxembourg, the decline was greater than in the partner countries: the Grand Duchy fell to fourth place, behind the Netherlands, Sweden and Finland.
“Usually” working from home
What is interesting is the different development in the proportion of people who “usually” work from home and those who only “sometimes” work from home. For those who “usually” work from home, the increase was first greater, and then later the decline.
In 2019, only 5.4 percent of employed people in Europe “usually” worked from home. Across Europe, the number of employed people who normally work from home practically doubled in 2021: to 13.3 percent. Since then, it has fallen again to 8.9 percent in 2023.
In Luxembourg, the rise and fall were even more rapid: while only 11.6 percent of people normally worked from home in 2019, two years later the proportion was significantly higher at 28.1 percent. Since then, however, a significant drop has been recorded, to just 12.6 percent in 2023. This is already quite close to the figures recorded by the Grand Duchy in 2019. The country has also fallen in this ranking: while only Ireland had more people “normally” working from home in 2021, by 2023 there were already more in Finland, Ireland, Belgium, Sweden and Germany.
“Sometimes” working from home
Nevertheless, the “teleworking” development does not seem to have been a brief “storm in a teacup”: sustained increases are being recorded, especially in the development of the proportion of employed people who “sometimes” work teleworking. Across Europe, the rate has grown slightly every year since 2020, from 8.9 to 14.1 percent. In Luxembourg, too, it reached a new historic high in 2023 (at 27.3 percent). In the frontrunner, the Netherlands, almost 40 percent of employed people can now sometimes work from home.
The Corona crisis has shown employees what is possible in terms of teleworking. Some no longer want to do without it. Many employees value the new-found flexibility, the freedom to coordinate work, leisure and family themselves. For companies, it has become a question of attractiveness in the battle for talent. It seems that only very few companies want to let their employees work 100 percent from home.
There are other interesting details hidden in the Eurostat figures. In 2023, for example, 59.9 percent of employed people in Luxembourg never worked from home. Across Europe, the average was 77.8 percent – in Bulgaria as much as 97.2 percent. In contrast to the European average, the proportion of women working from home in this country is slightly higher than that of men. Only 12.7 percent of employees in the Grand Duchy “usually” worked from home in 2023 – but 28.2 percent of the self-employed did.
In 2023, 40.1 percent of employed people in Luxembourg worked “sometimes” or “usually” from home Photo: Editpress/Julien Garroy
Read also:
Here to stay – home office development in 2021
Home office 2020: The initial enthusiasm has faded – now it’s time to calculate
The slow development of the “home office” in the years before Corona
Only in Finland were more people working from home in 2020 than in Luxembourg
Home office: Luxembourg was one of the leaders in Europe in 2022
