Covid-19 “expelled” many of the workers from their usual jobs and forced them to work from home. Although such opportunities existed before, many companies had their first experience with such extensive use of telework during the pandemic. In anticipation of the end of the pandemic and the rise in vaccination, many are thinking about how to organize the work in the future. It is clear that all workers no longer want to spend every working day in the office again, and a new form of work is becoming much more popular – hybrid work, which allows you to work part-time at work, part-time at home or elsewhere.
Facts and figures: Most European workers want to work part-time even after the pandemicInguna Ukenābele
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Employees “vote” for hybrid work
The European Union (EU) Agency for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (Eurofound), which aims to help improve social, employment and work-related policies, has carried out three large-scale electronic studies on how Covid 19 has affected EU workers.
The latest survey, conducted in March this year, when Europe was experiencing a pandemic for a round year, shows that, with the increasing number of vaccinations, workload from home has actually fallen in the EU. Eurofound study showsthat only 24% of EU workers worked full time from home in the spring, compared to 34% in the summer of last year, even though the pandemic subsided at the time. In turn, 59% of EU employees worked full-time in the employer or in other premises outside the home this spring.
However, this is likely to change as workers have compared different job opportunities, and a survey shows that most workers in Europe would prefer to work from home, at least from time to time, even in the absence of any restrictions due to Covid-19. The most popular choice is hybrid work.
31% of employees have mentioned that they would like to work from home several times a week, but 18% would like to do it several times a month.
16% of the surveyed workers want to work from home only after the pandemic, but 24% do not want to work from home.
Eurofound also notes that a comparison of the 2020 and 2021 surveys shows that it is the employees who have tried it during the pandemic that want to work at home, even partially. On the other hand, among those who want to continue working in the workplace, there are with great reliability those employees who cannot perform their work duties at home at all.
Eurofound points out that this situation promises new challenges for employers. If someone thought that everything would return to the old tracks after the pandemic, then these employee surveys show that this will not be the case, and if employers are not ready to offer hybrid working conditions, they are likely to lose out to other competitors in the recruitment process.
Baltics among Europeans
A Eurofound survey shows that there are only a few countries in the EU where at least half of workers would still not want to share their working time between home and work after a pandemic. These are only Greece, Bulgaria and Slovakia. The leaders, on the other hand, are Finland, where more than 80% of workers have said they want to work from home, starting with their daily work and ending at least a few times a month. Ireland, Spain, Sweden and Belgium are not far behind.
The Baltic states are in the middle. Among them, in Latvia, more than 60% have expressed a desire to work from home, starting every day and ending a few times a month.
At the same time, Eurofound warns that Latvia is among the countries where the number of employees surveyed is too small for these data to be considered representative. However, the data from Estonia and Lithuania show a rather similar picture and we can assume that we do not differ too much from our neighbors. Namely, in Estonia, 67% of employees have expressed a wish to work from home with different intensity, but in Lithuania – 59%. As in the EU as a whole, the most popular choice in the Baltic States has been working from home several times a week.
On the other hand, 25% of employees surveyed in Estonia and 36% in Lithuania do not want to work from home. In Latvia, this proportion was 33% of the respondents.
Quite similar results are also shown by the survey of the research and consulting company “Kantar” conducted in Latvia. Assessing the results obtained for what workers like in their daily work in a Covid-19 pandemic situation, it turns out that the most frequently mentioned positive aspect is the opportunity to work remotely. This is indicated by almost one in five workers or 17%. In addition, compared to the spring 2020 survey, this figure has increased significantly over the year, from 7% to 17%.
The opportunity to work remotely is more appreciated by managers, senior specialists, employees with high personal income, public administration, as well as those working in the field of finance and insurance and residents of Riga.
In addition, it is interesting that 7% of Covid-19 workers highly value the opportunity to work in quieter and more peaceful conditions, where there is no active working life in the background and “no-brain” colleagues.
It is possible that the idea of active daily interpersonal communication on work issues, “brainstorming” and constant flow of information as one of the motivators and also conditions for increasing productivity has been overestimated in the past in personnel management. From the employees ‘point of view, privacy, the opportunity to distance oneself in the performance of more focused work duties and autonomy are also of great importance, “Signe Kaņējeva, Kantar’ s personnel research expert, evaluated the results of the survey.
However, it is also not the case that Latvian workers want to be completely isolated. In the same survey, 22% of workers indicate that they lack direct, personal contact, communication with colleagues, clients and other people during the pandemic. In addition, this aspect is mentioned more often than in a study conducted a year ago.
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