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00:00:33 Mary McCaughey
Good morning, and welcome to this edition of Eurofound Talks. Today we're going to look at really one of the core issues that we have seen playing out over the last period of time. It's the post-pandemic rise of telework in Europe. We saw during COVID-19, we saw the pandemic pushing us into new ways of working. It evolved in terms of a widespread change across the labour market. We saw telework keeping many people in employment during a time when there was a lot of pressure on the labour force, but I suppose as we have seen the pandemic wane, we have also seen that this change, this trend towards more working from home, has continued, and we have seen this take hold in a way that it will probably be a more permanent phenomenon in the labour market. But we've also seen with that that there has been an impact. In some ways, it is good for work-life balance, it may be good for younger parents, it's good, perhaps, for caring for older people. But it also has had impacts in other areas that perhaps we need to see with more concern: gender equality and care, for example; the well-being of workers; the working conditions of those workers; where they work. So, it really is what we call today a digital minefield and I'm very happy to say that today I will be joined by one of our resident experts on telework and working life here at Eurofound, Oscar Vargas Llave. You're very welcome, Oscar.
00:02:03 Oscar Vargas Llave
Thank you, Mary.
00:02:04 Mary McCaughey
Oscar, maybe just to set us up and start off the context within which we are discussing today, tell me about telework in Europe and how it has changed.
00:02:15 Oscar Vargas Llave
Yes, this is a very important question, because I think the public is not aware of the real change that we have experienced during the last three years. I will give you some figures. For example, before the pandemic, around 10% of employees in the European Union teleworked either occasionally or usually. With the eruption of the pandemic in 2020, this figure increased to 18%, so almost double the number of employees teleworking in the European Union. What's more, even the year after, in 2021, this figure even increased more, to 22%. And your question is very good, because now there are many persons in the public, stakeholders, wondering if this trend will continue increasing or, because the restrictions of COVID-19 have been lifted, we will be back to where we were before the pandemic.
What we see is that, as I mentioned before, in 2021, up to 22% of European workers teleworked in that year, so we saw an increase at a time where in many countries already restrictions related to the lockdown, etc. were lifted. We have been following also what is happening in some individual countries during this year, 2022, and we see only a very slight reduction of workers teleworking – for example, from the first quarter this year from 12% to 11% in Spain, so it's a very minor reduction. Also in Germany from 25% to 22%.
So, so far, what we can say at the moment is that the number of employees teleworking in these countries, in Europe in general, has stabilised somehow. I think we are in a phase of adaptation to the new way of working for many workers, but so far we cannot say that we are going to be back to the situation we had before the pandemic, not even that there is a big reduction of telework in the European Union. We are seeing a stabilisation of the situation. I can also say that, from the information we have, we think that in the future this will start increasing again – not, of course, at the rate that we experienced in the pandemic, but after a period of stabilisation that could last 1-2 years, it is very likely we will see an increase again in teleworking when people have adapted to this way of work, also because of the increasing use of IT facilities at work, the increase of ‘teleworkable’ jobs, an increase in the service sector, ICT, etc. We can expect an increase in the numbers of people teleworking in the future. These 22% represent 41.7 million workers in the European Union that have teleworked in 2021. That is the equivalent to the whole German workforce.
00:05:31 Mary McCaughey
That's a huge number of people teleworking, Oscar, and certainly what you seem to be saying is that this phenomenon, which was in fact largely based on an emergency response, has taken hold and, to a large degree, it looks like it will become a permanent part of the landscape. I'm just wondering, though, that when you say that, when you say that it will continue to increase, is it fair to say that teleworkable jobs are really restricted to certain types of jobs, so that we will also see that there will be a constant number of jobs that will be required to be maintained within the workplace?
00:06:16 Oscar Vargas Llave
There is a big division in the labour market in relation to the possibilities of working remotely. Here in Eurofound we have researched an estimated number of teleworkable jobs in the European Union. And this is very important to consider for the future, because if there is a part of the workforce that were not able to telework in the pandemic and are not going to be able to telework in the future, in this way, this, I think, represents some sort of divide between different workers: those who can enjoy the possibility of teleworking or have access to telework because the work allows that, you know, the tools that they use for working, whereas in other sectors like, for example, construction, agriculture or some manufacturing sectors, we will see that there will be very few people able to telework. As telework has been introduced before, it has some advantages but also some disadvantages, for example, in relation to improving work-life balance, I think you could see the divide there between people who can benefit from this form of work and others that will not be able.
00:07:34 Mary McCaughey
And, Oscar, would they be considered to be, for the most part, good jobs, good-quality jobs that are teleworkable?
00:07:42 Oscar Vargas Llave
Yes, indeed, the majority of workers teleworking have managerial positions or are professionals. However, we saw during the pandemic an increase of middle-skilled workers, like clerical workers, etc. So, so far, yes, it is mainly a work arrangement that is part of high-level skilled work.
00:08:08 Mary McCaughey
So, we are really looking at a fairly privileged cohort when we talk about those who telework on an ongoing basis.
00:08:16 Oscar Vargas Llave
I would be reluctant to call this teleworking cohort privileged, because although most of them are in managerial position and professionals, we have also seen an increase of not so privileged workers, like those doing clerical jobs. So, with the expansion of telework, we see that also some workers who did not telework before have access to this form of work, and we cannot call them privileged.
00:08:49 Mary McCaughey
The interesting thing here would be to look at the working conditions of these workers. I mean, recent research from Eurofound showed that, in fact, people working from home were more likely to work longer hours. I think they were expected to exceed sometimes certainly the 40-hour week, if not the 48-hour week, and we knew that from the past as well as, prior to the pandemic, that ICT-based workers also seemed to have a greater intensity of work. Has that begun to be diluted somewhat?
00:09:26 Oscar Vargas Llave
What happened during the pandemic is that this was also experienced together with other demands like the stress related to the lockdowns, demands from homeschooling, etc. So, this all together made the feeling of work intensity, strain, higher during the pandemic. However, our analysis of the European Working Conditions Telephone Survey indicates that, for example, with the expansion of hybrid work, we see that this work arrangement shows better results in terms of working long [hours]. I will give you just a couple of comparisons between these workers working in hybrid mode and those working only from home full-time. We saw that around 35% of those working full-time from home report working long hours, compared to 29% for those working in a hybrid mode. So, generally speaking, when you telework, because you have the possibility to work anywhere and anytime, you are more likely to work longer. However, there are some arrangements like hybrid work, partial telework, the combining of both places of work, home and work, where it's likely that this risk is reduced.
00:10:45 Mary McCaughey
And we'll come back to hybrid work shortly, but I suppose one of the elements that would have been a stressor also would perhaps be not having access to the right material or equipment to carry out your work from home or from another place. Is that something that has been resolved in this interim period after the pandemic?
00:11:05 Oscar Vargas Llave
We have evidence, from our COVID-19 Living and working e-survey, that for example in July 2020, still in the middle of the pandemic, 1 in 10 workers reported not having the right equipment to telework from home. So, I think this is going to continue to be an issue. This has been already addressed by companies – providing the right equipment to employees. However, I think this is very important aspect also from the health and safety perspective, that the workers have the right equipment to work from home – not only that they have the right equipment in terms of technical elements, that they're able to have the proper laptop etc., but also from a health and safety perspective. I think this issue has to continue to be monitored, because our findings also show that it has a big impact on work satisfaction, if you have the right equipment at home.
00:12:10 Mary McCaughey
Also it highlights the issue of how difficult it is to regulate work that is carried out outside the workplace, and that refers to the issues, for example, with respect to disconnecting from work – so, the right to disconnect, to avoid the long hours we're talking about – but also with respect to the health and safety issues that you're talking about. How has that been managed?
00:12:35 Oscar Vargas Llave
This is a very difficult issue to manage. I think some of the aspects you mentioned are still under discussion in some countries and also at European level. In Europe, we found that before the pandemic, the vast majority of countries had some type of regulation related to telework, and this was mainly because there was a framework agreement in Europe on telework, which was signed in 2002, and this was a driver for the different countries to develop their own regulation on telework. But because, of course, of the pandemic, debates and discussions started again. You mentioned, for example, the right to disconnect; we saw that before the pandemic there were four countries that included the right to disconnect in their legislation. Those countries where France, Italy, Spain and Belgium.
00:13:38 Mary McCaughey
And that was prior to the pandemic.
00:13:49 Oscar Vargas Llave
That was prior to the pandemic. Actually, France already in the beginning of 2017 included the right to disconnect in the legislation. With the pandemic, we have four countries, new countries, with the right to disconnect in their legislation. These countries are Portugal, Slovakia, Luxembourg and Greece. On top of that, in Ireland, the Parliament passed a guide, a practice for the right to disconnect. This is not legislation, but it can be used, for example, when there is a court case, the employee can use this in the case. So, there’s increasing debate on the right to disconnect. More countries are adopting legislation on the right to disconnect. There are some countries, like those I mentioned, mainly from western and southern Europe, that include some provisions, like the right to disconnect or giving more flexibility to the worker to organise their working time autonomously. However, there is another set of countries, mainly in central Europe, that rely on existing legislation on working time to be applied in a teleworking setting. They don't develop new provisions on working time, like the right to disconnect or allowing flexible work, etc.
About the health and safety aspect, I would say that some countries – a few countries, I would say, maybe 6 or 7 countries in the European Union – adopted new provisions on how to develop, for example, risk assessment in a remote work setting. However, that is a small number of countries, and I think this represents an example of the difficulties now with existing legislation and the new way of working. I think the policymakers have difficulties addressing this issue when you work remotely – how do you go to people's homes to check that the conditions are appropriate and evaluate the risks there?
00:15:47 Mary McCaughey
Is there another danger as well, Oscar, that we enter into another inequality divide where those who have houses, those who have apartments that they can work in, that are well resourced and well heated and have the facilities, can work easily from home, but those, perhaps, younger people or those who are on lower salaries are not in the same position? Are we in danger of compounding an inequality within the system?
00:16:20 Oscar Vargas Llave
Low-paid workers are more likely to not have the right conditions at home to telework. In this way, of course, on top of the divide I mentioned before about teleworkable jobs, we can find in the future a divide of access to telework related to the conditions you have at home or your family situation. That's a very interesting point indeed.
00:16:48 Mary McCaughey
I think some of the work that Eurofound did with respect to the EU PolicyWatch, where we were looking at measures that were implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic, did also look at potential subsidies that were given or assistance and support that was provided to those who were teleworking. It could be to do with the cost of living, it could be to do with heating your home, it could be to do with filling some of those gaps that emerge when you are no longer working in the workplace, and all of those costs have been moved to your home.
00:17:25 Oscar Vargas Llave
Yes, that is what happened in the pandemic. I would say that in most European countries there were some sort of regulations trying to address this issue, and it has been addressed in several countries on a permanent basis. They are still in place even if the pandemic has sort of diluted it. But this is done in a different way. Sometimes there is a lump sum given by the companies, because the regulation says that companies have to support this through a lump sum, and in other countries there is a tax reduction for that, and in other countries this is not contemplated at national level. But, indeed, this is one, together with working time flexibility, the right to disconnect and also the telework regime – meaning how far workers have access or the right to request telework – this is one of the issues that has been addressed in the regulations during the last two years.
00:18:31 Mary McCaughey
There's been a lot of talk about the gender dimension over the last couple of years, how women in particular have fared, for one as a result of the impact of the recession followed by the pandemic. We know that women consistently do more unpaid work at home with respect to managing the household. Have we seen that there are clearly benefits for women to be more agile and to have a better work-life balance in some respects by having access to telework, but are we seeing some negative dimensions creeping in as a result of more women doing more telework?
00:19:12 Oscar Vargas Llave
Teleworking, being able to work remotely, generally speaking, has the potential for improving work-life balance. We know from our European Working Conditions Survey that, for a long time, we can say that it's an average of 1 in 5 workers in Europe reporting work-life balance problems. So, if we see that the expansion of telework, being able to have access to telework, improves work-life balance, I think here policymakers have a good opportunity to foster the use of telework for improving work-life balance. This is the positive part.
You ask rightly about the gender dimension. In the analysis of the European Working Conditions Telephone Survey, we found that both women and men benefit from teleworking in terms of being able to have a better work-life balance, being able to do work and at the same time other activities, caring, etc. However, we observed that men, when they telework more (you can telework occasionally only or you can telework full-time)… so men who telework full-time are more likely to report a work-life balance, so they improve their living and working conditions the more they telework. However, with women, this is not the case. Generally speaking, they improve their work-life balance compared to those not able to telework. However, we don't see this increase. So, for women, if they telework more often, they don't necessarily see this improvement, as we saw with men. So, this is the caveat. Telework is good for work-life balance and in a way also for gender relations. However, there is this aspect that women do not benefit as much as men.
00:21:11 Mary McCaughey
And I know that Eurofound has done other work recently also in that area – we won't go into it in great detail here, but also about the presence in the office and the visibility and how does that impact on the long-term careers for both men and women. So, that's something also to take into consideration, and perhaps I can move straight in with that, because I think it's part of it, about what you've referred to as perhaps the perfect space, which is the hybrid environment. Here, we see an awful lot of employers asking workers to come back to the office for a period of the week. It can be anything from one to three, sometimes it's four or five. Do you think, or have you seen from the research, is there a general acceptance of this? Are workers in favour of this move towards hybrid, or are there different viewpoints where we will see some level of conflict emerging over the next period?
00:22:10 Oscar Vargas Llave
First of all, I think it's important to explain the results of our e-surveys: they are constantly stating a preference for working some days from home and some days from the workplace. It is true that this interest for telework has somehow decreased a little bit with the experience of the pandemic, but still, all the recent surveys we have checked from national reports, we see that there is a large majority preferring to work not full-time from home but some days from home and some days from the office. This is also because of what you mentioned; it's important to be visible at the workplace. Also, from the social point of view, it's important both for the worker and the company to have workers some days at the workplace.
But our research showed that employees teleworking do not report a lower level of support from managers, for example, from colleagues especially. It is more, I think, that hybrid work is more problematic, probably, for managers to handle, to manage groups working in a hybrid mode because they are not used to doing that. It could be that there is a problem of adaptation to the new way of working, or really it is more difficult to manage hybrid workers. We saw before the pandemic that one of the main barriers for the expansion of telework was the values and attitudes of managers towards telework. There was a view from many managers that if workers teleworked, they would not be performing as well as at the office. So, there was this barrier, and this barrier has been removed. For example, now, hybrid work is expanding, of course, in sectors with high number of teleworkable jobs, like financial services, IT or public administration.
00:24:25 Mary McCaughey
In terms of that, though, Oscar, I suppose that's an interesting point. I mean, how do you, as an expert who's really been involved in this research for a long period of time now, how do you see it evolving over the next few years?
00:24:39 Oscar Vargas Llave
I think in this situation we have to look at the statistics, and the figures are saying that there is not a big drop in the number of employees teleworking after the pandemic. What we see is that there is a slight decline indicating that the number of people will remain stable in the future. Teleworking will remain stable at the figures that we see right now. In the end, this is also a matter of organisation of work and it's the responsibility of the employer to organise work. Of course, also social dialogue and agreements play an important role, so we are seeing that there might be changes in the future, but I think we have to base our forecasts on the present situation.
Also, if we consider the main drivers of telework, which are teleworkable jobs, the sectors with teleworkable jobs will also increase. We know that, overwhelmingly, workers prefer to work at least sometimes from home. We have seen during the pandemic the removal of cultural barriers for teleworking. Even, in some contexts, there is an increase in productivity if you consider all the elements: reduction on renting office spaces, etc. This has been used already, this type of policies. This hybrid mode will stay, will last long and I would tell policymakers that they should be prepared, they should take this into account, that now we can say that 1 in 10 workers in Europe telework occasionally or usually, and this will not drop a lot in the future.
00:26:28 Mary McCaughey
Well, thank you, Oscar. That brings me, really, to the final input from you. We always, at the end of each of these sessions, we like to distil the conversation down to three main points. If you were to be talking to those policymakers and you had three main points to put on the table for them to address to ensure that we tackle these issues, what would they be, if you can talk to me in three?
00:27:00 Oscar Vargas Llave
I think in connection to what I just explained about the future, because the increase of teleworking is not temporary, we should put in place measures to monitor what the effects of teleworking are in the different modes, full-time from home or in hybrid mode, in the future, because there is a change in terms of the number of people teleworking compared to before the pandemic. We have researched very well what happened before the pandemic. So, I would strongly advise to continue monitoring what the situation of these workers is.
My second point is in relation to organisation of working time. The organisation of working time in teleworking settings is not the same as when you work, for example, from a factory. Here, we see a lot of flexibility, potential flexibility, work from anywhere and at any time. This is conducive to working alone. In this aspect, there is a cultural element, because I think we have a culture of work characterised by being available, from the worker’s perspective, being available anytime, and, of course, we have the right to disconnect in some countries to address this issue, but I think this has to be another issue that policymakers have to continue to look after.
Finally, I want to end with the positive aspect that I mentioned before, which is the improvement of work-life balance that many workers are experiencing. In the current situation, where we go from crisis to crisis, it is good news to see that, without diminishing productivity and performance, some workers experience an increase in their work-life balance because they have the possibility to telework.
00:28:48 Mary McCaughey
Thank you, Oscar. Certainly, Eurofound can bring more to the table in terms of continuing to measure and monitor the evolutions that you have discussed today with respect to telework and hybrid work and, indeed, in terms of the organisation of working time and working time more generally. So, I think Eurofound still has a very important role to play in terms of contributing to the information analysis and data that is available for policymakers to make these decisions – and, of course, with the view to us all benefiting to some degree from the work-life balance elements that you have discussed here. Certainly, as we heave from one crisis to the next, one element could be that we do benefit to some degree from the work-life benefits.
Thank you very much for joining us today, Oscar. I think you have helped to shine a spotlight on one of the issues which really has been to the fore of the debate and will continue to be so. We discussed telework today, but it touched on an awful lot of other issues which Eurofound also has done much work and research on with respect to work-life balance, with respect to gender equality, intensity of work, working time, working conditions most generally. All of those you can find and much more on our website. Until the next time, when Eurofound talks to you.
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