European Company Survey follow-up 2020

The ECS 2020 was an online survey that collected data on workplace practices in over 1,200 establishments in the EU27 and the United Kingdom (UK). These data pertained to work organisation, human resource management, skills use, skills strategies, digitalisation, direct employee participation and workplace social dialogue. Unlike the ECS 2019, only the management respondents were addressed. Of the respondents, 670 identified as female, 601 as male and 5 as other. Those managers who had agreed to be recontacted for research purposes following their participation in the ECS 2019 were invited to complete an online questionnaire focusing on the impact of COVID-19 on workplace practices, about six months after the health crisis struck.

The survey questionnaire repeated a range of questions from the 2019 survey to enable comparisons over time. It also featured a set of newly developed questions on the effects of the pandemic on business operations (immediately after the start of the crisis and afterwards), work organisation, human resource policies, changes in skills needs, training, telework and other issues.

After the questionnaire was translated into 21 languages and the translations verified, invitations containing a personalised link to it were sent by email to 5,134 managers in the EU27 and the UK. A total of 1,276 managers completed the questionnaire. The data were weighted to match the population of establishments in the EU and obtain representative findings. However, it must be noted that standard errors of point estimates based on these data are considerable. Data collection started on 9 November 2020 and concluded on 30 November 2020.

The weighting that was applied to the ECS 2019 was the starting point for the weighting used in the ECS 2020 follow-up. This weighting corrects for:

• the fact that the sample was designed to overrepresent larger establishments
• differences between establishments that did and did not complete the screener interview
• differences between respondents who did and did not complete the questionnaire online

It also calibrates the sample distributions against population statistics.

Because respondents who completed the COVID-19 follow-up survey again differed somewhat from those who did not, a further correction using propensity score weighting was applied. To do so, variables from the ECS 2019 were analysed to identify those variables that were most closely associated with participation in the ECS 2020 follow-up. Using these variables and country, sector and size, response propensities were estimated. The inverse of these predicted propensities was multiplied by the original ECS 2019 weighting. Finally, the weightings were trimmed at the top and bottom percentiles, to avoid undue influence of outliers.

Eurofound (2021), Business not as usual: How EU companies adapted to the COVID-19 pandemic, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg.

Van Loo, J.; Eiffe, F. and Van Houten, G. (2021). Adapting business practices to new realities in the middle of a crisis: first findings from the COVID-19 European company survey. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. Cedefop working paper; No 5. http://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2801/92218.