Analyzing the Eurostat data in order to discover the percentage of employees that usually WFH/Remote Work/Ubiwork by country.

 

Nord and Central Europe leading the trend

On a quarterly basis, the Eurostat agency publishes several reports about employment data in the member States. This is important report summarizes the current and historical evolution of the percentage of employees working usually/sometimes/never from home has been released.

Our beloved guys from TypeThePipe have analyzed all this data during last week, and we are bringing you the highlights!

As you can see in the above chart, several Center and Northern countries are currently leading the remote work adoption across Europe. Luxembourg (47,8%), the Netherlands (42,7%), Switzerland (41.5%) and Finland (40.4%) are good examples. Close to 50% of their employees have some degree of remote work exposure, and are teaching the world that remote work works!

The European mean is 20%, with the South and lower Per capita GDP countries behind in this percentage. With 227.4 million people employed, it’s more than 50 M workers enjoying the benefits of WFH/Remote Work/Ubiwork.

Deepening into the data, we can observe in the next graph the WFH distribution between usually(USU), sometime(SMT) and never(NVR) across countries. There are some clusters of countries according to its proportion between percentages of each class. Some of them, like Luxembourg, Belgium and Denmark, have similar percentage of employees working remotely always and sometimes. Others, like Spain, Italy and Portugal, have a polarized distribution. Workers seem to work full remote or full from office. The third group of countries are represented by Switzerland, having the major part of the workers in contact with any WFH modality, doing it just sometimes.

Evolution and projections

Obviously, the remote friendly countries have undergone significant increments in the remote work percentage based on the total workforce. But they were not the only ones. Comparing its charts, we can observe a different slope but with increasing trends.

Based on a very conservative scenario, applying the deltas pre 2020, in five years 30% of the European employed workforce will be remote working. This is, of course, a very naive projection, as long as other effects like non linear technical improvements and demographic effects should be considered. We expect some kind of snowball effect here.

 

Country Per capita GDP ~ Remote Work

It is remarkable and obvious the fact that richer countries have shown a far better capacity to adapt its workforce to embrace remote work. The Per capita GDP, acting as an approach for the whole country mix of technology infrastructure, demographic characteristics and industry composition, is acting as a good regressor for the Remote Work adoption percentage. Typethepipe is analyzing this relationship in the upcoming weeks. The MIT Research team already published a paper about this topic on a global scale.

The results show that developed economies will likely do better — primarily those with a mix of industries and occupations that are more conducive to working from home, along with supportive conditions such as internet access and high-quality connectivity.

MIT research

 

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