Employees in Germany Working from Home Less Frequently, Survey Shows
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – New data reveals there was a decline last year in the frequency of working from home in Germany, but that remote and hybrid work practices have become firmly entrenched in sectors of Europe's biggest economy more than four years on from the pandemic.
The Federal Statistical Office said on Wednesday that 23.5% of all employed people worked from home at least occasionally in 2023. This was only marginally lower than in 2022 and 2021, DPA reported.
But white-collar workers are coming into the office more frequently, the survey data shows.
In 2023, 44% of employees who used home offices worked just as often or more often at the office than from home. A quarter of people worked entirely from home.
In 2022, 39% of employees worked just as often or more often at work than from home, and 31% worked exclusively from home. In pandemic-impacted 2021, only 31% worked just as often or less often from home than at the office, while 40% worked entirely from home.
In 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic, only 12.8% of employed people worked from home at all in Germany.
Employees in the healthcare, retail and construction sectors use working from home particularly rarely because it is often not even possible. In contrast, the opportunities are widespread among IT service providers, 74.7% of whose employees work from home. Insurance companies and management consultancies also have high percentages.
The figures from the 2023 put Germany slightly above the home office average in the European Union, which was 22.4% of all employees. The highest rate was in the Netherlands, where 52% of the working population worked from home at least some of the time.
