The corona pandemic has catapulted many employees from the office to their desks at home. If they like it there, the chances are good that they can continue to work from home at least for a day – even if they change jobs. Because companies are posting more and more jobs with the option of working from home. This is shown by a study by the Institute for Economic Research (Ifo) and the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt.
In total, more than 35 million job advertisements from more than 200 company websites and online job exchanges from 2014 to 2021 were evaluated. It shows: Between 2019 and 2021, the proportion of offers with the option of home office more than tripled. While only around 3.3 percent of the tenders contained a home office offer in 2019, it was more than twelve percent in 2021. According to the study, there has been a sharp increase, especially in professions in which home work has not been common up to now, such as in the construction industry or in the education sector. The proportion increased here almost five-fold. But also in industries in which many companies offered their employees home office options before the pandemic, the proportion has quadrupled. This includes, for example, the finance and insurance industry. In the information and communication industry, the proportion has tripled.
A trend that also manifests itself in direct surveys of companies, as the Leibniz Center for European Economic Research (ZEW) found in a corresponding industry report on the information industry and the manufacturing sector. According to this, many companies in both industries expected an expansion of the home office offer at the beginning of the pandemic, but corrected their assessments more and more upwards over time: In June 2020, almost two thirds of the companies surveyed were planning to use home office also to be used after the pandemic, a year later it is already 74 percent.
On the employee side, the researchers at ZEW also see increasing interest in working from home. “About every second company in the information industry currently assumes that in the long term more than 20 percent of employees will work in the home office at least once a week,” says ZEW scientist Daniel Erdsiek. In June of last year, only one in three companies expected it.