Working from home will continue to play a huge role in the economy even after the pandemic ends.
Many companies wanted to expand their home office offers, said Daniel Erdsiek from the Leibniz Center for European Economic Research (ZEW) in Mannheim on Wednesday.
In June 2021, ZEW surveyed 1000 companies across Germany about the use of working from home.
In particular in the information industry, to which the information and communication industry and its service providers, for example in advertising and market research, belong, the home office is on the advance.
Before the corona pandemic, around half of the companies in this area had enabled some of the employees to work from home at least once a week.
In June 2020, based on previous pandemic experience, 64 percent of companies were already planning to use home office in the post-Corona period.
A year later, this value has now risen to 74 percent, as Erdsiek explained.
Around every second company in the information industry assumes, according to ZEW, that in the long term more than 20 percent of employees will work from home at least once a week.
In June 2020, only one in three companies expected such intensive use after the pandemic.
In industry, around 46 percent of companies currently expect that some of the workforce will work from home at least once a week after the end of the pandemic.
In June 2020 this value was 37 percent.
Before the pandemic, only 24 percent of companies in this industry allowed regular home offices at all.
For the workplaces at home, investments were primarily made in digital devices such as smartphones, notebooks and tablets. One in three companies in the information economy and one in four in manufacturing has provided such equipment.