This would perhaps be unthinkable without Corona and the home office requirement. But now, at least occasionally, a quarter of employees in Germany work from home.
When it came to working from home, Germany was slightly above the EU average last year.
Almost a quarter (24.8 percent) of those in employment in Germany did their job at least occasionally from home in 2021 – a record, as the Federal Statistical Office announced on Tuesday in Wiesbaden.
Corona measures such as the obligation to work from home meant that the proportion almost doubled compared to the pre-Corona level in 2019 (12.8 percent). For ten percent of the working people, their own four walls were even the office every working day last year.
On average in the 27 EU countries, 24.2 percent of the workforce worked from home than in Germany. In the Netherlands (54 percent), Sweden (46.5 percent) and Luxembourg (45.4 percent) the proportion was highest last year, while in Bulgaria (6.5 percent), Romania (6.6 percent) and Cyprus (12.6 percent) few were working from home.
With the end of the legal obligation for employers to offer home offices, many employees in Germany have returned to their jobs. The use of the home office, however, differs greatly depending on the industry. While a good three quarters of IT employees worked from home in 2021, very few employees in the healthcare sector were able to do their work from home (5.4 percent). There was also little home office in construction and retail.
