Home office: Larger companies in particular want to stick to it
Photo:Eva Blanco / Westend61 / imago images
According to a study, many companies in Germany want to stick to the home office after the corona crisis - also in industry. In the manufacturing sector, which includes mechanical engineering, the chemical and automotive industries, before the outbreak of the pandemic, only one in four companies regularly worked from home, according to an evaluation by the Center for European Economic Research (ZEW). Now it is almost 50 percent. According to this, around 37 percent of companies plan to use home office for the time after the crisis. The ZEW surveyed 1,765 companies, 775 from the manufacturing industry and 990 from the information industry.
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"Due to the new experience and knowledge, many companies are planning to use home office more intensively even after the crisis than before the start of the corona pandemic," said ZEW expert Daniel Erdsiek. The changes in the information economy, which includes the ICT sector, media service providers and knowledge-intensive service providers, are even more pronounced than in industry. "Even before the crisis, about every second company in the information industry was working from home, as significantly more activities are suitable for flexible work," explained Erdsiek. Almost two thirds of the companies now planned to use home office even after the crisis.
Both in the manufacturing sector and in the information industry, it is mainly larger companies with 100 or more employees who expect a permanent expansion of home work (56 and 75 percent). Overall, around every third company said they had invested in new technology at short notice in order to use home office during the crisis.
Icon: The mirrormik / dpa-AFX
