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A person telecommuting from home during the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic in Madrid.Jaime Villanueva
The irruption of teleworking due to the coronavirus pandemic has changed the lives of many workers in Spain and, judging by the CIS survey, for the better, although not all are advantages.
According to the latest survey by the Sociological Research Center, dedicated to examining the effects of the pandemic, 68.8% of teleworkers are satisfied or very satisfied with this form of employment and three out of four think that it is a good way to work regardless of whether or not there is a pandemic.
Of course, teleworking tires, according to two-thirds of workers, to the point that it has caused many to put aside household or family tasks.
The latest delivery of the CIS, carried out on a sample of 2,861 people, discriminates against a group of 1,530 who claim to work (they are neither unemployed, nor students nor pensioners ...).
Of these, 90.4% declared that they did not telework daily before the pandemic and the questions about telework included in the CIS are centered on this subsample of 1,384 people.
As a result of the pandemic, more than two million employees have joined this type of work, joining the 950,000 who were already doing it in 2019, to exceed three million teleworkers, according to the Randstad labor consultancy.
An unimaginable leap just a few months ago
In an economy highly focused on services such as Spain, just over a third of the workers surveyed, 36.6%, began to telework because of the pandemic, compared to 34.9% who continue to do their jobs just as it usually did before the arrival of the virus.
28% have not been able to directly consider the use of teleworking because the nature of the activity prevents it.
Of that third of employed people who have started to telework, 26.5% say they are “very satisfied with the experience”.
Together with 42.3% who declare themselves “quite satisfied”, it turns out that almost seven out of ten workers positively value this way of working, compared to 27.4% who would not repeat themselves (21.3% say they are not very satisfied and 6.1% not satisfied).
In fact, the vast majority of new teleworkers perceive it as a good job solution, regardless of current health circumstances.
Thus, 75.7% believe that it is "a good way to organize and carry out work regardless of the pandemic" and 62.6% would like to telework when the health crisis is a thing of the past.
On the contrary, 17.8% do not see it favorably, and 30.6% would not repeat it.
The experience is valued positively even despite the fact that four out of ten workers, 39.1%, consider that "teleworking implies more effort and dedication than face-to-face work".
Almost the same, 40.9% think that it requires the same effort, while only 15.2% believe that it involves less.
The effort and dedication of teleworking is reflected in levels of fatigue that reduce dedication to household chores or family relationships.
According to the survey, during periods of confinement, 23.1% have always or most of the time felt “too tired after working to take care of the children or housework”, to which is added 43 , 9% who have felt this way at times.
Only 28.7% affirm that they do not feel that fatigue.
In the other sense, 44% of teleworkers affirm that they had difficulties concentrating on work due to their family responsibilities.
9.3% affirm that most of the time or always their family responsibilities take away the time that they should have dedicated to teleworking, while more than 15% indicate that teleworking has prevented them from dedicating the time they would have wanted to with their family .
