According to a new study, many companies in Germany want to stick to the working from home after the coronavirus crisis - even in industry. In the manufacturing sector, which includes the mechanical engineering, chemical and automotive industries, only every fourth company had employees working regularly from home before the outbreak of the pandemic, according to an evaluation by the ZEW – Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research. Now it is almost 50 percent. According to the study, about 37 percent of the companies plan to use so-called "home offices" in the period after the crisis. The ZEW surveyed 1,765 companies, 775 from the manufacturing sector, 990 from the information industry.
"Due to the new experiences and findings, many companies plan to use working from home more intensively after the crisis than before the beginning of the coronavirus 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 heavy industry. "Even before the crisis, about one in two companies in the information economy used home offices, as there are significantly more activities suitable for location-flexible working," explained Erdsiek. Almost two thirds of the companies now planned to use home offices even after the crisis.
In both the manufacturing industry and the information economy, it is primarily larger companies with 100 employees or more that expect a permanent expansion of working from home (56 and 75 percent respectively). Overall, about one in three companies stated that they had invested in new technology in the short term in order to use home offices during the crisis.
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