In Corona Year 2020, more than one-third work from home
Over a third of employees worked from home at least part of the time in 2020 as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Peaks were recorded in the second and fourth quarters. Who was working from home depended heavily on the sector. The information and communication sector worked the most from home.
Over the year as a whole, 76.3% of employees were working from home, as reported by the Federal Statistical Office (FSO) on Monday. Its survey is based on data from the 2019 and 2020 Swiss Labor Force Surveys (Sake).
In second place for working from home in 2020 was the financial and insurance sector, with 61.4% working from home. More than 50 percent of employees in the education and teaching, freelance and scientific and technical services sectors also spent at least part of their working time working from home.
In total, 34.1% of employees worked from home in full or in part last year. In 2019, this figure was only 24.6 percent.
High work autonomy
Overall, 73.9% of Swiss employees recorded their working hours in 2019. The European average was only 58.1%. In addition, automatic recording of working hours was twice as widespread in the EU (32.8%) as in Switzerland (13.4%). On the other hand, three times more employees in Switzerland recorded their own hours manually than in the EU (53.1% compared to 15.8%).
In 2019, fewer employees in Switzerland (49.2%) had to adhere to fixed working hours than in the EU (60.1%). 36.8% of employees had restricted working hours and the remaining 14% were free to choose their own working hours.
60.4 percent of employees in Switzerland had a high degree of autonomy at work. On the other hand, 13.5 percent had little or no influence on the content and sequence of their tasks. Across Europe as a whole, 50.6 percent of employees had a high degree of autonomy at work. The highest values were recorded in Iceland (76.4 percent), Portugal (75.5 percent) and Luxembourg (73.3 percent). In Cyprus and Slovakia, the figures were only 19.8 and 23.2 percent respectively.
One in twenty on call
In 2020, 5.5 percent of employees in Switzerland worked on call. This has hardly changed since 2010. 45.8% of them were guaranteed a minimum number of working hours by their employer. On-call work is particularly widespread among people of retirement age (25 percent) and 15 to 24-year-olds (9.8 percent).
In 2020, 18.2% of the Swiss workforce regularly worked on Saturdays and 9.3% worked on Sundays. This is a decrease compared to 2010. Women worked more often at weekends than men. (SDA)
