Most German Companies Want to Retain Current Arrangements for Working from Home

Most companies in Germany, 84%, want to keep their current rules on working from home, finds an ifo Institute survey. “This applies to all sectors of the economy and to small, medium-sized, and large companies alike,” says ifo researcher Simon Krause. Only 8% of companies would like to change their rules on working from home. “Despite the public debate about returning to the office, working from home has become firmly established in the working world,” Krause adds.

The media industry (23.9%) and goods manufacturers (19.4%) in particular are planning to make working from home more flexible. By contrast, restrictions are planned especially by textile manufacturers (19.6%), the pharmaceutical industry (16.3%), and information service providers (16.2%).

“Since April 2022, we’ve calculated a constant rate of one-quarter of all employees working from home,” adds ifo researcher Jean-Victor Alipour. “In view of the new survey results, we don’t expect to see a decline.” This is because 34.1% of all companies currently have a works council agreement on working from home, while a further 15.4% use regulations at the department or team level; 29.1% work with individual agreements; 31.2% have either no regulation or no working from home at all.

These average figures conceal considerable differences: 49% of manufacturers and 32.6% of service providers have a works council agreement, but the same is true of only 12.3% of companies in trade and 17.1% in construction. Regulations at the team level and individual agreements are more or less equally prevalent in all economic sectors. In construction (54%) and in trade (50.8%), the proportion of companies with no regulation or no option for working from home is significantly higher than in the service sector (31.2%) and in manufacturing (18.1%).

At 55.3%, large companies are significantly more likely to have a works council agreement than small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), where the figure is 23.8%. At 39.4%, the proportion of SMEs with no regulation on working from home or no such option is higher than that of large companies (13.1%). Regulations at the team level are more common in large companies (23.2%) than in SMEs (12.1%), while SMEs (31.9%) are more likely than large companies (23.3%) to rely on individual arrangements.

The representative survey was conducted among more than 9,000 companies in Germany in August 2023.