Coronapandemic has brought sustainable changes to the world of work. Millions of employees worldwide were forced to stay away from their offices due to the rapid spread of the virus and the lockdown.
If possible, companies switched to Home Office – a model that turned out to be further than Pandemie. Because today it turns out: home work has come to stay, even if it is now on the retreat.
In particular, in companies of the service sector, the IT industry or in other “employee companies”, where the work performance can largely be provided by the agency or for the monitor, the flexible way of working has settled quickly. Of course this was not possible everywhere: industrial companies had to stop or close their production in the short term; They were helped in Austria with short -time work and other tools.
Home Office is pushed back in many places
Even after the pandemic, working from home remained popular, because this experiences a better balance between work and private life or more flexibility in daily life. Nevertheless, it now says it in many places: “Back to Office”. Not only, but especially in the United States, there is currently a counter trend. Whether Amazon, JP Morgan or Google have now called their business in the recent past, ended the majority of the work from home. Strictly work from the office, the new US government under President Donald Trump, who recently gave up the state’s termination, did not want to return to your original workplace.
Use in Austria
In Austria this is not handled so strictly, but home office was recently used less in this country than a few years ago. According to the Ministry of Finance, which data is available through the submitted payment briefs of employers, the number of employees in the home office continuously fell from 2021 to 2023. If a good 848,000 people regularly worked from home, it was only a good 743,000 in 2023. The same can be found in a study into the evaluation of the use of households on behalf of the Ministry of Labor and Economic Affairs, which was carried out in mid -2023. After a jump up in 2020, the survey also shows a slight decrease in the following years.
This finding is supported by a more recent Deloitte analysis from 2024, to which both Chamber of Labor and Chamber of Commerce (WKö) refer to APA. While 82 percent of employees regularly worked from home from home in 2022, it was only 65 percent in 2024. From the point of view of the Chamber of Labor, however, it must be taken into account that companies with at least theoretical option at home are largely included In the sample of Deloitte and that the results are therefore only partially comparable to other studies.
Home Office became telework
The increased use of home office since Pandemic ultimately also gave the impulse for fundamental changes in the law in Austria: Home Office has been legally under the further term “teleworking” since January 2025. For employees it made the change possible not to do their work not only within their four walls, but for example with family members or in coffee houses. An agreement with the employer is a condition for the “everywhere work from everywhere”.
Source: Krone
I’m Ben Stock, a journalist and author at Today Times Live. I specialize in economic news and have been working in the news industry for over five years. My experience spans from local journalism to international business reporting. In my career I’ve had the opportunity to interview some of the world’s leading economists and financial experts, giving me an insight into global trends that is unique among journalists.
