Teleworkability and the COVID-19 crisis: potential and actual prevalence of remote work across Europe

Abstract

This paper develops a conceptual analysis to identify the jobs that can be done from home and those that cannot, and on this basis quantifies the fraction of employees that are in teleworkable occupations across EU countries. Using detailed data on occupational tasks, we construct two teleworkability indices. The first core technical teleworkability index, based on the prominence of physical tasks, implies that 36% of dependent employment in the EU is technically teleworkable. However, our second social interaction index shows that only one third of teleworkable employment is in occupations that require limited social interactions, thus ideally suited to telework. To validate our approach, we compare our measures of teleworkability with data on the actual prevalence of telework before and during the COVID-19 outbreak. We show that our measures correlate with the observed increase in telework across countries and occupations in the EU during the outbreak. However, the prevalence of telework among employees appears to have remained below its full potential in 2020, as measured by our technical teleworkability index. This is especially the case for lower-level white-collar occupations as well as for countries with limited previous experience with teleworking. These patterns suggests that, despite the rapid increase in teleworking, the same barriers that prevented the diffusion of telework before the outbreak - lack of ICT infrastructure, fears of losing managerial control, position in the occupational hierarchy, limited workforce's digital skills, awkwardness of remote social interaction - are likely to continue playing an important role in shaping the diffusion of telework after the outbreak.