14 ms·

Latest EU data shows that in the Netherlands 14% of employees work from home

145 points by RayMan1 7y ago

jelly1 7y ago
Smallest country in Europe has the highest percentage of employees working form home
- eesmith 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_... lists a number of European countries which are smaller than the Netherlands, including Belgium and Albania.
  - jdhdbebdxu 7y ago
    What does this actually add? They were clearly jabbing at the fact it's easy to have good ratios when your country is tiny. Whether or not their example is actually the tiniest is only semi-relevant with respect to the point being made. This is like when European nations talk about the high publication rates of their academics, good ratios are easy when your country's slice of the pie is miniscule.
    - PeterStuer 7y ago
      Can you elaborate on why population size skews working from home distributions? It isn't obvious to me.
      - ageitgey 7y ago
        It's effectively cherry-picking data. If you want to encourage something as public policy (like working from home, recycling, public transit, etc), it's a lot easier to deploy a new program at a 'city level' where everyone more or less lives and travels in similar way than than at a US Federal level where you are dealing with over 300 million people who live in all kinds of geography and all kinds of different situations. The US covers everything from highly urban areas to vast, unpopulated deserts and mountains. The Netherlands is about the size (population wise) of a large city like Shanghai and it's fairly consistent in geography and urbanization throughout the entire country. That's just much easier situation to influence than a vast country like the US. It's a much simpler problem. It would be more fair to compare the US with all of Europe, including Spain, Greece, Croatia, etc. What percent of people are working from home in Croatia? And how does that compare to a Netherlands-sized cherry picked area in the US, like the New York City metro area? See how that's an unfair comparison? According to the article, the US vs. the entire EU rates are not too far off.
        seszett 7y ago
        > It would be more fair to compare the US with all of Europe, including Spain, Greece, Croatia, etc. What percent of people are working from home in Croatia? These are all shown on the map. Only a handful small Eastern European countries (plus Greece) have lower rates than the US. Spain has 4.3% people working from home. Countries both with lower and higher population density than the US have higher numbers. > According to the article, the US vs. the entire EU rates are not too far off. EU is 5.2% and the US 2.8%, that's about half of the EU.
        Aaargh20318 7y ago
        > it's a lot easier to deploy a new program at a 'city level' where everyone more or less lives and travels in similar way than than at a US Federal level where you are dealing with over 300 million people who live in all kinds of geography and all kinds of different situations. Why ? You can just treat the US a a collection of smaller communities and implement it independently in each of those. All you need to do at the federal level is to instruct the local level to tackle the issue.
      - Mattasher 7y ago
        Small sample sizes are much more likely to produce extreme results, because it's easier to get an extreme result by chance. In the US, the highest rates of cancer occur in the most rural counties. So do the lowest rates of cancer. Think about it like grabbing from a giant bag of M&M's. The fewer you select, the higher the chances your results will be skewed towards one color.
        PeterStuer 7y ago
        But we are not sub-sampling here. We are comparing the whole of the Netherlands with the whole of the US right? We might take a big bag of M&M's and a smaller bag of M&M's, and count both of their contents, and find that the small bag has proportionally significantly more blue M&M's than the bigger bag.
    - majos 7y ago
      1. it’s good to flag clearly false statements 2. it’s not a “fact it’s easy to have good ratios when your country is tiny”?
    - eesmith 7y ago
      Jelly1's comment adds even less. If your observation about correlations is true, can we assume that Belgium and Albania have even higher ratios of employees that work from home? Belgium = 6.6%. Given that Belgium and the Netherlands are neighbors, with a majority Flemish population, this means simple size isn't the primary factor. (Albania isn't even listed.) Switzerland is only slightly larger than the European part of the Netherlands, and yet it has a rate of 4.1%. Population density might be a factor, but simple density isn't enough, as Finland's rate is 13.3% while the US has a density about twice that of Finland. Since size isn't a clear factor, and density isn't a clear factor, I could not makes sense of Jelly1's comment. It did not come across as an informed jab but a factually incorrect statement, which I tried to highlight, without a verbose analysis like this one.
- RayMan1 7y ago
  Finland is 8-th biggest country in Europe (Russia included) and it follows the Netherlands with 13.3 percent
- seszett 7y ago
  Well, in all logic one should expect larger, less densely populated countries, to have a higher percentage of employees working from home. The population density and the size of the Netherlands (ignoring the fact that it is not the smallest country of Europe in any kind of sense) is not an obvious factor for making more people work from home, since it should make it easier for people to commute to work. The awful traffic and saturated road network though might play a role in this.
- hellofunk 7y ago
  By what measure do you call the Netherlands the smallest country in Europe?!
  - cantexplain 7y ago
    By percentage of cyclists wearing helmets. But joking aside, by none, really. The Netherlands is very dense, and indeed quite small, but it's not the smallest by any common metric - size, population, economy.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  Beats being in a traffic jam for 45 minutes mornings and evenings and is better for the environment.
- tremon 7y ago
  The Netherlands is ranked #7 in the EU in terms of labour force, around 5% of the total EU workforce (with the UK gone, Germany, France and Italy form the top three, together they account for about 50% of the workforce).
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  Usually, the highest percentage of anything happens on the smallest groups.
papermachete 7y ago
Count your blessings, it's an honour to work for silicon valley and spend half your wage on taxes and boomer real estate. Keeps the economy growing, I believe. What's that? No you must work there in person, it doesn't matter programming is a portable profession by design.
- tluyben2 7y ago
  I work remotely for valley and LA startups. As a freelancer (sometimes with shares) in my case, but still, it is doable. I guess big corps is different, but those do not interest me (meant as; I cannot say anything about those).
  - est31 7y ago
    From the links on your profile it seems you live in NL. You can still freelance for SV/LA startups? Interesting, as when I searched for remote positions in those companies, almost all of them didn't seem to allow non-US remote work. How do you cope with the time difference? Is the pay closer to SV/LA levels or closer to NL levels?
    - tluyben2 7y ago
      The time difference works out as we talk 1 hour west coast morning and that’s it. Usually that is the end of my day, so they can test and report issues for me to fix when their day is done. Pay: I do not know: payment in NL is quite high for freelancers in my experience so not sure about that question. It is more the taxes that get you I guess vs the west coast.
      - est31 7y ago
        Thanks!
    - Mvandenbergh 7y ago
      As a manager, I really like having a few people in the US and a few in Asia. (Our core team is in London). That lets us get certain tasks done much more quickly (in terms of elapsed time between start and finish).
jibbirish 7y ago
This actually became very obvious 3 weeks ago, when a majority of employers shut down their work from home services because of the Citrix Netscaler vulnerability. There were major traffic jams the following Monday morning which were aptly named "Citrix Jams" on the news. Apparently many companies were late implementing the security measures and had to take their entire service down 3 weeks after the initial publication of the issue & fix.
- gallypette 7y ago
  This, and also the fact that Citrix's mitigation was not perfect. NCSC's recommendation was to shut the service waiting for a real patch: https://www.ncsc.nl/actueel/nieuws/2020/januari/16/door-citrix-geadviseerde-mitigerende-maatregelen-niet-altijd-effectief https://www.ncsc.nl/actueel/nieuws/2020/januari/16/door-citr...
- aequitas 7y ago
  Not only the traffic jams where a problem. Some companies are so forward with working remote they've abolished the concept of a personal workspace/desk for every employee and only have 'flex' workspaces which are shared among all workers (higher ups excluded of course, do as I say, don't do as I do...). So in the morning you never know which desk you'll end up with and if you even sit close to your teammates. The flex spaces (along with the parking spaces) are calculated to the average amount of employees to be expected to work in the office, not the maximum capacity. So you can imagine how productive that monday was.
  - mercer 7y ago
    I was surprised to find out that this 'flex' workspaces thing is not just a 'hip company' thing, but pretty common for government workers too. Not a fan, personally, but still.
    - ragebol 7y ago
      It's weird, my girlfriend works for a water board (keeping our feet dry, the fish wet and crops & nature just wet enough), the have this too. To make things worse, between christmas and new years, the office is closed as lots of people take up vacation days but if you don't you're still expected to work.
fnord123 7y ago
Most/many professions (lawyers, doctors, dentists, etc) have an office on the ground floor on their house and live in the floors above.
- csomar 7y ago
  Indeed, but this is going to vary by country. If you try a developing country, you'll find that most people do work from home. (where I live even the mechanic/grocery/shops are operating from home). If you are moving further (rural), you might find that pretty much everyone is operating from home. This is not allowed in the USA but I'm not sure about the Netherlands or other EU countries. The correct measure should be: Jobs that are performed remotely. (i.e. If you are a doctor, you are not accepting patients at home but performing work through the Internet)
ragebol 7y ago
Being Dutch and actually working remotely from home full time, I find this hard to believe. What I can believe much easier is that indeed many people are allowed to occasionally work from home or have a day a week or something when they typically work from home. E.g. to pick up the kids from school etc. I do get raised eyebrows when I mention working from home full time. This is anecdata, but I don't know anyone who works from home full time. Maybe we Dutch from-home workers should get out more and meet each other :-)
- raverbashing 7y ago
  As the title in the graph shows (in the article), it's the % of people that "usually work from home"
  - Huppie 7y ago
    That wasn't the question on the questionnaire though, as BetaCygni points out somewhere above in this thread. The Dutch questionnaire only answered the question if you are allowed (and sometimes do) work from home.
- arberavdullahu 7y ago
  If they are allowed to occasionally work from home then it means that they are also capable of working from home full time and that is the main take away.
  - Bootvis 7y ago
    We can argue whether this is theoretically true but I haven’t met an employer here in the Netherlands that thinks this. Working from home some of or most of the time is fine but there needs to be face to face contact at least weekly.
  - toyg 7y ago
    Not really true. I turned down a very good job in Amsterdam just last month, because they wanted me in the office 4 days a week. It was a great employer, tons of perks, I’m sure they were flexible about times and you could move that remote day to suit you etc etc, but still: 4 days in, not negotiable. I’ve seen the same here in UK. The remote day effectively ends up being an unofficial reduction of working hours rather than an acceptance of WFH as legitimate.
teekert 7y ago
I'm Dutch I work from home about 20-30 percent of my time. But that is not in this metric. I think my group is substantially larger than this 14% then.
jacquesm 7y ago
We do a lot of this, but it's not for everybody. Some people work well with that much freedom, others not so much and they really need the structure and close contact with colleagues to shine. We try to find a middle ground by having an office but no mandatory presence there, on some days the office is quite full, on others deserted. I personally don't care as long as the work gets done. We're all over Europe so a good percentage of our colleagues is too far away anyway so for us and our kind of work this is a very good fit.
tschellenbach 7y ago
Dutch person here, these stats are definitely wrong.
- toxicFork 7y ago
  In what way?
pinkfoot 7y ago
The other 86% spend about four hours in traffic. Source: lived there.

145 points by RayMan1 7y ago

jelly1 7y ago

Smallest country in Europe has the highest percentage of employees working form home

eesmith 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_... lists a number of European countries which are smaller than the Netherlands, including Belgium and Albania.
- jdhdbebdxu 7y ago
  What does this actually add? They were clearly jabbing at the fact it's easy to have good ratios when your country is tiny. Whether or not their example is actually the tiniest is only semi-relevant with respect to the point being made. This is like when European nations talk about the high publication rates of their academics, good ratios are easy when your country's slice of the pie is miniscule.
  - PeterStuer 7y ago
    Can you elaborate on why population size skews working from home distributions? It isn't obvious to me.
    - ageitgey 7y ago
      It's effectively cherry-picking data. If you want to encourage something as public policy (like working from home, recycling, public transit, etc), it's a lot easier to deploy a new program at a 'city level' where everyone more or less lives and travels in similar way than than at a US Federal level where you are dealing with over 300 million people who live in all kinds of geography and all kinds of different situations. The US covers everything from highly urban areas to vast, unpopulated deserts and mountains. The Netherlands is about the size (population wise) of a large city like Shanghai and it's fairly consistent in geography and urbanization throughout the entire country. That's just much easier situation to influence than a vast country like the US. It's a much simpler problem. It would be more fair to compare the US with all of Europe, including Spain, Greece, Croatia, etc. What percent of people are working from home in Croatia? And how does that compare to a Netherlands-sized cherry picked area in the US, like the New York City metro area? See how that's an unfair comparison? According to the article, the US vs. the entire EU rates are not too far off.
      - seszett 7y ago
        > It would be more fair to compare the US with all of Europe, including Spain, Greece, Croatia, etc. What percent of people are working from home in Croatia? These are all shown on the map. Only a handful small Eastern European countries (plus Greece) have lower rates than the US. Spain has 4.3% people working from home. Countries both with lower and higher population density than the US have higher numbers. > According to the article, the US vs. the entire EU rates are not too far off. EU is 5.2% and the US 2.8%, that's about half of the EU.
      - Aaargh20318 7y ago
        > it's a lot easier to deploy a new program at a 'city level' where everyone more or less lives and travels in similar way than than at a US Federal level where you are dealing with over 300 million people who live in all kinds of geography and all kinds of different situations. Why ? You can just treat the US a a collection of smaller communities and implement it independently in each of those. All you need to do at the federal level is to instruct the local level to tackle the issue.
    - Mattasher 7y ago
      Small sample sizes are much more likely to produce extreme results, because it's easier to get an extreme result by chance. In the US, the highest rates of cancer occur in the most rural counties. So do the lowest rates of cancer. Think about it like grabbing from a giant bag of M&M's. The fewer you select, the higher the chances your results will be skewed towards one color.
      - PeterStuer 7y ago
        But we are not sub-sampling here. We are comparing the whole of the Netherlands with the whole of the US right? We might take a big bag of M&M's and a smaller bag of M&M's, and count both of their contents, and find that the small bag has proportionally significantly more blue M&M's than the bigger bag.
  - majos 7y ago
    1. it’s good to flag clearly false statements 2. it’s not a “fact it’s easy to have good ratios when your country is tiny”?
  - eesmith 7y ago
    Jelly1's comment adds even less. If your observation about correlations is true, can we assume that Belgium and Albania have even higher ratios of employees that work from home? Belgium = 6.6%. Given that Belgium and the Netherlands are neighbors, with a majority Flemish population, this means simple size isn't the primary factor. (Albania isn't even listed.) Switzerland is only slightly larger than the European part of the Netherlands, and yet it has a rate of 4.1%. Population density might be a factor, but simple density isn't enough, as Finland's rate is 13.3% while the US has a density about twice that of Finland. Since size isn't a clear factor, and density isn't a clear factor, I could not makes sense of Jelly1's comment. It did not come across as an informed jab but a factually incorrect statement, which I tried to highlight, without a verbose analysis like this one.
RayMan1 7y ago
Finland is 8-th biggest country in Europe (Russia included) and it follows the Netherlands with 13.3 percent
seszett 7y ago
Well, in all logic one should expect larger, less densely populated countries, to have a higher percentage of employees working from home. The population density and the size of the Netherlands (ignoring the fact that it is not the smallest country of Europe in any kind of sense) is not an obvious factor for making more people work from home, since it should make it easier for people to commute to work. The awful traffic and saturated road network though might play a role in this.
hellofunk 7y ago
By what measure do you call the Netherlands the smallest country in Europe?!
- cantexplain 7y ago
  By percentage of cyclists wearing helmets. But joking aside, by none, really. The Netherlands is very dense, and indeed quite small, but it's not the smallest by any common metric - size, population, economy.
jacquesm 7y ago
Beats being in a traffic jam for 45 minutes mornings and evenings and is better for the environment.
tremon 7y ago
The Netherlands is ranked #7 in the EU in terms of labour force, around 5% of the total EU workforce (with the UK gone, Germany, France and Italy form the top three, together they account for about 50% of the workforce).
marcosdumay 7y ago
Usually, the highest percentage of anything happens on the smallest groups.

papermachete 7y ago

Count your blessings, it's an honour to work for silicon valley and spend half your wage on taxes and boomer real estate. Keeps the economy growing, I believe. What's that? No you must work there in person, it doesn't matter programming is a portable profession by design.

tluyben2 7y ago
I work remotely for valley and LA startups. As a freelancer (sometimes with shares) in my case, but still, it is doable. I guess big corps is different, but those do not interest me (meant as; I cannot say anything about those).
- est31 7y ago
  From the links on your profile it seems you live in NL. You can still freelance for SV/LA startups? Interesting, as when I searched for remote positions in those companies, almost all of them didn't seem to allow non-US remote work. How do you cope with the time difference? Is the pay closer to SV/LA levels or closer to NL levels?
  - tluyben2 7y ago
    The time difference works out as we talk 1 hour west coast morning and that’s it. Usually that is the end of my day, so they can test and report issues for me to fix when their day is done. Pay: I do not know: payment in NL is quite high for freelancers in my experience so not sure about that question. It is more the taxes that get you I guess vs the west coast.
    - est31 7y ago
      Thanks!
  - Mvandenbergh 7y ago
    As a manager, I really like having a few people in the US and a few in Asia. (Our core team is in London). That lets us get certain tasks done much more quickly (in terms of elapsed time between start and finish).

jibbirish 7y ago

This actually became very obvious 3 weeks ago, when a majority of employers shut down their work from home services because of the Citrix Netscaler vulnerability. There were major traffic jams the following Monday morning which were aptly named "Citrix Jams" on the news. Apparently many companies were late implementing the security measures and had to take their entire service down 3 weeks after the initial publication of the issue & fix.

gallypette 7y ago
This, and also the fact that Citrix's mitigation was not perfect. NCSC's recommendation was to shut the service waiting for a real patch: https://www.ncsc.nl/actueel/nieuws/2020/januari/16/door-citrix-geadviseerde-mitigerende-maatregelen-niet-altijd-effectief https://www.ncsc.nl/actueel/nieuws/2020/januari/16/door-citr...
aequitas 7y ago
Not only the traffic jams where a problem. Some companies are so forward with working remote they've abolished the concept of a personal workspace/desk for every employee and only have 'flex' workspaces which are shared among all workers (higher ups excluded of course, do as I say, don't do as I do...). So in the morning you never know which desk you'll end up with and if you even sit close to your teammates. The flex spaces (along with the parking spaces) are calculated to the average amount of employees to be expected to work in the office, not the maximum capacity. So you can imagine how productive that monday was.
- mercer 7y ago
  I was surprised to find out that this 'flex' workspaces thing is not just a 'hip company' thing, but pretty common for government workers too. Not a fan, personally, but still.
  - ragebol 7y ago
    It's weird, my girlfriend works for a water board (keeping our feet dry, the fish wet and crops & nature just wet enough), the have this too. To make things worse, between christmas and new years, the office is closed as lots of people take up vacation days but if you don't you're still expected to work.

fnord123 7y ago

Most/many professions (lawyers, doctors, dentists, etc) have an office on the ground floor on their house and live in the floors above.

csomar 7y ago
Indeed, but this is going to vary by country. If you try a developing country, you'll find that most people do work from home. (where I live even the mechanic/grocery/shops are operating from home). If you are moving further (rural), you might find that pretty much everyone is operating from home. This is not allowed in the USA but I'm not sure about the Netherlands or other EU countries. The correct measure should be: Jobs that are performed remotely. (i.e. If you are a doctor, you are not accepting patients at home but performing work through the Internet)

ragebol 7y ago

Being Dutch and actually working remotely from home full time, I find this hard to believe. What I can believe much easier is that indeed many people are allowed to occasionally work from home or have a day a week or something when they typically work from home. E.g. to pick up the kids from school etc. I do get raised eyebrows when I mention working from home full time. This is anecdata, but I don't know anyone who works from home full time. Maybe we Dutch from-home workers should get out more and meet each other :-)

raverbashing 7y ago
As the title in the graph shows (in the article), it's the % of people that "usually work from home"
- Huppie 7y ago
  That wasn't the question on the questionnaire though, as BetaCygni points out somewhere above in this thread. The Dutch questionnaire only answered the question if you are allowed (and sometimes do) work from home.
arberavdullahu 7y ago
If they are allowed to occasionally work from home then it means that they are also capable of working from home full time and that is the main take away.
- Bootvis 7y ago
  We can argue whether this is theoretically true but I haven’t met an employer here in the Netherlands that thinks this. Working from home some of or most of the time is fine but there needs to be face to face contact at least weekly.
- toyg 7y ago
  Not really true. I turned down a very good job in Amsterdam just last month, because they wanted me in the office 4 days a week. It was a great employer, tons of perks, I’m sure they were flexible about times and you could move that remote day to suit you etc etc, but still: 4 days in, not negotiable. I’ve seen the same here in UK. The remote day effectively ends up being an unofficial reduction of working hours rather than an acceptance of WFH as legitimate.

teekert 7y ago

I'm Dutch I work from home about 20-30 percent of my time. But that is not in this metric. I think my group is substantially larger than this 14% then.

jacquesm 7y ago

We do a lot of this, but it's not for everybody. Some people work well with that much freedom, others not so much and they really need the structure and close contact with colleagues to shine. We try to find a middle ground by having an office but no mandatory presence there, on some days the office is quite full, on others deserted. I personally don't care as long as the work gets done. We're all over Europe so a good percentage of our colleagues is too far away anyway so for us and our kind of work this is a very good fit.

tschellenbach 7y ago

Dutch person here, these stats are definitely wrong.

toxicFork 7y ago
In what way?

pinkfoot 7y ago

The other 86% spend about four hours in traffic. Source: lived there.