According to the data of the latest survey carried out by eJobs Romania, at this moment, 46.1% of employees work exclusively from the company headquarters. Only 18.4% still work entirely from home, and the rest divide their schedule between home and office, as follows: 18.8% have a hybrid schedule based on a structure decided by the company, 13.7% have to come to the office as well, but they have the freedom to decide for themselves how many days they work from home and how many from the office, and 3% come to the office only for meetings and meetings.
“If at the beginning of 2020 we were still the country in Europe with the least openness of employers to remote work, now this style of work has entered a form of normality here as well, in almost all fields of activity. Last year, more than 30,000 remote jobs were posted, 29.4% more than in 2021 and 490% more than in 2019, and since the beginning of the year we already have more than 3,000 jobs remotely posted, i.e. 10% of the total. This means that employers remain flexible from this point of view, but this flexibility manifests itself in the direction of accepting a hybrid work program rather than a completely remote one”, said Ana Calugaru, Head of Communications within online job recruitment platform eJobs.
In this regard, 57.1% of survey participants say they work at least five days a month from the office. 14.3% come to the company headquarters only once a month, 9% twice, 7.1% three times, and 12.4% work from the office four days a month.
Asked what changes they would like to make this year related to the way they work, most (respectively 28.3%) answered that they want to work hybrid, but to be the ones who decide how many days they come to the office. 23.6% want to work exclusively from home, while 20.1% would like to increase the number of days they work remotely. 1.5% are at the other pole and intend to work more from the office, and 22.6% have decided that in 2023 they will work only from the company headquarters. In the case of the last two categories, 40.4% say that the decision to return 100% or to work more days from the office belongs to the employers and that it was established at the level of the entire organization. 59.6%, on the other hand, confess that they no longer feel comfortable working from home and want to make a change.
“Although it was desired by Romanian candidates for a long time, all the surveys we did around this topic show us that there are also disadvantages that employees are aware of and which led many to give up working just because the home. The acute feelings of alienation, the lack of socialization with colleagues, the dissipation of a clear boundary between personal and professional life are just some of the reasons why today we see that the most sought-after way of working is not necessarily the remote one, but hybrid“, added Ana Calugaru.
This type of employer flexibility has also become a criterion that candidates take into account in the perspective of new employment. Thus, 60.9% of the survey participants claim that they would no longer work in a company that does not accept remote or hybrid work. 26.6% of respondents even say that this is the aspect that would weigh the most heavily in the decision to accept a new job offer. For 55.5% the most important thing is the salary, 7.4% are primarily looking for promotion opportunities, and 5.9% say that the team matters the most.
The survey was conducted in January 2023 on a sample of 4,318 respondents.