Teleworking grew by 19% in 2023, although the proportion of employed people who practice it in Spain is almost half that of the EU

The 'puncture' of teleworking after the pandemic stopped in 2023. After almost two years losing steam, the number of people working from home grew by 19.4% at the end of last year compared to the previous year, according to the latest installment of the Employment Opportunities and Satisfaction Monitor report published this year. Tuesday by the Adecco study center. Despite the progress, Spain is far from the data of the European Union, where the proportion of employed people who telework almost doubles the Spanish data.

Teleworking reversed the downward trend registered in the previous seven quarters in the final stretch of 2023. Specifically, the volume of people working from home – whether occasionally or regularly – grew by 19.4% in the last three months of the year to reach 3.06 million employed people.. Even so, the figure is still lower than the maximum of 3.55 million teleworkers that were registered in the second quarter of 2020, in full confinement due to the pandemic, which incorporated 1.91 million employees into teleworking.. Since that ceiling, the practice of remote work has lost 494,500 employees in Spain.

In parallel, the percentage of workers who connect from home also increased in 2023 to reach 13.6% of the total number of employed people, the highest figure since the end of 2021, when teleworking reached 14.4%. of the total employed. The penetration of remote work reached its peak in the first quarter of 2021, with 16.2% of workers practicing it, almost double the 8.3% that did so at the end of 2019, before the pandemic.

According to data released by Adecco, approximately two out of every fifteen employed people work remotely in Spain, a proportion much lower than the European average.. In the community club, the average percentage of workers who connect to their workplace from home reaches 24.1%, a rate that almost doubles the 13.6% in Spain. Far from narrowing, the gap between Spain and its community neighbors increased two percentage points in 2023 compared to the previous year, due to teleworking advancing in the Mediterranean country at a slower pace than in the rest of the continent.

Among the four large European economies, Spain is the second where teleworking has the least impact. The proportion of employed people who work remotely in the Mediterranean country is slightly higher than the 13.1% in Italy, but falls behind the figures for France and Germany, where 36.4% and 25.9% of employed they practice teleworking respectively. The Netherlands is the European country where the highest proportion of people work from home (56.8%), followed by Sweden, Finland and Luxembourg, all of them with rates above 40%.

Within the national territory, teleworking does not have the same impact in all autonomous communities. Madrid and Catalonia are the regions where the most workers practice it in Spain, 22.7% and 14.9% of the total employed respectively. In fact, the two communities account for 45.4% of workers who practice teleworking at least occasionally in Spain (26.3% and 19.1% respectively).

Also in the Valencian Community the incidence of teleworking is above average. 13.8% of workers in the Levantine region connect remotely – slightly above the 13.6% of the national average -, being the second community where it grew the most in 2023, only behind Madrid. At the opposite extreme, the proportion of employed people who work from home does not reach 9% in the Balearic Islands, Extremadura and Castilla y León. Nor does it reach 10% in Castilla-La Mancha, La Rioja, Murcia and the Canary Islands.. Compared to the situation at the end of 2022, only Asturias, Galicia and the Canary Islands lost teleworkers in 2023.