Survey: About 60 per cent of companies plan to resume in-office work in March

About 60 percent of companies plan to resume in-office work in March, while 40 percent of employees say they did longer hours and were more productive working from home than at the office, shows a survey conducted at the end of 2020 by Undelucram.ro, an online community that offers reviews about employers, wages or the working environment in companies.

“17 percent of the companies (particularly shops/factories) returned to work at the facilities at the end of the state of emergency (May 2020), and almost 22 percent have given up remote working earlier this year. As the number of new Covid-19 cases goes down, increasingly more companies intend to resume in-office work. Thus, 57 percent of companies plan to call their employees back to office in March. Conversely, almost 4 percent of companies want their employees to work remotely permanently,” the pollster said.

As far as the employees are concerned, 65 percent of the 3,752 respondents said they have worked from home in the last year. Of the work-from-home employees, 40 percent said they worked longer and were more productive, 30 percent said that they worked less but their efficiency increased, 18 percent said both their working time and efficiency decreased, and 11 percent said that they did longer hours while their productivity has slackened.

Almost 40 percent of the work-from-home employees said that the lack of face-to-face interaction has affected their mood – with 26.2 percent reporting they were pretty much affected, and 13.8 percent being very much affected by the new working conditions. Conversely, 35 percent of the remote employees said they were only slightly affected by the lack of interaction, and 22 percent reported being just very little affected by this. About 2.3 percent said they were not affected at all.

As regards businesses, one third (31.2 percent) proceeded to layoffs between June and December 2020. The most affected categories were employees with secondary education and unskilled workers (57.6 percent).

Also, 57.3 percent of the companies slashed training and wellbeing programs, and 9 percent no longer paid for the transport of the employees.

The survey was conducted between November and December 2020 on 3,752 employees and 583 HR managers from all over the country. Most of the surveyed companies operate in IT&C, trade/retail, financial services (banks, insurance services, pensions and others), outsourcing services (BPO), health care, transport and logistics, industrial production.