One thing I’m interested in is the myriad impacts of Covid 19 on our lives. For many of us lucky enough to have jobs that can be done in part or whole from the home, this has resulted in a big increase in the amount spent there. Today, Eurostat have released a study of member state employment data quantifying the overall levels of working from home across the EU. From an EU wide steady state level of 5% on average of total employment time worked from home for 15-64 year olds, the EU average has increased to 12.3% in 2020 as a consequence of Covid 19. The data for Ireland is well in excess of this. With an average of 21.5% of employment time being spent working from home, Ireland has the third highest figure in the EU exceeded only by Luxembourg (23.1%) and Finland (25.1%).

When looking at the figures by gender, on average, women worked a slightly higher percentage of time at home (13.2%) across the EU compared with men (11.5%). However, in Ireland, the figures for men and women are almost identical at 21.3% and 21.7%, respectively.

It will be interesting to see how durable this increase in working from home is now that vaccination programmes are in full swing across the EU and employers move to bring their workforce back to the workplace.