Thirty percent of employees in the Czech Republic work from home. While this share has increased compared to the pre-Covid era (20 percent then), it has decreased compared to the Covid age. For example, 34 percent of employees were in the home office during the Q3 2020 closures and 41 percent in Q1 2021.
Even now, there could be far more, but often people’s efforts to work from home fail due to the mistrust of employers. According to a regular survey conducted by g82 for LMC, which runs the Jobs.cz and Práce.cz portals.
Compared to the time of covid, the share of employees in home offices has fallen by ten percentage points, which is not necessarily beneficial for companies.
“There’s a big difference in motivation for people who can work from home, with the biggest drop for those who have lost it. They see it as a lack of confidence,” said LMC labor market analyst Tomas Ervin Dombrovsky.
Among other things, people are influenced by the fact that during the COVID, they saw companies trying to allow them to work from home, and in most cases, it worked.
Nevertheless, several things have changed in contrast to the COVID era. Employees who were allowed to work from home one to three days per month were the most common. Now it is often more frequent. For a third of workers in this group, it is one to two days a week. 11 percent work three to four days a week and 16 percent work primarily or exclusively from home.
Changes to the Labour Code
The Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs (MoLSA) has now drafted amendments to the Labour Code to make the path to the home office easier for employees. It has been proposed that employers must allow selected groups of people to work from home if the nature of their work allows it. These include parents of children under the age of 15, pregnant women, or people caring for a severely disabled person for an extended period. For example, it should not be possible for salesmen and saleswomen, laborers and workers, or other professions where the employee must be present at the workplace for obvious reasons.
If an employer does not comply with the request without serious reasons, it should be fined under the forthcoming amendment.
The standard is also intended to ensure that employers are obliged to reimburse employees for work-related costs, such as utilities. However, the amendment has run into difficulties with several other ministries and other authorities in the comment procedure.