Until now, the concept of the "home office" has tended to trigger mixed feelings in many people. Working from home was actually not that popular. Employees were afraid it might harm their career, were concerned about social isolation or did not want to have to tackle the challenge of separating their personal from their professional life. Conversely, companies were sometimes not confident that their employees were actually performing to the maximum in the home office. What’s more, they either did not possess the technical requirements for it, or held back from making the corresponding investments. The figures speak for themselves: in 2018, the proportion of home workers in most European countries lay in the single-digit percentage range. For Switzerland, Eurostat puts the relevant share at 4.1%. By contrast, this form of employment was more widespread in Austria, Finland and the Netherlands (see graph).
It’s possible that the world of work is now at a turning-point when it comes to ‘home office’, with the rapid spread of coronavirus forcing companies to send their workers home. Amongst employees, too, a rethink has kicked in. The latest survey conducted by the German Association for the Digital Economy (Bundesverband Digitale Wirtschaft, BVDW) confirms as much. "Three-quarters of German employees are eyeing up the home office option and digital solutions," is how the BVDW summarises the survey, prompted by the coronavirus pandemic and conducted with 1,000 interviewees from 5-8 March. Not even two weeks later, this expectation has already become reality. Market research company Gartner conducted a survey with HR managers in a total of 800 global companies on 17 March, revealing that 88% of the companies involved were encouraging or instructing their workers to switch to home working. An article on handelszeitung.ch confirms the global picture for Switzerland: it indicates that around half of the 4,600 Swiss employees at the insurer Zurich, for example, are working from home. Google’s Zurich site is totally abandoned – all 4,000 employees are going about their work within their own four walls. View more information on investment solutions on the topic “Homeoffice: Heading into a new world of work”.
As a technology company, Google ought to have the necessary infrastructure. For other employers, however, the challenge is to upgrade their IT systems. "Communications networks such as VPN need to work, security has to be guaranteed, and the bandwidth – whether at the server site or for employees at home – needs to be sufficient," explained Christian Miele, President of the Federal Association of German Start-Ups, speaking to the Thomson Reuters news agency. The current situation could prompt further growth in the cloud segment. The outsourcing of data and applications to the virtual cloud is a key component for many home office solutions. This market is already expanding rapidly today: Gartner puts global sales in cloud computing for 2020 at USDbn 266.4. If the experts are right, it would mean that the business has expanded by more than 150% in less than five years (see graph).
Alongside bandwidth and storage capacities, an efficient remote workstation is reliant on online platforms for workflow and on specific hardware. All in all, it is hardly surprising that companies which supply the various solutions for the home office have trended comparatively robustly in the current stock market fire sale. This innovative segment of "working from home" shares includes cloud specialists just as much as video-conferencing providers and software companies on whose tools employees can communicate and exchange data. As an example, one prominent Swiss technology group is amongst those companies set to benefit. Logitech supplies a wide range of devices for the efficient home office; its portfolio ranges from screens and keyboards to headsets and webcams. Reflecting that, the share has recently moved up again following a fall in the first half of March.
(proportion of workers aged 15 to 64 normally working from home)
