Remote work not gaining traction in Greece

Greece lags its European Union peers in remote employment, coming 18th among member-states with only 5 percent of its workforce regularly employed to work from home, the Hellenic Federation of Enterprises (SEV) says in its latest monthly bulletin.

SEV stresses the multiple benefits of this form of labor, arguing that remote jobs can result in an increase in productivity by up to 50 percent, as well as in a drastic reduction in operating costs for enterprises. It can also make it easier for workers to balance their private and professional lives, the report notes. Changes to the way labor is organized and offered constitute an important part of digital transformation, SEV adds.

SEV’s analysts attribute Greece’s poor performance in this domain to the local market’s notorious inability to react to changing conditions due to technological advances or to new trends in organizing labor. They argue that bolstering remote employment could play an important role in improving labor productivity after a 12 percent decline during the decade-long crisis.

Remote employment is most popular in knowledge-intensive domains and enterprises such as information technology, healthcare and logistics. Customer service and internet marketing are among the sectors to have benefited most from this form of labor.