Hungarian employees: work at home or back to the office?

Photo: Alpár Kató - Daily News Hungary ©

The outbreak of the pandemic forced most people to start working from their homes, which has been a major challenge for businesses and employees alike. Pénzcentrum, a Hungarian website dedicated to finance, conducted a survey to find out what major obstacles workers had to face in the past weeks, and what expectations have emerged toward their employers.

With the outbreak of COVID-19, companies and employees found themselves in a situation that had never been experienced before. Wherever it was possible, home office was introduced.

Now, as life is slowly going back to normal, Pénzcentrum wanted to find out what employees would prefer: keep working from home or return to the office.

The survey was answered by 3,630 respondents in 24 days, with a balanced participation between men and women. 44.6% of respondents were aged between 41 and 55, and 33.7% between 25 and 40 years.

Of the respondents, 70% work in a senior position, but roles in middle management too reached a share of 22%, while 8.2% of the respondents work in top management. Fresh graduates and junior workers were more poorly represented; they mostly work at Hungarian (62.6%) or international (37.2%) companies, third of which employ 200 to 1,000 people.

Unemployment rate in Hungary has not been this high in three years

Wind of change in everyday life

According to the results, 56.48% of the respondents believe that from now on, we will be spending significantly more time in the home office, and may never go back to how things were before mid-March.

Given the opportunity to work remotely in the long term, 52.68 per cent of the respondents would be even willing to give up some of their employee rights that come with having a fixed workplace.

Should home office become permanent, a significant share of respondents (37.07%) think there would be a need for monthly team-building activities, in contrast to the 15% that do not consider them at all necessary.

In the survey, opinions were also asked about not having one’s fixed seat at the workplace, or whether the employer should cover the extra costs that arise from working from home. To see all the results of Pénzcentrum’s survey (in Hungarian), click here.