Teleworking to remain a dream in Hungary?

Undoubtedly, part-time employment, teleworking and flexible worktime schedules become more and more valuable factors in choosing between jobs worldwide. However, according to Magyar Nemzet, companies in Hungary seem to adapt slowly to new trends like such employee needs. Although many say that flexibility could ease labour shortage causing serious problems for companies.

Teleworking: a solution for labour shortage?

As Daily News Hungary already reported , labour shortage is critical in many segments of the Hungarian economy. Of course, this is not a specific Hungarian problem; the whole Central-European region is suffering from it. Thus, many suggest companies to offer

flexible working hours, teleworking or part-time employment to attract new employees.

However, according to Eurostat, rate of part-time employees is only 4.8-5.8% in Central-Europe. This is extremely low compared to the Netherlands where 2/3^rd of women are working part-time. What’s more, the relevant Hungarian data is even lower. According to a survey conducted by Hungarian Central Statistical Office,

only 3% of the employees meaning 50,000 people teleworked in 2011.

It says a lot for the problem of teleworking that Magyar Nemzet was not able to find any new data since then.

In addition, Magyar Nemzet has asked the biggest employment websites how Hungarian companies try to adapt to the employee’s needs regarding working conditions. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the results are withering.

Companies in Hungary adapt too slow

To start with, Nikoletta Szigeti, branch manager of Profession Services stated that providing flexible working conditions is an international tendency. In contrast, only a few companies support teleworking in Hungary. Of course, in case of projects venue and exact time of the work does not affect efficiency and outcome. However, these are only regular in informatics and marketing. To her mind,

tasks will replace traditional working hours spent in a traditional workplace soon.

To put it in another way, in the future it will be irrelevant where the work takes place in many jobs.

Balázs Kristók, operations director of jobinfo.hu, said that more and more employees would like to do at least part of their work through teleworking. In addition, they regard this opportunity as an allowance, so offering it might mean competitive edge for a company. According to him, more and more employers recognize this need. Thus,

multinational companies started to increase the number of teleworking positions especially in the service sector.

Of course, teleworking is mostly for white-collar workers. It cannot be applied, for example, in commerce where mobilizing workforce is important. However, offering a part-time opportunity might attract some job-seekers. Profession.hu states that the number of part-time job offers have risen by 27% compared to January. However, since they only have a 6% share among job offers this increase is not significant.

All in all, Hungary fell behind Western-European countries regarding teleworking or part-time jobs. Despite government announcements the number of such flexible opportunities have not increased significantly up to now. However, it might happen that