If you’ve been balancing your laptop on a precarious stack of cookbooks, or lamented VPN speed from your kitchen table, you’re not alone. Ever since restrictions were put in place to slow the spread of Covid-19, companies have been scrambling to enable colleagues to work from home.
As we adapt to the much-cited ‘new normal’, some experts are predicting that remote work might be here to stay. This is leaving many nervously eyeing up our makeshift home desk set-ups, and wondering how on earth we can
handle the backache.
But for some, remote working is just another day at the office .Thousands of workers in the Netherlands benefit from the country’s astonishingly flexible work culture. While the percentage of employed persons usually working remotely before the coronavirus outbreaklingered at
around 4.7% in the UK, and
3.6% in the US,
14.1% of the Netherland’s workforce reports usually working away from the office. The Netherlands has long led the global shift toward remote work, with only Finland
catching up in recent years while other countries lag behind.
“When the pandemic started, I suddenly found myself playing the part of a
remote-work coach for my wife and our neighbours,” says Yvo van Doorn,
an Amsterdam-based engineer. “I was suddenly answering questions about
home networks and video conferencing. It was eye-opening because I’d
taken these things for granted.”
Read more at:
What the Dutch can teach the world about remote work - BBC Worklife
