Working from Home in the Netherlands: Looking Inside the Blackbox of Work and Occupations

The paper provides new evidence on the ability to work from home (WFH) for hundreds of Dutch occupations and examines how WFH is related to various occupation-specific characteristics. This is done by linking several publicly available datasets from Statistics Netherlands, which contain different occupation-specific information (e.g., tasks descriptions, measures of physical and socio-psychological workload, autonomy of work, computer use at work, workplace accidents and injuries, job satisfaction and job turnover, actual WFH, etc.). The paper finds that WFH is possible only in high and mid-skilled occupations such as managers, professionals, technicians and associate professionals, and clerical support workers, while it is nearly impossible in low-skilled professions such as plant and machine operators and elementary occupations. Around 16% of the employed persons in the Netherlands work in occupations that cannot be done from home, 24% work in occupations that can be performed entirely from home, and 54% are employed in occupations with significant possibilities to WFH (i.e., their occupations contain 50% or more teleworkable tasks). Furthermore, the ability to WFH is negatively related to physical work, repetitive work, and dangerous work and positively related to working on screens and independence at work. The potential to WFH is also positively correlated with job satisfaction and negatively correlated with victimisation at work (i.e., intimidation, violence, bullying, unwanted sexual attention), incidence and duration of sick leave, and work-related reasons for sick leave. The analyses in the paper are of a descriptive nature.