Employers oppose remote work: poll

More Taiwanese are working from home amid the COVID-19 pandemic, but more than 70 percent of companies want all of their employees back in the office, a 104 Job Bank survey showed.

Seventy-one percent of enterprises preferred all their employees to be in the office, while 29 percent preferred a hybrid work schedule that combined on-site and remote work, the survey showed.

Only 0.3 percent of firms backed remote-work-only arrangements, it showed.

Workers walk to their offices in Taipei’s Neihu Technology Park on June 10 last year.

Photo: CNA

Most firms in favor of a hybrid model preferred three days in the office and two days of working from home, the survey showed.

However, 65 percent of office workers preferred a hybrid work schedule, while 30 percent said they wanted to work in the office and only 5 percent wanted to work exclusively from home, it showed.

The online poll, conducted last month and this month, collected 3,419 valid questionnaires from enterprises and 3,390 from job bank members.

The margin of error was 2.5 to 3.5 percentage points for the employer poll and 2.4 to 2.9 percentage points for the employee poll.

Based on the results, a later poll found that 81 percent of employers would not be willing to change work models even if their employees preferred working from home some of the time.

While office workers prefer working from home some of the time, they are willing to adapt to their employers’ requirements that they travel to the office for work, 104 Job Bank head human resources officer Weber Chung (鍾文雄) said.

After Taiwan raised its COVID-19 alert to level 3 on May 19 last year, following a surge in domestically transmitted cases, 58.1 percent of companies introduced work-from-home programs, the job bank said, citing a survey released in June last year.

At the time, 37.7 percent of office workers said they had done some work remotely, the survey showed.

Before Taiwan recorded its first case of the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 last month, about 5 percent of firms and office workers were still operating remotely, the job bank said.

Should domestic cases continue to rise, that rate is likely to increase, it said.

The surveys reflected different perceptions of how effective employees were when working from home.

Businesses said that working remotely led to a net 46 percentage point loss in efficiency and 41 percentage point loss in productivity, while employees felt their efficiency and productivity at home fell by only about 3 percentage points, Chung said.

In a follow-up poll, 49 percent of companies disagreed with the results of the employees’ assessment, Chung said.

However, the employers and employees surveyed did agree that work-from-home programs have three major advantages — improving employee satisfaction, attracting talent and saving on office space leases, Chung said.