More than 80 percent of Romanian employers currently report an employee in-office attendance of less than 50 percent on a normal working day and no significant changes are expected this year, reveals a Colliers survey, according to Agerpres.

The relevance of the office setting remains high, and many companies understand the priority of reconfiguring it so as to respond to the needs generated by the change in the working pattern.

Month-on-month, Eurostat short-term employment intention indicators show strong numbers for Romania, which outperformed most EU member states, and the answers to several questions in the Colliers survey indicate that around 60 percent of IT&C respondents plan to expand their workforce in the next year, compared to an average of 44 percent for all respondents. Also, the vast majority of respondents are looking for a flexible working program for their employees and are more open to such arrangements than two years ago. Specifically, in October 2020 approximately 53 percent of companies offered their employees 1-2 remote working days per week, while at this moment the number increased to 3-4 remote working days. Only 4 percent of the survey respondents require employees to work permanently from the office.

For most companies, employee productivity remained largely unchanged even with the new hybrid way of working, and only 21 percent of respondents believe that remote work has a negative impact on workforce productivity, compared to 40 percent who consider that it even brings about an improvement. The same data shows that SMEs encountered more difficulties in ensuring remote work productivity, with 34 percent of companies with fewer than 500 employees seeing an increase in productivity, compared to 43 percent in the case of large companies.

Increasing turnover remains one of the most relevant goals of any company, the Colliers survey shows, indicating also that although there is no „universal” approach to beefing up productivity or as regards remote work, the various innovations aimed at increasing workplace digitization can lead to improved cost efficiency and productivity.

The Colliers survey was conducted among management representatives or decision-makers from 75 companies operating in various economic sectors and with headcounts between a few dozen and hundreds of employees.

Agerpres