Photo: Silje Bergum Kinsten / norden.org
Introduction
Since the pandemic, remote work has become more integrated into work-life culture in the Nordic Region. Surveys showed that a high percentage of employees in Europe (78%) who had experienced remote work during the pandemic were interested in continuing at least occasionally after restrictions were lifted (Eurofound, 2020). In 2022, Randall et al. reported on the status of remote work within the Nordic Region, highlighting the effects of new working patterns on urban and regional development. Since then, employers and employees alike have adjusted their ways of working, with hybrid work being more common than always working from home. While these changes influence things like quality of life in the work environment, tax systems, and the labour market, these alternative working practices have also changed the way people move, where people live and work, and what they expect from their city or region.
This is the sixth and final report in the research project Remote work and multilocality post-pandemic
This report, and others linked to the project, have used the term city to refer to municipalities with large populations (relatively speaking in the Nordic context), and the term town to refer to municipalities with smaller population sizes. However, it is not always the case that the academic literature follows suit. Ideas around “city centres” or the “15-minute city” may also apply to smaller scales.
Established in 2019, the Nordic Vision sets the goal for the Nordic Region to become green, competitive, and socially sustainable by 2030; read more at https://www.norden.org/sv/declaration/var-vision-2030
As of 2024, the phenomenon of remote work is at a unique phase. While the effects of remote work practices are already being felt spatially, planners and policymakers may yet have the possibility to steer remote work in a way that benefits both urban and rural areas in the Nordic Region. This report provides discussion for how actors might think strategically about remote work in order to guide the region towards social, economic, and environmental sustainability.
The state of remote work in the Nordic Region
Despite the undeniable changes that remote work has inspired in recent years, it is important to keep in mind that, prior to the pandemic, a relatively high percentage of the populations in Nordic countries worked remotely. In Denmark, Finland, Iceland, and Sweden, over 27% of the population reported sometimes or usually working from home already in 2018, compared to the EU average of 13.6% in the same year (Figure 1). Over the pandemic years, the proportion of employees who sometimes or usually work from home grew in all Nordic countries as well as across the EU. According to data from the European Labour Force Survey, around 58% of employed persons in the Nordic countries report never working from home in 2023, compared to about 73% in 2017. Norway saw the most dramatic changes between 2017 and 2023 (10.4% sometimes or usually worked remotely in 2017 compared to 41.8% in 2023).
Figure 1. Percent of employed persons sometimes or usually working from home: EU compared to Nordic countries, 2017-2023.
Source: European Labour Force Survey (Eurostat, 2024-a)
*No data available for Iceland in 2021 or Sweden in 2020
Source: European Labour Force Survey (Eurostat, 2024-a)
*No data available for Iceland in 2021 or Sweden in 2020
In 2021, Eurofound predicted that at least 20% of European employees would continue teleworking practices after the pandemic, a forecast that has thus far been proven true. As of 2023, 13.3% of employed persons in the EU sometimes work from home, and another 8.9% report usually working from home (Eurostat, 2024). While numbers of people working remotely have remained steady since the pandemic, there is some variation in the proportion of people sometimes compared to usually working from home (Figure 2). Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden all saw an increase in people usually working remotely between 2019 and 2021. However, while the proportion of people reporting usually working remotely decreased in all four of these countries by 2023, the proportion of people reporting sometimes working remotely increased after 2021. The results highlight the normalisation of hybrid work over full-time working from home.
Figure 2. Percent of employed persons usually, sometimes, and never working from home in the Nordic countries, 2019, 2021, and 2023.
Source: European Labour Force Survey (Eurostat, 2024-a). * No data available for Iceland in 2021
Source: European Labour Force Survey (Eurostat, 2024-a). * No data available for Iceland in 2021
While the data in Figures 1 and 2 show national-level figures, other reports provide distinctions of remote work proportions based on municipal typology. Across Europe, capital areas tend to have higher rates of people working remotely compared to other regions, and cities have higher rates than towns or suburbs: “the pandemic shifted the balance of telework in favour of cities compared to other areas; it increased the share of urbanites teleworking, and the frequency of this practice” (Sostero et al., 2024, 14).
Remote work as an “urban” trend is thought to be due to employment structures in metropolitan areas – in other words, areas with a higher proportion of white-collar jobs are more likely to accommodate remote work. However, as Granath Hansson & Guðmundsdóttir (2024) point out, remote work can be a two-way street, enabling remote workers to hold employment in urban areas while living outside of urban areas, or to hold employment outside of urban areas while living in urban areas. The manifestation of this (and whether it will contribute to higher proportions of remote workers in small towns or rural areas) is not yet clear. Eurofound has reported a growing gap between the rate of teleworking in cities compared to towns and suburbs and rural areas (Sostero et al., 2024). The situation raises questions as to whether remote work will act as a powerful factor in attracting or retaining people. There remains some uncertainty around how municipalities can use remote work practices as a planning tool and which areas may have greater opportunities to see benefits (Bogason et al., 2024-a). The situation also provokes some question as to how strongly employment steers people to settle in one location versus another – or to split time across multiple localities. Importantly, while remote work opportunities may enable some segment of the population to decouple their municipality of residence from their municipality of employment, whether people actually do so – and how many – depends on a number of complex and individual factors.
Finally, it is important to remember that remote work is not an opportunity provided equally to all people in the Nordic Region; it remains dependent on the kind of job and the agreements made between employers and their employees. A recent Eurofound report warns that “hybrid working is often a privilege that high earners in more senior positions have access to, while employees lower in the hierarchy are excluded. Hybrid working thus has the potential to become a new source of inequality in the workplace” (Eurofound, 2024, 26). Simultaneously, local and national surveys show conflicting perceptions of whether working from home is an advantage or disadvantage for employees who are granted the option (e.g., see Haunstrup Christensen et al., 2024).
Overall, it is evident that remote work has changed how people live and work. Therefore, research is needed to understand how such changes may influence urban and regional development. Furthermore, planners and policymakers have the opportunity to guide remote work to ensure it aligns with sustainable development goals for the city or region in which they work.
Outline of the report
This report is organised into three parts. First, we provide a synthesis of key findings from the previous reports developed within the Remote work and multilocality post-pandemic project
Box 1 reviews several key terms within the ever-expanding lexicon of remote work. Additional terms, such as urban attractiveness or third spaces, are highlighted in relation to the sections below that explore these ideas in more detail (see Boxes 2 and 7).
In the Nordic countries, a variety of words are used to describe the phenomenon of working wholly or partly from a place other than the main workplace. Words used can be translated into remote work, working from home, and work without specified location (Randall et al., 2022-a). In this report, we use the term remote work based on the meaning presented by Statistics Finland:
Remote work refers to gainful employment that, in line with an agreement with the employer, is carried out outside the actual workplace (e.g., at home or at a summer cottage, or on a train), often with the use of information technology equipment. Remote work is work of the kind that could also be carried out at the workplace […]. A characteristic feature of remote work is that work arrangements are not tied to a specific time or place […] (Statistics Finland, n.d.).
Related terminology around remote work in the Nordic languages include distancearbejde or hjemmearbejde in Danish; distansarbete, hemartbete, and flexibelt arbete in Swedish; fjernarbeid, hjemmearbeid, and stedsuavhengig arbeid in Norwegian; fjarvinna and störf án staðsetningar in Icelandic; and etätyö, monipaikkaisuus, and paikkariippumaton työ in Finnish (see Randall et al., 2022-a).
Hybrid work
Hybrid work refers to the situation when an employee works part-time at his or her permanent workplace and part-time remotely. As expressed by Gurstein (2023, 345): “Hybrid work is a flexible work model that supports a blend of in-office, remote, and on-the-go workers. It offers employees the autonomy to choose to work wherever and however they are most productive.” As hybrid solutions are the most common, compared to full-time remote positions, and hybrid arrangements have different implications for spatial patterns than full-time remote work, it is important to distinguish between these two different phenomena. Several labour surveys in the Nordic countries during the pandemic (2020-2021) highlighted that both employees and employers desired to continue remote work opportunities at least 2-3 days per week after restrictions were lifted (Randall et al., 2022-a). In the Nordic countries, collective agreements help to regulate such hybrid work.
The Framework Agreement on Telework defines telework as:
A form of organising and/or performing work, using information technology, in the context of an employment contract/relationship, where work, which could also be performed at the employer’s premises, is carried out away from those premises on a regular basis (European Trade Union Confederation, 2002).
This definition continues to be the point of reference for remote work agreements in the Nordic countries. Referring to Huws et al. (1990) and Mokhtarian (1991), Gurstein (2023) explains how telework was originally conceptualised as decoupling work from its dependence on transportation. Telecommuting highlights this by linguistically indicating the practice as a form of mobility. However, Gurstein clarifies that “telework is not just working from home, as satellite office or neighbourhood telework centres close to employees’ homes can substitute for the commute to a centralised office” (Gurstein, 2023, 345). Based on this nuance, telework itself may still involve some kind of commute, albeit to somewhere other than the primary office space. While telework or telecommuting were the more popular terms at the advent of ICT-dependent work practices, these terms have been replaced by “remote work,” “work from home,” and “hybrid work,” with minor conceptual variations. However, telework is still often used in academic literature depending on the study and the concepts used by statistical offices.
In academic literature, remote work, work from home (WFH), and telework are all used with various frequencies. The discourse also includes references to remote work or telecommuting “practices” (Budnitz et al., 2021; Currie et al., 2021), flexible working “patterns” (Budnitz et al., 2020), and work-from-home “arrangements” (Thulin et al., 2023; Elldér, 2020), indicating the repeated exercise of these working methods, the complexity and variations involved when discussing such methods, and their emergence as a way of life (of solving the life puzzle, or livspusslet). These arrangements are highly individual, and are potentially irregular, depending on the week, day, or even hour since, depending on the flexible arrangement, employees may split their work tasks across time and space within a single day. These fragmented practices make remote work a particularly complex field to study.
Simply put, multi-locality is about having some definitive link to more than one place. However, the concept is far more complicated, both theoretically and practically (see Lapintie, 2022; Weichart, 2015). Weichart (2015) explores several theories for understanding residential multi-locality as “a social practice … [in which] at least one household member moves from one place to another at (predominantly) regular intervals” (387). However, the phenomenon, as Weichart and others argue, is highly complex and involves the study of space, time, and identity. It also suggests that there are clear boundaries of what constitutes “home” compared to other spaces, which is not always clear cut. While the idea of multi-locality is not new, Lapintie (2022) points out that our “state-epistemology” still does not account for it. He brings to light the distinction between living and residing, pointing out how statistical databases fail to account for the multi-local individual who may be both urban and rural but can only be permanently registered in a single municipality. For the purposes of this report, we consider remote work as one kind of multi-locality in that it affords some individuals with the ability to rearrange their living and working activities across multiple locations.
Though not always the case, ICTs are often the backbone of remote work opportunities (Sostero et al., 2024). The term encompasses “all technical means used to handle information and aid communication,” including “both computer and network hardware, as well as their software” (Eurostat, 2023). While much of the Nordic Region enjoys a high level of quality internet connectivity (for example, more than 92% of Danish municipalities offer connections to “superfast” broadband), there remain some discrepancies between urban and rural municipalities (Penje, 2022). That being said, Sostero et al. (2024) suggest that “rural internet speeds in the EU are now likely enough to support telework” and therefore, “high internet speeds are no longer significant predictors of higher levels of regional rates of telework” (2). In this report, we use both ICT and digital infrastructure to discuss the services and systems required for performing most remote work tasks.