The Netherlands may have figured out something about working from home that the rest of the world has yet to learn.
If you’ve been balancing your laptop on a precarious stack of magazines, or wondering how to extend your wifi reach, you’re not alone. Ever since lockdown started, companies have been scrambling to enable colleagues to work from home.
As we adapt to the oft stated ‘new normal’, many are predicting that remote work is here to stay. Especially when you factor in evidence from recent surveys. Results of a US poll conducted mid-crisis, suggest that 59% of remote workers would like to continue to work remotely as much as possible and another worldwide poll revealed that 48% of participants would happily take a pay cut if it meant they could work from home indefinitely.
But for some, remote working is just another day at the office. While the percentage of employed persons usually working remotely before the coronavirus outbreak lingered at around 5% in the UK, and 4% in the US, a comparatively huge 14% of the Netherland’s workforce reports usually working away from the office. Indeed, the country has long led the global shift toward remote work, with only Finland catching up in recent years.
“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.”
Across the globe, many companies have found that the shift to remote work has been a less-than-smooth transition. Setting up usually office-based staff with computer equipment, and recalibrating working culture to keep employees connected, has been a significant shift for most. But for the Netherlands, the country’s already sizeable remote workforce means that the adjustment has been much less dramatic.
“Dutch people had certain advantages when we went into lockdown,” explains van Doorn, whose employer Auth0 gives all workers the option for flexible work, offers a budget to create a comfortable and productive home working set up, and helps to arrange co-working spaces if needed. “We’re fortunate enough to be a country where 98% of homes have high-speed internet access, and the Netherlands has the right combination of technology, culture, and approach to make remote working successful. I’m judged on whether I deliver value, not on the fact that I sit at a desk for nine hours a day,” he told the BBC. As we begin to tentatively imagine a post-pandemic future, there will be many who find themselves looking wistfully toward van Doorn’s permanent home working set-up.
Major international companies, including Barclays and Twitter, have already suggested that expensive city office space may become a thing of the past. Both have already hinted at an end to the commute for its employees, planning potentially long-term remote work policies for after the pandemic.
Aukje Nauta, an organisational psychology professor at the University of Leiden, who is researching how companies can enhance individuals in a dynamic work context, believes that employers could look toward the Netherlands for inspiration as they consider how best to implement remote-work policies and set up virtual offices.
“Values such as democracy and participation are deeply rooted in the Dutch working culture, so managers place more trust in their workers than elsewhere in the world,” she says. “For example, ING bank now has a policy on unlimited holidays implemented for pilot groups of workers, who can take as much holiday as they want as long as their tasks do not suffer."
"Employers elsewhere are now learning that employees can be trusted to work from home, and I believe that in post-corona times, smart combinations of working from home and meeting in real life will emerge more and more worldwide.”
But there are also broader economic and social contexts that enable remote work to flourish in the Netherlands. “Physical infrastructure is well developed, and public and commercial remote-working facilities are plentiful,” says Bart Götte, a business futurist and psychologist based in Amersfoort. “Public libraries have reinvented themselves as massive and comfortable modern working spaces, and there are an enormous number of small, quality coffee shops that service the remote workforce."
"Employers in the Netherlands have also seized the opportunity to cut costs and become more productive – they need less square metres of expensive office space, and strict sick pay legislation in the Netherlands means that they are motivated to make sure that their workers have healthy working facilities at home.”
The explosion of remote working facilities in the Netherlands hasn’t just benefited employees of large companies. Around 1.1 million workers in the Netherlands are self-employed, and the normalisation of the virtual office has made it easy for freelancers and small business start-ups to operate without the need for dedicated office space.
With the Netherlands displaying an admirable level of trust in its employees and an understanding of the digital frameworks needed to support remote work, other countries may now be looking towards the Dutch as they plan a post-Covid future.