Lockdown measures implemented in offices to curb the spread of Covid-19 infections boosted remote working on a large scale across Belgium, but nowhere is this practice more common than in the Brussels-Capital Region.
Few companies in Belgium allowed employees to work from home pre-pandemic, but the health crisis forced all employers to experiment with the concept, resulting in many turning their homes into offices. This phenomenon has had a lasting impact, even after measures were lifted.
Before the pandemic, around one in four Belgians worked from home occasionally, and this figure remained relatively stable between 2019 and 2022. However, the share of "intensive" home-based workers (who work from home more than half of the time) rose from 7% to 17% between 2019 and 2022.
In Brussels, the figures are even more pronounced, an annual report by the Brussels Institute for Statistics and Analysis (BISA) showed. "During the health crisis, homeworking increased by about 15 percentage points among Brussels residents and workers in the region," BISA noted.
Changing habits
More than 40% of people living in Brussels and 48% of people who normally commute to Brussels for their jobs now work from home. According to BISA, this is "a significant proportion" at both the Belgian and European levels.
More than one in four workers living in Brussels (21%) and more than one quarter of people whose workplace is located in the capital (27%) spend more time working from home than in the office – quite a bit more than the Belgian average.
"This can be explained by the fact that a large proportion of employees and civil servants in the major Brussels institutions now work intensively from home." Overall, the development of IT tools has resulted in all office occupations having the necessary access to work from home.
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BISA argued that working from home will increasingly become the norm, adding that even in the Brussels region there is still room for a further increase in remote working. Any further increase will depend on factors such as personal considerations or rules on remote working, however.
The Institute also stressed that workers spending more time at home has an impact on both organisations and neighbourhoods. "This raises the question of the future of business districts that are too dependent on the presence of office workers. It also opens up opportunities for local economic development in the neighbourhoods where home workers live."
