more than half of Russian companies allow employees to work remotely

More than half (58.6%) of Russian companies allow their employees to work remotely, according to data from the “Monitoring Digital Transformation of Business – 2023” by the Higher School of Economics based on surveys of more than 4 thousand organizations in ten sectors of the economy. Let us recall that remote employment began to be used more often during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020; later, according to surveys of employers, they tried to return most of their employees to the office (see Kommersant, March 29, 2023).

Nowadays, remote employment is most often practiced in service sectors with a high level of digitalization – primarily in finance, telecoms and the IT industry. In industries where the work of the majority of employees is related to the management of machinery, equipment and other production assets (energy, housing and communal services, agriculture, etc.), the remote format is expectedly less common. At the same time, regardless of the industry, the larger the organization, the more actively it uses remote work. As the authors of the monitoring note, this may be due to the fact that large companies often have a higher level of development of digital infrastructure; in addition, since there are several types of workers in such companies, they may have different requirements for presence in the workplace. In companies that use remote employment, it is available to an average of 45% of staff. In particular, 30% of the employees of these organizations can work remotely one or several days a week, and 15% permanently.

However, for many employers it is important to know where their employee works from – this does not matter for only 29% of companies. The majority (55.5%) noted that it is possible to work from any region of the Russian Federation; another 19.4% require that the employee be in the same city as the company’s office. Only 2.6% of respondents reported that their staff could work from abroad. Restrictions on the location of remote workers are more often set by financial, energy, telecommunications and IT companies, where the work is related to personal data of clients or critical information infrastructure. Small enterprises set such restrictions more often than large and medium-sized ones (78.4% versus 73% and 69%, respectively).

Anastasia Manuilova