Italians shout tired, the elites of Silicon Valley in the United States boycott, Dutch employees enjoy the care of employers, and China takes the opportunity to develop the digital economy. According to a report by Radio News France on January 31, the national conditions and culture are different, which makes people’s attitudes towards telecommuting very different during the epidemic.
Four French journalists stationed in Italy, the United States, the Netherlands and China told the situation of the people of the four countries working at home through their personal experience.
As the first European country to be hit by the epidemic, Italians are far less like telecommuting than Nordics. Although the number of people staying at home to work has increased tenfold in a year (nearly 2 million people), the survey of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan shows that the biggest feeling for Italians to work from home is “tired”.
Two-thirds of the school’s teachers believe that telecommuting has caused life to suffer from “digital aggression” and their muscles are tight.
61% of teachers said they were emotionally unstable, and 50% of teachers gave up exercise. In addition, 53% of teachers admit to “seeking comfort” in food because they are tired. However, the report of the Central Bank of Italy also shows that telecommuting avoids layoffs in private enterprises and gives employees an unexpected salary increase of 6%.
White-collar workers in Silicon Valley, USA, spend a day’s office time in front of computers, but they are very resistant to working from home.
In order to encourage employees to work hard, the reality of inch of land and inch of gold on the West Coast has made many technology giants spend a lot of money to build the company into a “three-in-one micro-city” for work, life and rest.
Telecommuting means packing back to expensive apartments. As a result, many businesses in San Francisco Bay eventually abandoned telecommuting.
The Dutchman was the “European telework champion” in 2019. Compared to the average of 5% in Europe, 14% of Dutch people worked from home before the epidemic.
The epidemic has strengthened the telecommuting model, and Dutch regulations require bosses to provide employees with efficient and comfortable working from home. As a result, many families have purchased computers, office chairs, printers and other equipment for free.
Although telecommuting has become a memory of many people after the stabilization of the epidemic in China, in the first half of 2020, 40% of the country’s working population was forced to work from home, and many people stayed at home because of “being on vacation”.
Online shopping, 5G communications, the establishment of “cloud services” in government affairs and the use of big data (such as traveling with health codes) have become daily, and the epidemic has become a catalyst for the “high-quality transformation” of China’s digital economy.
People’s habit of using Alibaba or WeChat platforms to carry out video conferencing and organize work is expected to be retained after the end of the epidemic.
