9.17. People doing telework on the labour market

From 2001 the Hungarian Labour Force Survey's (LFS) economic activity questionnaire is supplemented with information that enables to identify teleworkers by how often they do telework (regurlarly, ocassionally), to present their demographic and labour market characteristics, and to monitor the changes in them. The question is addressed to people aged 15–74 being in the sample.

Question to identify teleworkers in the Labour Force Survey

According to the instructions for completing this question

"Telework is any work in which the employer and the employee are spaced apart during the course of the work, there is a telecommunication connection between them, and the work is presupposes the use of electronic equipment. The employee transmits the results of the work via telecommunication channel.

The telework is considered to be regular if the respondent has spent at least half of the time spent working in the last four weeks in this form. If the time spent with telework does not reach fifty percent of the time spent working, but has occured in the last four weeks, it is considered "ocassional". If this type of work has never occurred, the answer code is "no"."

The results of the LFS supplementary survey for the mapping of atypical forms of employment in the first quarter of 2018, as well as methodological research have shown that the respondents usually include the "home office" phenomenon in their responses as part of 'teleworking. While the conditions of telework as an atypical form of employment is regulated by the Labor Code, the "home office" is subject to an individual, internal employer regulation. Treatment of these two phenomena together was also confirmed by the results obtained during the first wave of the coronavirus epidemic, when employers provided a much higher proportion of their employees the "home office" option, and this was reflected in the increased rate of telework when evaluating the results of the survey.

The sample size of the respondents