KOMPAKK Index of Occupations’ Teleworkability in Germany

“Telework”, “home office” and “work from home” have recently become very prominent working concepts due to social distancing regulations during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to a study by Kohlrausch and Zucco (2020), in Germany the share of people who regularly work from home has increased from about 4% before the pandemic to approx. 20% during the first wave of the pandemic. Furthermore, the share of workers who alternate between business and home office also increased. In this development, telework was not equally distributed across all occupational and social groups. With the project “Household structures and economic risks in East and West Germany during the COVID-19 pandemic: compensation or accumulation? (KOMPAKK)” we define economic risks that people were exposed to due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We therefore calculate several risk factors based on survey data from 2017 and 2018. As some occupations might be well executed from home while others are not, we created an index which reflects the possibility of working from home.