Tuesdays, Thursdays popular office times in work-from-home agreements

Employers and employees are increasingly making agreements about working from home. Hybrid working in which employees go to the office three days a week seems to be becoming the norm, NU.nl reports after speaking to employers and unions. Tuesdays and Thursdays are popular days for in-office work.

Work from home arrangements are also included in more and more collective bargaining agreements. Since 2020, 170 collective labor agreements included conditions for hybrid working, and about 100 included a work from home allowance, figures from the employers' association AWVN show. That covers over a million employees.

"We see at many companies that three days in the office and two days working from home have become the standard. We hardly see any unilateral obligations from the employer. That doesn't work in our Dutch corporate culture. Many employers make agreements with the staff. It is purely tailor-made," an AWVN spokesperson said to the newspaper. "If there is a weekly meeting on Monday or Tuesday, you are expected to come. And if you have to collaborate, it is also better to see each other, for example. But as an employer, you also give your employee a bit of autonomy by allowing working from home.

Employer organizations VNO-NCW and MKB Nederland also see many agreements on hybrid working. "Our view is that, in practice, employers and their people often make good agreements about this that suit their specific company or the teams in which people are active," a spokesperson said to NU.nl. "It is also striking that office days mainly occur on Tuesdays and Thursdays."

According to trade union FNV, how you work depends a lot on what sector you work in. Office workers at the central government and municipalities mainly work from home, while bank and insurance workers work three days in the office and two at home. "It is absolutely not the norm to work from home only, while employees are allowed to come to the office every day," a spokesperson said.