Among the EU countries, there was a large variation in the percentage of enterprises that used this feature, with the highest shares being registered in Finland (84.5 percent of enterprises), Sweden (79.1 percent), Denmark (78.5 percent) and Belgium (70.1 percent). On the opposite side of the scale, the lowest shares were recorded in Bulgaria (32.4 percent), Hungary (33.5 percent), Latvia (34 percent) and Romania (34.9 percent).

Mostly Large Enterprises Offered Access to Remote Working

Statistical data on remote access aims to measure the technological readiness of enterprises to give employees remote access to three types of enterprise resources:  the email system, documents and business applications, or software of the enterprise.
In 2024, in the EU, six out of 10 enterprises (60.2 percent) with 10 or more employees offered all three types of remote access to their staff. 

When it comes to the size of the enterprises, 91.9 percent of large enterprises (250 or more employees) offered all three types of remote access to their employees, while the same happened in 78.2 percent of medium enterprises (from 50 to 249 employees) and 56 percent of small enterprises (from 10 to 49 employees). 

Large enterprises led in all types of remote access. Almost all large enterprises offered remote access to the email system of the enterprise (97.8 percent), to documents of the enterprise (e.g. files, spreadsheets, presentations, charts, photos) (94.9 percent) and business applications or software of the enterprise (e.g. access to accounting, sales, orders, Customer Relationship Management systems) (93.1 percent). 

As for medium enterprises, 92.2 percent gave their employees remote access to the email system, 83.9 percent to the documents of the enterprise and 82 percent to the business applications or software of the enterprise. 

Comparatively, small enterprises provided remote access to a lesser extent, since 78.5 percent of them gave their employees remote access to email, 65.5 percent to documents and 61.8 percent to business applications or software of the company.

Compared with 2022, there was an increase in all types of access among enterprises of all sizes, most notably for small enterprises providing access to company documents (+4.6 pp).