Some 52.9% of enterprises within the EU held meetings remotely via the internet last year, marking a 2.9-percentage-point increase on 2022, new data from Eurostat has found.
While remote working soared during the COVID-19 pandemic, the latest figures indicate that remote meetings, via platforms such as Microsoft Teams or Google Meet, have continued to maintain their appeal.
Across the different EU member states, there was a large variation in the number of businesses conducting remote meetings, with Finland leading the way – 84.5% of Finnish businesses held remote meetings in 2024.
Other countries to report a large share of remote meetings included Sweden at 79.1%, Denmark at 78.5%, and Belgium at 70.1%.
At the other end of the scale, Bulgarian firms hosted the lowest number of remote meetings in 2024, at just 32.4%, followed by Hungary 33.5%, Latvia 34.0%, and Romania 34.9%.
Online access
Many businesses across the EU also offer online access to work and office resources – as of last year, some 60.2% of EU enterprises (with at least 10 employees) provided staff with access to email systems, documents, business applications or software.
The larger the business, the more likely it is to provide remote access to employees – among large firms with 250 or more employees, 91.9% offered remote access, while among medium-sized businesses (50 to 249 employees), access was granted to 78.2%, while among small firms (10 to 49 employees), 56.0% offer remote access.
In terms of the type of software for which businesses offered remote access, nearly all large enterprises offered remote access to their email systems (97.8%), documents (94.9%), and business applications (93.1%). For medium enterprises, the corresponding figures were 92.2%, 83.9%, and 82.0%. Among small firms, 78.5% offered email access, 65.5% providing document access, and 61.8% granting access to business software, Eurostat noted. Read more here.
