Taking all types of telework together (home-based and mobile telework as well as self-employed teleworkers in SOHOs), 13% of the working population in the EU can be classified as teleworkers. This means that the share of teleworkers in Europe is considerable lower than in the US: in the country where the telework idea was born, every fourth worker has some type of teleworkplace (25%).
The countries from Central and Eastern Europe lag somewhat behind in telework penetration (average: 5.5%). However, there are comparatively high numbers in Estonia (12%) as well as in Lithuania (9%), Slovenia (9%) and Poland (8%).
This pattern is of course partly determined by the economic wealth of each country, as measured in GDP per head. Additionally, considerable differences in the availability of appropriate technological infrastructure can be expected to play an important role, together with organisational practices in companies, political and legal frameworks, housing conditions (spare room for home-based telework), as well as cultural factors such as common attitudes of management and workforce towards techno-social change.