Czech companies among EU's most respectful of employee personal time

Czech employers contacted their employees outside of working hours significantly less often than the EU average last year, according to new statistics released by Eurostat this week.

A 2019 survey asked employees if they had been "contacted several times in the last two months." Across the EU, about 17% of employees reported being often contacted by their employers during leisure time. More than half of those, about 10% of all employees, were contacted with direct action required within one working day.

Key insights: men (20%) were contacted while away from work more often than women (14%), and the those in the real estate (18%), information and communication (15%), and professional, scientific and technical (14%) fields were the most-often contacted while away from work.

In the Czech Republic, however, only 7.7% of employees reported that they were contacted during leisure time, the third-lowest percentage in the EU. Only workers in Romania (5%) and Lithuania (4%) reported being contacted during leisure time less often than employees of Czech companies.

A total of 5.2% of employees in the Czech Republic reported being contacted with direct action required within one working day, roughly half of the EU average.

A total of 9.8% of employees reported being contacted while away from work in Czech neighbor Slovakia, while 17.2% of Germans reported the same.

Employees in Scandinavian countries were the most-frequently contacted, with about a third of workers in Finland (35.3%) and Sweden (32.3%) being contacted on work-related matters during their personal time. Workers in the Netherlands (29.8%) were also frequently contacted outside of working hours.

Across different employment levels, managers (26%), professionals (14%), and technicians (12%) were the most-frequently contacted, while plant and machine operators (4%) and elementary occupations (3%) were the least-often disturbed outside of work.

"Of course, these and similar statistics should be taken with a grain of salt," Czech economist Lukáš Kovanda writes on Parlamentní listy.

"[Employeees] may be burdened with a certain subjectivity, or even self-censorship, resulting from cultural-historical norms and patterns of behavior. What an employee in Scandinavia considers a disturbance, for example, an employee in countries such as the Czech Republic, Romania or Lithuania will not even report in the statistics."