The quickly accelerating and previously unmet global COVID-19 pandemic necessitated abrupt re organisation of work in several spheres of economy and society around the world. The overall possibilities and success of managing the re-organisation of work depended on certain technological, and especially digital, readiness in different economies and countries. The significance of differences in labor market structures and general economic and cultural factors, for example, cannot be ignored either.

Finland’s digital infrastructure is usually considered one of the best in the world, and as the pandemic-driven re-organization of work crucially meant relocating work tasks to be carried out remotely as much as possible, the Finnish digital infrastructure met its toughest challenge thus far.

We wanted to know, how the transition of working Finns to remote work had succeeded in the first few months of the pandemic, and in October-November 2020 we organised a survey with Taloustutkimus to investigate various dimensions of this question. The data was gathered as a web survey, and the weighted population of 1518 individuals who answered became a representative sample in relation to the population.

Our survey results show that the pervasive transfer to remote work mode did take place comparably well in Finland, Finnish workers do quite a lot of remote work, and are happy with their (relatively) new forms of work. The experienced benefits are in fact so important, that general return to some version of pre-pandemic work life with its less prevalent remote work has begun to look more and more impossible. Naturally, remote work is not possible to all workers, but it is more common amongst white-collar employees and individuals with higher education and better income. There are regional differences also.

In the paper, we will detail key empirical results of our survey, relate them to other relevant studies of the subject, and especially reflect on organizational and societal trust – in addition to the advanced digital infrastructure – as the key enabler of the pandemic-forced but successful adoption of various modes of remote work in Finland.