Also, as I see there is not a big culture of freelancing. Is this true or am I missing something?
Hello, I would like to do some research. In which fields are you more allowed to do home office based jobs in Switzerland? Focusing on doing the job while living in Switzerland.
Your "research" parameters are too wide and vague. Do you mean working in Switzerland for a company based in another country, or just generally working at home?
WFH seems to vary vastly depending on whether you can actually do the job at home (i.e. not direct customer facing and nothing where the equipment is static in the place of work). Other than that, it seems to be at the discretion of individual management and/or company policy.
You are right, it is too vague. I guess I am interested in some responses from personal experience, who work from home in Switzerland and what they are doing.
I meant to work for a swiss company while also living in Switzerland.
I work in finance (Swiss company, with a mix of Swiss / other nationalities at C-level). 3-4 days in the office, 1-2 days at home. WFH is practiced by everyone from management downwards. Highly flexible managers who really embraced WFH from the time of the pandemic.
I work in Finance, 5 days from home.
Anything related to software/data engineering likely has certain flexibility.
Engineering consulting, at least 4 days a week at home. Max 1 day a week in the office.
Sometimes I do calculations on my laptop, sometimes I connect to a server somewhere to do the calculations there. QC of work from colleagues or management of projects around the world does not require going to an office in ZH.
Any job that you can easily outsource to a country far far away.
I'd be curious to know how many of the people here who work from home also worked from home prior to the pandemic.
My husband is in IT and works for a large insurance company in Winterthur. He is working from home full-time now, since the pandemic, and it looks like it's going to probably stay that way. He only has to go to the office maybe once every few months for a meeting or a company dinner.
I also have a good friend who is in accounting and works from home 3 days per week and in the office 2 days per week now. He works for Adidas in Lucerne.
I can ́t tell you in my case as I got this job only in 2021 but it was listed as a WFH 100% job immediately. But then that is also because I work for a US company and my reporting lines are to the US (but have a local Swiss contract).
My previous employer was highly against WFH and only allowed it 40% because they couldn ́t find anyone wanting to come into the office with only 1 day WFH per month :-)
Pharmaceutical clinical trial data analysis for companies within or without Switzerland.
"Freelancing" in Switzerland often means working via a payroll company - you become an employee of the payroll company. Common in finance and aforementioned pharma industry.
Such as?
Ironically, the position of being the person that outsources the jobs is not outsourceable. Be that person
Unless you work for a CRO. Most CROs (IQVIA, ICON, SyneosHealth, PPD) offer permanent full time remote positions in certain functions, for example remote CRAs, data managers etc. I work in Pharma fully remotely. What was supposed to be a hybrid job turned out to be a fully remote job..can't really complain. I drop by the office once every six months or when there is a business need. I realised I more often in the US office, than in my local one.
Consulting in IT is also often remote. I've been working my way up from Senior Consultant to Director over the past five years and have been remote ~90% of the time.
First year (2018) was full office or occasionally at client site, though even then it was an option to work from home if you really wanted to. A year later, pre-covid, I understood a lot of clients didn't want consultants at their office so I started working mostly from home, as I saw a lot of others did it already.
And since 2020 it's been home office only. Only showing up to client site once a year and to company office also once or maybe twice a year.
The only constraint is that for most Swiss clients I cannot do work abroad, due to data regulation laws and some other compliance rules. So I'm planning to travel to Japan for a few months, I'll be reallocated to some other clients for that time frame.
Irony would be if the person in that position were to be outsourced.
software developer, home office only, allowed to work up to half a year outside of Switzerland in EU, other destination also possible after discussing it case by case. I'm also allowed to move my work with me to any other country if I decide to leave Switzerland permanently.
OH is a software developer, he does WFH 2 - 3 days a week (he also did this prior to covid). He can also WFH when we're at our house in the UK.