Working from Home: Lessons from the COVID-19 Crisis Shutterstock Before COVID-19, around 9% of workers in Israel worked from home, for all or some of their work hours, according to a survey carried out by the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) in July 2020. Numbers working from home skyrocketed with the outbreak of the pandemic. A series of IDI surveys conducted since then among employed Israelis (salaried employees and self-employed workers who were working when the crisis began), revealed that the percentage of those working from home at the end of March 2020, when the first lockdown was imposed, had jumped to 55%, and then declined to around 43% in July 2020, when the lockdown was eased, though social distancing restrictions remained in place. This latter figure is similar to the figures in the interim periods between lockdowns since that time. The findings of a December survey (conducted just before the third lockdown) reinforce this data, showing that the percentage of those working from home during the second week of December 2020 stood at 45%.Survey from end of March/beginning of April 2020 [Hebrew]: https://www.idi.org.il/blogs/special-economic-survey/march-april-2020/31797. Survey from July 2020 [Hebrew]: https://www.idi.org.il/media/14897/economic-poll.pdf This figure comprised around 13% of workers (both salaried employees and self-employed) who were working only from home (including 5% who worked only from home before the crisis) and 32% who were working partly from home and partly at the workplace (including some 7% who had worked some of the time from home beforehand) (see Figure 1).