The Generalitat’s new agenda urges businesses across Catalonia to offer summer remote work and loosen fixed schedules as part of a broader push to improve work-life balance. Regional ministers for Equality and Feminism Eva Menor and for Business and Labour Miquel Sàmper presented the initiative in Barcelona. It sets out 55 measures to help employees reconcile their professional and personal lives.
Among the proposals is the option to work remotely 100% during specific periods, including summer and school holidays, or in emergencies. The agenda also encourages digital disconnection outside working hours. It recommends that companies create on-site childcare facilities and extend leave policies beyond the traditional family model. It also calls for meetings to be scheduled at times that support family life. These proposals address broader time pressures: Barcelona City Council reported on 19 October 2026 that 54% of residents have difficulty reconciling work, personal and family life, including 56% of women and 52% of men.
The Generalitat describes the plan as a “country strategy.” It comes just days after another controversial proposal surfaced, offering public employees up to 200 euros more per month if they forgo telework. The new roadmap is intended as a guide for both the private and public sectors, adapting work-life balance policies to the circumstances of each workplace and sector, while taking regional differences into account. That tailored approach echoes Menor’s call for an agenda developed with companies and organizations, with measures suited to different types of work.
At the presentation, Eva Menor said work-life balance and shared responsibility should be viewed as tools for social change, not solely as private or family matters. She noted that women continue to shoulder a disproportionate share of domestic and care work, spending an average of one hour and 17 minutes more per day on these tasks than men and nearly tripling men’s involvement in family planning. Separate Catalan time-use figures reported by Barcelona City Council show that 56% of women organize household and family-care tasks alone, compared with 16% of men, and that women have 33 minutes less leisure per day. Miquel Sàmper stressed that work-life balance is a right for all and that companies must recognize these changes as necessary and irreversible for collective well-being.
The scale of the imbalance also appears in Catalonia’s 2025 gender-equality index. The Catalan Statistics Institute (Idescat) placed it at 68.7 points, up 1.5 points from 2024. The time dimension scored 69.1 points, while the power dimension scored 51.4. The same data show that 74.3% of women regularly perform unpaid housework, compared with 55.2% of men. Barcelona City Council has also reported that time poverty affects 32% of women and 25% of men. Those figures help explain why the roadmap looks beyond childcare, addressing work schedules and meeting practices as well as the distribution of care responsibilities.
The agenda identifies four basic challenges. One is reorganizing work time and space; another is ensuring support services for families. It also aims to change perceptions of care responsibilities and embed shared responsibility in organizational culture and labor negotiations. By late 2026, the Generalitat plans to launch a digital tool to help companies and public bodies assess their practices and identify measures suited to their circumstances.
Since the pandemic, Spain has seen a gradual shift towards flexible work arrangements, though implementation varies widely between regions and sectors. Catalonia’s new agenda reflects growing pressure on employers to address demographic challenges, including an aging population and low birth rates. Employers also face pressure to boost competitiveness and sustainability. Spain’s rate of remote work remains below the EU average, information from Eurostat, despite high employee demand for greater flexibility.
