Home office is the vaccination for employers. There is even an obligation to do so, you can only refuse it under certain conditions, and you can face severe fines. Even the visionaries of New Work, digital, flexible, placeless work could hardly have dreamed that things could come to this point so quickly.
Two years ago, it is hard to believe, the home office was always based on a kind of exceptional situation. You had to struggle hard one or two days a week. There was no doubt about the otherwise valid normality, the presence in the office. Studies prior to Corona, such as those carried out by the Institute for Employment Research since 2012, found a very slowly growing proportion of the home office in general employment. The majority of entrepreneurs and executives were fundamentally skeptical of this work model and did not allow themselves to be confused by utopias with employees relaxing on the beach with their laptops open. The fear of losing control over their employees and having to give up the tried and tested “management by acclamation” was too great.
The majority of employees, who could at least imagine working from home for a while, were a little more open. They hoped to be able to combine family and work better or to balance the work-life balance to an optimum. However, they would never have thought of completely immersing themselves in the home office. If you take these findings into account, you can gauge which gigantic experiment began with the corona pandemic. The almost widespread retreat to the home office marks a social change, the consequences of which cannot yet be foreseen in their entirety.
Is this change good or bad? If you take into account the lack of protests by the employees, then it’s good. There is no known case that an employee of a company has sued for his or her right to be present in the office. The union side tends to register smaller claims, such as the employer’s participation in the costs of working from home. Personal samples give a predominantly positive assessment. It quickly became apparent that working from home was not that different from working in the office. Sure, the many video conferences are annoying, you complain a little about the isolation. But the stress and time savings on the daily commute to work are perceived as a significant improvement in quality of life. The ability to organize one’s time resources in a self-determined manner is also valued. And for smokers, the home office is paradise anyway.
The danger of procrastination, of postponing important work tasks, which was initially painted on the wall by opponents from home office, quickly turned out to be exaggerated. At home, the distractions for employees are no greater than at work, they are just different (shopping, tidying up, cooking). Anyone who previously had a problem with procrastination in the office also encountered him in their own four walls.
Psychological terror open plan office
For the others, the digital chain of Slack feeds, Teams reminders, and Zoom meetings was enough to keep them doing their chores. For many, it felt amazing how quickly you could get your real job done. For the first time they understood how the British sociologist Cyril Northcote Parkinson wrote in 1942 that work always extends into the time that is made available to it. In the USA, this has meanwhile led to the phenomenon that employees in the home office are taking on additional jobs.
Why were the employees so well prepared for the home office? Why did the business that were run from the office not come to a standstill, but continued smoothly? Presumably because the gang that tied the employees to their offices was already more frayed than it looked.
The employees are the avant-garde in the great attempt at society to break the boundaries between work and leisure, which has been in full swing since the appearance of the smartphone. Mobility, flexibility and agility are the key concepts of a new ideology that aims to unhinge the life of an employee and office work. Looking back, it is easy to see how well this has been prepared in recent years. With the help of the psychological terror of the open-plan offices or crazy ideas such as “desk sharing”, the employees were slowly worn down, so they were all the more receptive to the siren chants of the new digital world.
You should now be able to dynamically leave the old behind. Traditional knowledge and traditional behavior had to be constantly put to the test; no one was allowed to rest on “professional experience”. We should look forward to the new software updates with great anticipation. As goodies, there was the exemption from the obligation to wear a tie and suit and the option to use the boss or to call the boss by his first name.
In this new world of work, significantly more responsibility rests on the shoulders of employees. Where the old boss, who gives clear guidelines, is less and less tangible in the flat hierarchies, a vacuum arises that you have to fill yourself. Without external pressure, they should act solely from within. Obviously, this is easier for them than expected.
The employers are much more inflexible. There is currently no question that is being discussed “as fiercely as returning to the office” among management levels in German business, according to the business pages of national daily newspapers. Despite the positive experiences of the pandemic, there is a clear tendency against the home office: “The vast majority of companies want their employees to work at least 70 to 80 percent from the office again.” noticeable lack of creativity, the impairment of the corporate culture, the dwindling loyalty of employees and the greater risk of cyberattacks.
But the employees take their time when they return. Despite the abolition of the legal restrictions at the time, 90 percent of the employees at the reinsurance company Munich Re were still working from home two months ago. If they’re doing their jobs as efficiently there as they are in the office, how do you convince them to return? This will no longer work with authoritarian instructions. In times of agility, employees want to make such decisions themselves. He has to feel like going back to the old office, it has to be made palatable to him. At Deutsche Telekom, for example, they are trying to do this with cultural events and mindfulness training, which are now being offered in the yawning empty office buildings.
The Boston Consulting Group, a leading global management consultancy, assumes that every second employee wants to work from home on a long-term basis. The next few years will probably be a transition phase in which a hybrid work culture will prevail due to compromises. Depending on the individual negotiation basis, the employee will be able to request a part-time or full-time option for the home office in the future. The IT talent you are looking for is free to choose, the replaceable sales woman has to swallow what the company offers her. But even these rudiments of old control madness will eventually disappear or be replaced by new digital instruments.
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