The retail giant Amazon is putting an end to home offices. From the beginning of the year, employees will be able to work in the office five days a week again. In Germany, almost one in four people continues to work from home.
Amazon employees will soon be able to return to the office five days a week. Working together is more efficient and brings teams closer together, argued CEO Andy Jassy in an email to employees. “Looking back over the past five years, we continue to believe that the benefits of being together in the office are significant.” Amazon employees are currently allowed to work from home two days a week.
Permanent jobs instead of Desk bookings
The new regulation will come into effect from the beginning of January so that employees can adapt their living conditions to it, Jassy wrote. At the same time, however, as before the Corona crisis, it will be possible to work from home sometimes – for example if a child is sick or if you want to concentrate on a work task. In the two headquarters of the world’s largest online retailer in Seattle and Arlington near Washington, fixed workstations will also be reintroduced instead of the desk bookings that have recently been common.
After offices remained largely empty for months at the height of the pandemic, many companies gradually began to bring employees back from home offices. Since February 2023, Amazon has again required employees to be present three days a week. For the employees who work in the distribution centers or as delivery drivers and make up the majority of the workforce, working from home was not an option anyway.
In Seattle, where Amazon has several high-rise buildings in the city center, working from home led to a drop in sales in shops and restaurants. Other US technology companies like Apple found a balance by working three days a week in the office.
Ifo Institute sees home office in Germany “by no means on the decline”
In Germany, there has also been a debate in recent months about returning from home offices to the office at companies such as the software group SAP or Deutsche Bank. The ifo Institute believes that these discussions, which keep flaring up, are exaggerated. The picture is growing that this debate is a “hype” “that is not reflected in the data,” said ifo expert Jean-Victor Alipour recently. On average, employees in Germany spend 17 percent of their working time at home, according to a recent company survey conducted by the Munich-based institute last week – the same amount as a year ago.
Other data also show that “home office is by no means on the decline,” says Alipour. Currently, 23.4 percent of employees in this country are at least partially working from home. This is only a minimal decline since February. In addition, an analysis of job advertisements has shown that home office is being offered as an option much more frequently. Most recently, the figure reached a high of around 21 percent.
Employers who want to take advantage of on-site work could do so primarily by better coordinating attendance, said Alipour. The key is that people are together on site. How much working time is spent at home depends very much on the industry. While it is 58 percent in IT and 50 percent in management consulting, the rate is much lower in the accommodation sector at one percent and in the catering and construction sectors at around two percent. The average for the industry is ten percent.
ZEW also does not see a complete move away from home office
According to the ZEW economic research institute, there is at least no sign of a move away from part-time home office regulations in Germany. According to a survey in August, employees in 82 percent of companies in the information technology industry work from home at least once a week. In the manufacturing industry, which is more tied to a specific location, the figure is 48 percent.
This means that the proportion of companies that allow their employees to work from home at least one day a week has remained at a consistently high level since the coronavirus pandemic, said study director Daniel Erdsiek. In last year’s study, the figure was 80 percent for companies in the information industry and 45 percent for the manufacturing industry. However, the fact that all work can be done from home is currently not the norm. Only 22 percent of companies in the information industry currently allow employees to work from home a full five days a week.
Nevertheless, a comparison with the situation before the Corona crisis shows how strongly mobile working has become established in recent years: Before the pandemic, the proportion of companies with home office regulations in the information economy – which includes the information and communications technology sector, media service providers and knowledge-intensive service providers – was only 48 percent. In the manufacturing sector, the figure was 24 percent.