How would the corona pandemic have gone if not many people had switched to the home office? The ability to continue working from home has helped limit the negative economic impact of the crisis. It enabled companies to do at least part of their business. In the meantime, the temporary obligation to work from home has been lifted again. The employees are gradually returning to their workplaces. But hardly anyone believes that the world of work will soon look like this again before the crisis.
Many employees have also experienced the downside of working from home. Especially those who couldn’t find the peace and quiet there to concentrate on their job, for example because they had to look after their young children at the same time. It was also not uncommon for technical problems to arise because there was a lack of the necessary equipment or because there was no access to fast internet. But overall, people were more satisfied with working from home and mostly don’t want to go back to their familiar circumstances. At least not completely.
According to a survey by the consulting firm Ernst & Young (EY), a large majority want to do at least part of their job in the home office. In response to their ideas about the world of work in 2030, as many as 84 percent said they could imagine that they would then work completely independent of location. Half of the respondents even thought it had been agreed that there would be no more company buildings in the foreseeable future. It is also expected that employers will provide the necessary work equipment for the home.
Germany’s most valuable DAX company, SAP, wants to give its employees complete freedom in the future where they work from. If you don’t want to, you no longer have to go to your old workplace in the office. Not even the Internet company Google is going that far at the moment. It wants to see at least some of its employees in the office again from September onwards, even if only on a daily basis. About 20 percent could work at home permanently, company boss Sundar Pichai announced in an email to employees in May. You can apply for a form of work. Who is eligible for which mode should then be determined by the respective team leaders.
The crisis has shown how well home office works
For software developers at SAP or Google, mobile work is comparatively easy. The situation is different with activities that require a lot of organization and interaction, not to mention service jobs or those in which something is manufactured. But even in such companies there is no avoiding the home office after the pandemic.
The Federal Government supports this process to the best of its ability. Labor Minister Hubertus Heil (SPD) has presented a draft law that does not provide for the right to work from home, but has a so-called obligation to discuss. Employers and employees should discuss the possibilities and ideally reach an agreement.
Josephine Hofmann from the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering (IAO) sees such a legal regulation as differentiated. “I am of the opinion that the question of flexible working should basically be solved in the companies, because that is where implementation takes place. But such a move could help to strengthen the position of the employees in individual cases,” says the team leader and cooperation Guided tour at the IAO in Stuttgart.
Hofmann thinks that the pandemic has shown that home offices work well in most companies and that companies have learned a lot, for example how to work across locations. “Perhaps the pandemic has also led to more thinking about the international division of labor and about the relocation of jobs,” she says.
The total flexibility is “poison for the working atmosphere”
In any case, companies are preparing for the new world of work. The ILO receives numerous specific inquiries every day. Managers want to know, for example, how to draft a company agreement for mobile working, what upper limits should be set for the home office and to what extent the company has to take care of the equipment at home.
Entrepreneur David Zülow doesn’t believe in complete flexibility of work. For him, only hybrid solutions come into question, in which one does part of the work at home and the other, larger part in the company. “If I have total flexibility and never see my employees, then I lose the personal relationship with them. That is poison for the working atmosphere and it is also not efficient,” says the boss of an electrical workshop with 350 employees. In contrast to service companies, Zülow also sees the problem in his company that employees who cannot work at home because of their job profile become dissatisfied: “This is where compensation payments quickly come into play. And that becomes expensive.”
Nonetheless, Zülow will also offer home offices in the future, mainly because otherwise he won’t get the staff he needs. “Like many medium-sized companies, I would defend myself against a legal right to home office or a quota obligation,” says Zülow, who is also chairman of the Association of Family Businesses in North Rhine-Westphalia.
Home office is not a result of the pandemic. But as in many other social or economic areas – just think of online trading – it has accelerated development. In a study published last November, the Ifo Institute found that before the pandemic, 18 percent of all employees worked wholly or partially from home. This number then rose to 42 percent in the pandemic, although fewer people were naturally at home in the manufacturing sector than in many service companies. A machine cannot be assembled remotely and the packages for the many online orders do not pack themselves either. Due to the temporary home office requirement, the proportion should then have increased noticeably again.
Only 20 percent want to work full-time in the future
The Ifo survey also showed that the vast majority of companies did not have any major problems implementing home offices. However, many stated that the work result had deteriorated. In particular, the quality of cooperation with colleagues suffered.
Home office solutions could be the beginning of an even broader change in the world of work. The flexibilization of the location could be followed by a flexibilization of the working hours, which enables more than flexitime. Sabbaticals, job sharing, more free time overall – these are the trends. In the EY study, almost 40 percent of those surveyed said they would like to reduce their working hours to 80 percent, and only 20 percent want to continue working in the classic full-time model in the future.
Whether and to what extent such ideas can be realized also depends on the pressure that the growing shortage of skilled workers is exerting on companies. Because first of all, the effort for the flexible working time models increases and with it the costs. Each company will then have to decide for itself whether it will and can bear this effort in order to get suitable staff or whether it will not.