From the home office to the office
Your own desk is a personal place – now it’s in danger
Many employees want a hybrid of home office and office
© Finn Winkler / Picture Alliance
Due to the pandemic and working from home, fewer office jobs are needed. The trend is towards shared desks in companies. But that entails risks for the working atmosphere and productivity.
Many office workers want to continue working from home, at least for a few days, after the end of the pandemic. Companies therefore need fewer office jobs. But for companies, the change in work organization harbors risks, as scientists say. Possible consequences of planning errors are lower productivity and a worse working atmosphere. The pandemic is fueling a trend that was imported to Germany from the USA years earlier: individual offices are becoming open-plan offices, personal desks are being replaced by communal tables, known in management jargon as “shared desks”.
Employers traditionally prefer to see their workforce in the company, but Corona has accelerated the rethinking: Many employees like to work from home and mostly work there just as much – and often even more – than before. “Many people work longer at home because they no longer have to travel to work,” says Hannah Schade from the Leibniz Institute for Labor Research at TU Dortmund University. “The time that you would otherwise have spent on the train or in the car is given to your employer, so to speak.”
“Very few employees want to work from home one hundred percent”
The Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (Baua) asked companies about their plans in 2020 in the first year of the pandemic: “Among the large companies with more than 250 employees, over 50 percent wanted to expand the home office,” says Nils Backhaus, a work organization specialist. “Since three quarters of the employees work in large companies, it will affect a lot of people.”
Naturally, companies also have to consider how many office jobs they actually need. “Very few employees want to work from home one hundred percent,” says Backhaus. “It will result in the majority of employees wanting to come into the office on certain days of the week.”
But that has pitfalls. A small example: According to surveys, Mondays and Fridays are the most popular home working days. If the majority of the workforce wants to jostle in the company from Tuesday to Thursday, it can get too cramped in the smaller offices. “If the offices are busy three days a week, you may have to tell employees who can come into the office on which days,” says Backhaus.
According to Backhaus, discord in a company could also trigger the gap between home workers and those who are indispensable in the company: “If those who already had privileges during the pandemic because they could work from home can keep these privileges after the pandemic or even expand them , then that would be associated with an increase in inequality in the company,” says the scientist. “Something like that could also have a massive impact on peace in the company.”
Home office or office? Choice can lead to “option stress”.
The organization of hybrid working time models with constant alternation between work in the company and at home will be a major challenge for companies, says Backhaus. “The works councils and employees play a major role in co-determination.”
Flexi offices and communal desks are part of a form of work organization imported from the USA under the slogan “New Work”. Flexible working as such is by no means unpopular among workers. Hannah Schade from the Leibniz Institute in Dortmund says that job satisfaction increases as working hours and work locations become more flexible. But at the same time the “option stress” increases accordingly. To put it bluntly: those who have the choice are spoiled for choice and have to organize themselves.
For companies, designing flexible offices presents very practical difficulties. In many companies, employees have to book desks electronically. Once workers are forced to organize vacancies, this naturally leads to frustration.
Open-plan offices are rather detrimental to productivity and communication
“To me, tightly calculated offices seem tempting for the employer who thinks it will be cheaper for me,” says Schade. “But a change that benefits everyone – including the employer through increased long-term productivity and greater employee satisfaction – is not cheap,” says the scientist. “So no mini telephone boxes that you feel like you can’t breathe. But different types of rooms for different activities and enough space for all the activities that the employees do.”
According to Schade, there are still no large-scale scientific studies on flexi offices. The usual open-plan offices, on the other hand, have already been examined fairly thoroughly. Accordingly, these are rather detrimental to productivity and communication. “You can save space with open-plan offices, but you can’t expect an increase in productivity, especially when people feel like they’re being watched,” says Schade.
It has been proven beyond a doubt that a high noise level in the office means stress. Accordingly, large-scale workforces are encouraged to work as quietly as possible. As a result, communication suffers: For a British study published in 2018, the scientists removed the partition walls in offices. The result: the number of person-to-person conversations dropped by 70 percent.