Home office, is that a cozy Netflix day with a laptop on your lap? A full-day yoga session with three pro forma work phone calls in between? What was common prejudice against mobile working before the pandemic sounds like a tired joke from a bygone era today. If you listened to the corporate executives and HR managers in the past year and a half, they kept pointing out how “astonishingly well” the decentralized office was working.
And indeed: people work at home, and tend to do more than in the office tower. Like researchers at Harvard Business School and New York University have figured out, an average working day in the home office during the pandemic takes 48.5 minutes longer. The time that employees save on the way to the office can quickly be spent longer in front of the PC – in front of the video camera, to be precise. In particular, the number of meetings in the home office has increased (although the virtual meetings did not last that long), and employees also wrote an average of one and a half more e-mails. If there is no more corridor radio, you just have to type or videoconferencing.
Many people can apparently live quite well with the newly structured working day: Like surveys of the union-oriented Economic and Social Science Institute (WSI) show that most employees who have worked at home in the meantime wish to be able to continue to do so. To save yourself the traffic jam on the autobahn, to be able to organize the working hours more freely or to be able to check on the children in between: employees perceive these as advantages.
Several studies, including a survey of the Bitkom digital association, have also shown that working people consider themselves to be more productive at their desks at home. With this subjective impression, however, you could be wrong. Because researchers of the Institute for the future of work (IZA) found out with the help of an analysis tool that measured the work performance of 10,000 test subjects from an Asian IT company with their consent: The employees also delivered the same output in the home office, but they had to spend around 30 percent more working time. Productivity declined at home – especially among employees with children who were repeatedly distracted from work. The advantages and disadvantages are sometimes quite close together.