Few companies are as famous for their modern offices as Google. Before the pandemic, employees were motivated to spend as much time as possible in the company with their own fitness studios, massages at the desk, basketball hoops, snacks and other offers – in the hope that they would be as productive as possible. But Google also decided at the beginning of March 2020 to send almost all employees worldwide to the home office.
18 months later, Google’s head of Central Europe, Philipp Justus, summed up at the Plan W congress: “It worked amazingly well.” Regardless of whether you are a software developer or a marketing person, most tasks could just as easily have been done from home after a short changeover period. “That was a surprise for us,” says Justus. Due to the positive experience, the employees at Google will be able to work from home on a daily basis even after the pandemic. An attitude that not all managers in Germany share by a long way.
There is the boss who asks his employees to leave the laptop camera on all day in the home office so that he can always check whether his colleagues are really sitting at their desks. Or the manager who gives the employees who come to the office voluntarily champagne every evening to celebrate the culture of presence. There are blatant examples that the Greens Bundestag candidate Laura Sophie Dornheim puts forward at the Plan W congress, but they point to a general problem: the demands placed on managers have changed radically – and not everyone finds it easy to adapt to them .
Get Remote founder Hertwig recommends agreeing on a team code for the home office
Most office workers are now likely to have laptops and have more or less ergonomic workplaces set up within their own four walls. But that alone is not enough to ensure that work in the home office works well over the long term. “It is much more an organizational and a management question than a technical question,” says Teresa Hertwig. The founder of Get Remote has been advising companies on the introduction of mobile working for three years. The pandemic has catapulted her company from a niche existence into the mainstream and brought her many orders. “All of a sudden, managing directors who were previously absolute opponents of home offices asked us,” reports Hertwig. You can imagine that the consultant would be sensitive to their concerns, at least she admits: “I also felt this loss of control at the time when I introduced remote work as a manager.”
Above all, it would have helped her to formulate clear expectations. She recommends that every manager talk a lot with their employees and agree on a team code that defines how cooperation should be structured in the future. This could also answer very practical questions, for example whether the camera has to be switched on during meetings or not. In Hertwig’s opinion, a switched-on camera is always the better option.
Good communication skills are especially important in the pandemic
This is confirmed by Petra Nieken, Professor of Human Resource Management at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. The expert in the field of “Future of Work” is connected to the Plan-W congress via video. Because a corona case occurred in her son’s daycare center, she was unable to come to Berlin – a problem that many parents in the pandemic should be familiar with. Nieken uses her own example to demonstrate how communication changes when you don’t sit together in a room: “Part of my body language is missing, we are simply not that close digitally,” explains the professor. However, managers would have to learn to interpret the non-verbal signs of their employees via a camera.
“I had to learn a lot more to listen”: Ulrike Tagscherer (left) from Augsburg-based robot specialist Kuka about her experiences with digitally leading teams. On the right in the picture SZ presenter Nakissa Salavati, Petra Nieken was connected via video.
(Photo: Johannes Simon)
Ulrike Tagscherer has also experienced that it is not that easy to perceive the body language of colleagues digitally and to classify it correctly. “I still had to develop a little sensitivity, and listening was another topic,” says the innovation manager at Augsburg-based robotics specialist Kuka. Tagscherer has now got used to calling their employees individually after digital meetings and asking how they are when they have a strange feeling – for example because a colleague did not nod during a meeting and did not seem enthusiastic. You have only had good experiences with it. “My colleagues were always grateful that I had brought things up,” says Tagscherer.
Good communication skills are now one of the most important qualities of a modern manager, as all participants in the discussion agree. In addition: the ability to let go, to trust the employees and to let them work independently. “Today’s manager is a coach who guides employees to do things better,” summarizes Nieken.
However, there is disagreement on the question of whether there is a need for a legal right to work in the home office – something that Greens Bundestag candidate Laura Sophie Dornheim would like to enforce. Stefanie Wolter from the Institute for Employment Research thinks “that a company agreement is always preferable to a political constraint”. Founder Hertwig agrees with the labor market researcher: Enforcing a right to work from home is likely to be difficult for employees in practice anyway. “If I have a boss who doesn’t want to work from home, he’ll punish me in my career,” says Hertwig. In her opinion, the employees would then be better advised to look for a new job. After all, a large number of companies have now recognized that home offices can work.