The new SZ series “Home Office – What Now?” illuminates the good and bad sides of working from home, shows who is having a particularly difficult time in the home office, and describes how the world of work will change. You can find all episodes on this overview page.
The toothbrush is still hanging in the corner of your mouth while you scroll through the service emails, you end the uncombed state after noon. And at some point shortly after 5 p.m. you notice that you are still sluffing across the hall in your pajamas. All day long one had been wondering why the colleagues in the office next door were looking so strange.
This is of course an exaggeration, but when many people return to their companies after months of the pandemic, some old people feel as if they have to be learned again. According to the current status, the will run at the end of November Corona occupational health and safety ordinance from, obliges companies to offer their employees home office whenever possible. The question arises as to how much home work companies should allow in the long term. And what do the employees actually want? A survey by the career portal Linkedin, which the Süddeutsche Zeitung Available in advance, it now shows that there is one group in particular that is skeptical about the home office that one might not have expected directly: the boys.
Leon Schmid, 24 years old, is one of them. After completing his master’s degree in media informatics, he started working for an IT consultancy in Hamburg last November. He was still allowed into the company for onboarding, but then came the second lockdown; those who came shortly after him even had to start their new job entirely from home. Imagine difficult, says Schmid. He’s been in the office for a few months now, at least one day a week. Closing the apartment door behind you, a short walk across the Rathausmarkt over to the company: “You start working with a completely different feeling when you leave the house for it,” says Schmid now. “I would even come more often, and I think many others too.” There is currently not enough space if everyone wants to work on site at the same time.
The home office has advantages, says Schmid, but after the months he also sees what is sometimes lost: the feeling of togetherness, the exchange, the short conversation between the door and the door, where you learn so much. In the past few months, Schmid was only able to get to know a large part of the other 150 employees virtually. The return to a little more normalcy in the job – for Schmid this is now an enticing prospect.
Personnel specialists and management advisors had long drawn the image of a new generation of employees who believe their flexibility is the most sacred thing and who want work and life to be reconciled – and who allegedly detests nothing as much as the nine-to-five corset of the old German republican compulsory workforce. It is controversial what has ever been in such pictures of young office professionals. The Marburg sociologist Martin Schröder speaks of one in a study “Generational Myth”: The attitudes of the younger generation weren’t that out of the ordinary, and when they did, it was at most easily and not necessarily as suggested by the personnel advisors.
The cliché of freedom-loving youth breaks at least the numbers for the home office, for which LinkedIn asked 1004 employees across Germany. A majority of 48 percent of all respondents said they would prefer a mix of home office and on-site work if given the choice. Only just under 29 percent would opt for the office permanently. Employees between the ages of 16 and 24 see it completely differently: 47 percent would prefer full office work; Even a mix of office and home office is conspicuously unpopular in this age group with a good 29 percent. Where does the tendency of young people come from for a form of work that could be heard everywhere during the pandemic?
Apparently mainly because of the fear of disadvantages. A good half of those surveyed between the ages of 16 and 24 fear that working from home could have a negative impact on their own careers. Among employees between 35 and 44 years of age, on the other hand, only 37 percent express this concern, among those over 55 it is just a quarter – which could also be due to the fact that older employees have often long since established themselves professionally and are therefore comparatively relaxed with them Avoid longer work distances at the kitchen table at home: Things just have to be done, and that much more career is not possible. Then rather in sweatpants.
Barbara Wittmann, head of Linkedin in the German-speaking area, considers the concerns of the younger generation to be “not unjustified” https://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/ that we see every day, “she says.
That even shows the famous study of a team led by economic researcher Nicholas Bloom from Stanford University, who is often referred to when the benefits of working from home are to be praised: A Chinese travel company wanted to allow its call center employees to work from home a few years ago, but the Managers feared their employees would be wasting time at home – so they had the researchers conduct an experiment first. Bloom and his colleagues were able to convince 249 telephone operators to try; employees with an even date of birth should work in their own four walls for nine months, while colleagues with an odd date of birth should continue to work in the office. In fact, management’s fears turned out to be unfounded: employees in the home office even managed more calls and were less sick than those in the office. But they were not rewarded for this, on the contrary: They were promoted far less often than the face-to-face employees. Perhaps because supervisors tend to overlook the work of the employees in the home office, speculate Bloom and his co-authors.
IT consultant Leon Schmid does not fear any disadvantages from the home office for himself; In this respect, he is probably even more confident than many in his generation – and perhaps also more reliable than research results such as Bloom’s allow. “Where networks and personal contacts are particularly important for a promotion, those in the home office certainly have a harder time,” says the 24-year-old. “With us, the performance is actually clearly recognizable, so it doesn’t matter where someone is sitting.” Schmid even believes that sometimes it is not the employees but the employers who can be at a disadvantage if there is no sense of presence: If you only belong to the company from your home desk, you will probably be gone more quickly – after all, the next remote job is only one Click away.