opinion workers
Why the home office causes damage
Status: 13.07.2023 | Reading time: 3 minutes
Political editor Hannah Bethke thinks little of working at home
Source: Marlene Gawrisch
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More and more employees prefer to work from home. Many see this as a gain in freedom – while doing so they only disenfranchise themselves. Because they unnecessarily give up the historical progress of separating professional from private space.
In working life, the need for autonomy is growing. This does not only apply to the infamous “Generation Z”, i.e. the younger people who expect a good work-life balance from their first job. Rather, it fundamentally concerns the question of how much regulation employees are willing to accept in the 21st century.
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The Federal Statistical Office recently announced that almost a quarter of all employees in Germany worked from home last year. That’s still almost double what it was before the pandemic. The trend is clear: Many employees have gotten used to working from home – and now they no longer want to go back to the office.
They see it as a gain in freedom. Employees can decide for themselves where they work, at least part of the week, as many company agreements on remote working now provide. It sounds practical: you save yourself the trip to work, have all the comforts at home and organize your working hours independently.
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As a result, however, the employees disenfranchise themselves. Office space that remains empty is not profitable. A company that wants to do business sensibly will sooner or later save on space. In other words, working conditions are getting worse.
The more unattractive the office becomes, the more employees become dependent on the spatial conditions of their own home – because then the home office is no longer a choice, but a necessity.
Dissolution of boundaries of various kinds as a result
Employers are rightly concerned about this trend, as the consequences for work culture are devastating. Creativity, the ability to work in a team, loyalty, communication, chance encounters, the conversation in the hallway from which an idea suddenly emerges – all of this suffers when we only sit at home in front of the screens and private conditions surround us where professional matters are concerned goes.
With the spread of the home office, the tolerance for ambiguity that every team depends on is also decreasing. Where there is no alignment with analog reality, positions radicalize. It is no coincidence that the public debate has escalated and polarized so much during the pandemic, when many sat at home and only communicated digitally.
Commentary by Kristina Schroeder
At the same time, there is a dissolution of boundaries in the home office because isolation takes the place of community. Some drown in overtime, others wish they had more control over their work.
It was a long struggle in the history of the labor movement to separate the private from the professional space. The fact that the SPD and trade unions, of all people, are campaigning for a right to work from home demonstrates astonishing short-sightedness.
All the more reason to say to all employees: go back to the office! It is in your own interest!
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In order to display embedded content, your revocable consent to the transmission and processing of personal data is required, since the providers of the embedded content as third-party providers require this consent [In diesem Zusammenhang können auch Nutzungsprofile (u.a. auf Basis von Cookie-IDs) gebildet und angereichert werden, auch außerhalb des EWR]. By setting the switch to “on”, you agree to this (which can be revoked at any time). This also includes your consent to the transfer of certain personal data to third countries, including the USA, in accordance with Art. 49 (1) (a) GDPR. You can find more information about this. You can withdraw your consent at any time via the switch and via privacy at the bottom of the page.
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