In the Corona-crisis, everything suddenly went very quickly: From today to tomorrow, millions of Germans worked in the home office. What was previously dismissed often as technically or organizationally feasible, was suddenly possible. So many people have not switched already to the Desk at home as sometimes assumed: researchers at the University of Mannheim were the end of March, 25 percent, of the total population of the group that worked completely or mainly in the home office. Compared to on-the-Corona-days when according to Eurostat data, only one in Twenty worked from home, are the spectacular values.
Jessica Blazekovic
editor in the economy.
F. A. Z.
The crucial question that many of those Affected are now: Was this all a flash in the pan, or the home office remains a permanent Option, the new world of work? A recent survey indicates a real triumph. More than half of the companies want to Corona strengthened to work from home, show data from the current Ifo business surveys. “The Corona-crisis could mean a permanent boost for the home office”, Oliver Falck, Director of the Ifo center for Industrial organisation and new technologies, is convinced. For many companies, the transition with substantial investment went hand-in-hand. This reorganisation of the work will not be made, in all likelihood, is completely reversible.
Unused home office-Potential
The Trend of the home office is motivated, therefore, economically. The workers should be pleased: even now, a lot more people are interested in looking for a job for jobs that allow for home office. However, surveys also show that the long-lasting Work-from-home for many Employees is more of a Loading than a relief. It is apparently on the right level.
The Ifo data suggest that not the full home office Potential in German companies is exhausted. At 56 percent, the researchers estimate the proportion of employees that could work in principle, at least temporarily, from home. Previous studies had come to be significantly more restrained forecasts. The Ifo researchers give reasons for the Differences in the methodology: Instead of professions screened according to whether they are exercised in the Free or editing E-Mails, require, define the home-office Potential of a profession as the proportion of economically not active, which exclude the possibility that the home office is in your Job possible. Therefore could even be done in agriculture, one third to Work from home.
“I can delete the Ifo results are absolute,” says the President of the Federal Association of personnel managers, Inga Dransfeld-Haase. A return to full presence in the culture is not going to give up. The company suddenly began to show purified, justified with the “collective learning experience” in the Corona-crisis. Now is the time to make the transition in the long term, and to compromise in case of a mixed form between the classroom and the home office culture to suit long, without the “social peace” among the staff.
A luxury, which not everyone will be entitled to
“it Clear that the weeks of the Corona-pandemic changes have taken place, the can imagine before that, no one would have and not long appeared to be feasible,” says Norma Schöwe, managing Director of the German Association for personnel management. Even if the home office or the “New Normal” requires some technical feasibility as well as certain conditions, könnees to an alternative new form of work will be. “What will remain after the Corona pandemic, the trust and the realization that mobile and virtual Working can work at a distance, and powerful.”