The home office obligation expires on Wednesday. But is the topic of home office off the table? An interview with Lasse Rheingans, managing director of a digital agency in Bielefeld, author and revolutionary in the world of work.
– Listen to the post 8 Min–
Mr. Rheingans, when I first called you, it sounded very lively in the background. You asked me to call back – you were juggling kids, food, and so on. What are your own working days like at the moment?
Lasse Rheingans: That’s the way it is, I think many listeners can relate to it. We are all currently in the home office – actually since the beginning of March last year. Anyone who has children and has experienced this terrible time of homeschooling in between knows that you have to juggle a lot. My working days are a bit shaped by how you get it all under one roof.
Full salary for your workforce, even if they only work 25 instead of 40 hours a week. You started this experiment in 2017, kept it straight because of its success and also wrote a book about it: “The 5-hour revolution”. Was this concept able to withstand corona, home office and homeschooling?
Rheingans: At first glance, not because we switched to the home office at the beginning of March and the concept was previously such that we could do our job together in the office from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Suddenly it was noticed that in the home office one or the other has children around them, there is a different working environment, maybe things are missing that one would have needed. And so we first said: It is a special situation and you have to find a way to deal with it now. Let’s see how each and every one of them can reach their goal in a totally self-organized manner. And so we broke up this rigid five-hour day concept and switched to total self-organization and flexible working hours.
In the home office, there is no direct exchange with colleagues. How does this affect your team?
Book tip
Book tip: The 5 hour revolution. If you want success, you have to rethink work by Lasse Rheingans Campus publishing house Pages: 224 pages ISBN: 978-3593510729 Price: 24.95 euros
–
–
–
–
Rheingans: At the beginning, when we introduced the five-hour day, we had external supervision who accompanied us. We have found time and again that this social, this small talk, this relationship level is completely lost. And it wasn’t worth it to us. We didn’t want to work as efficiently as machines, we actually wanted to work better. But we noticed over the years that in order to be able to work really well, you also need space for relationships. There is little room for this in a five-hour day, and certainly not in the home office.
So we have established methods and routines how we can somehow make topics such as relationship work tangible through virtual meetings. We give space to this relationship work, and it is worth it to us. And that pays off in terms of employee productivity and satisfaction. You can not only improve the processes and thus save time, but at the same time you have to keep an eye on the relationship work and force that a lot of energy can and should flow into it.
According to current studies, 77 and 90 percent of those surveyed are very satisfied or satisfied with the conditions in the home office during the pandemic and do not want to go back to the status quo before the pandemic. You have already indicated what can contribute to satisfaction. Which other factors are decisive for you?
Rheingans: This home office may have been great at first, but not for everyone either. We also conducted surveys among colleagues: How would the respective colleague like to continue working after the pandemic? And there we had the whole range: from five days home office to five days in the office. So everyone is very individual, and the best thing would be if everyone could work so individually in the future. With us it will be the case in the future that the workplace does not matter, there is no longer any obligation to be present. There are also no more working hours, for example from eight to one. Instead, we see whether people are taking care of themselves, whether they are okay, whether they are not overworking. Otherwise we would have to intervene. We want to record working hours, but we just want to see that nobody works too much.
You obviously have a lot of trust in your employees. I could imagine that there are also some employers who, on the other hand, are worried that someone will only twiddle their thumbs at home.
The car manufacturer fears that vacationers will spread the Delta variant. A return is not conceivable until August at the earliest. more
–
–
–
–
Rheingans: Yes that’s true. But where does the control mania come from, what does it do and does it even make sense? You can’t control the work in the office either – apart from the fact that I don’t want to. You have to provide a work environment where people want to do work on their own initiative. There would be this possibility: You can look very individually at the strengths, assign tasks according to the strengths if the culture allows this, in order to then bring people to the point that they want to achieve maximum performance on their own. And then you don’t need any control. I firmly believe that people want to do a top job on their own and therefore do the job they do. Nobody forces them to work for me. If you have that trust – and I have because I absolutely believe in the good – then it really doesn’t matter whether someone is in the office or at home.
Who is this working model suitable for?
Rheingans: We see that more and more work is becoming cognitive, i.e. demanding, that we have to bring in a lot of brain power, that we have to do less of the simple processes as humans. We see this through megatrends such as digitization and everything that has emerged since industrialization. And at the same time there is also the shortage of skilled workers. That means we don’t have enough people to do all kinds of jobs. Every industry is massively affected by these megatrends. It’s going to change anyway, and the question is how we can deal with it. How can we possibly shape this change in a positive way? Those who do not question the topic of work will run into major problems in the medium term.
