What companies in BW can do better – SWR Aktuell

Since November 2020, employers have been obliged to offer employees the opportunity to work from home – unless operational reasons speak against it. This is one of the measures to curb the spread of the coronavirus. The currently applicable home office obligation is regulated in Section 28b of the Infection Protection Act and applies for a limited period up to and including March 19, 2022. In the Prime Ministers’ Conference on Wednesday, a decision will be made on how to proceed.

SWR: What effect did the legal regulations on working from home have on companies at the beginning of the corona pandemic?

Johanna Bath: My impression was that many companies even went a step ahead of the legal regulations. They even stayed in the home office faster and longer than the legal regulations required. There was a phase in the summer when the home office obligation was lifted, but many companies still left their employees in the home office.

This is very surprising because many employers previously had a rather reluctant attitude towards working from home – in Germany. We are a rather cautious country when it comes to hybrid working models. This shows me that the companies basically had the technical equipment and the pandemic was the trigger to finally use these opportunities.

Do you think health was really the decisive factor or was it more the thought: We wanted to try that anyway.

The reason was health, so avoiding the risk of having major outbreaks in your own workforce. The studies also show that for the vast majority of employees, the switch to working from home went relatively smoothly. Basically, it wasn’t technical requirements or the ability of the workforce that held us back, but rather the mindset, the belief that it can really work. When the alternative was to take the risk of having major pandemic outbreaks within the workforce, you overcame this mindset hurdle and said: Ok, let’s turn the big lever. Then everyone was surprised – and the studies also show this – that it worked so smoothly on the one hand – and that there were no slumps in productivity, as was always feared.

Nevertheless, some studies show that even more people could work from home. Why is that?

I think there are three reasons for this. On the one hand, the question is: As a small company, am I familiar with topics such as working from home and hybrid working? For example, an IT company: 20 years ago, the founder developed ingenious software with 30 employees. How is this CEO supposed to know about such topics as work organization? – Not at all, just as I don’t know how to program software. There is a knowledge gap in many small businesses. Sometimes there is also a so-called mindset gap, so that some people say: We have always worked in the office, why should that change now, do the people in the home office do anything at all? The third is that I think many are reluctant to invest. It’s not a question of money at all.

Is that so?

I always like to take SAP as an example: The company organizes online events for its employees for an unbelievable amount of money, for example an online Christmas party for five million euros. At such moments, the impression arises that it is because of the money. But that would have been just as nice, regardless of whether I’m a 120-man or 20-woman company: If I, as the boss, say, that’s my grandmother’s best-kept vanilla crescent recipe – you’ll get it exclusively from me a small box with all the ingredients and we bake vanilla crescents at the same time for an evening. Then we’ll get together nicely. It’s more about creativity and spirit than money.

So the ideas are crucial?

I would very much wish for our business location Baden-Württemberg that there were more people who would lead the way and not say we’ll wait until the numbers go down because that doesn’t really have anything to do with the corona numbers. It’s really about the fact that Corona has thrown us into a new world of work that would have come one way or another and that the employees have wanted for a lot longer and we now have to find the will to make something really good out of it.

Current figures show that the trend towards working from home is increasing again, is this the future?

I believe that a pure home office is the future for a few companies, because there are also some negative consequences that are only really becoming apparent now that we’ve had two years behind us, which we were initially able to compensate very well for. For example, 50 percent of employees in Germany report that their networks have become smaller, which means that professional exchange is declining.

What problems are there?

What is very underrepresented among employers is the topic of further training, for example: How have I trained my employees, how to structure their working week in the home office? Have I provided them with tips on how they can better manage online meeting times and the flood of e-mails and messages for themselves, for example? Have I given time management training on how you can then allow and create concentrated quiet working hours yourself?

Here’s some really dramatic data: the average office worker checks their inbox every six minutes, and the longest streak of silent work is 20 minutes. If you switch between tasks very quickly and do that famous multitasking, you ultimately know that it is totally detrimental to concentration and performance and, of course, to the work result. Very few employers have this topic on their screens.

The other is leadership: Are my managers trained to lead in remote or hybrid work environments? That’s something that’s extremely important, because 95 percent of the feedback we give to our employees falls through the physical separation. By that I mean these hundreds of non-verbal or even verbal feedback situations that I experience in my office, i.e. the mere fact that I smile at my employee when he or she comes in the door in the morning and says good morning – that is a signal: I’m ok, you’re ok. That means: I have to train my managers how to deal more explicitly with the employees in feedback situations. You must also make an effort to compensate online for those social moments that you automatically have in an office life and create spare moments for them.

They see companies as having an obligation to tackle this problem. At what point do you think the companies in Baden-Württemberg are in this situation?

So I think we’re still in a certain wait-and-see attitude here at the moment. I think many have now adjusted their company agreements on the subject of “remote work” so that the subject of home office or remote work is regulated on a broad basis with employer and employee representatives. But that doesn’t regulate the why and the how and I find both extremely important.

This includes questions such as: Should a maximum of 40 percent work from the home office or do we want to work flexibly from the home office for a maximum of two days a week? The answer will be very different for each company, because the culture, strategy and values ​​of the company are also different. At the moment I don’t feel that I’ve had much concern with it. How can a hybrid organizational model not only work somehow and be somehow defined in a company agreement, but how can that support us in achieving our strategic goals of growth goals, sales goals, turnover and so on better than before? I miss this optimistic, opportunity-oriented approach to hybrid work.

–