Companies want to see their employees in the office more often again.
(Photo: Redd 5U / Unsplash)
So now it begins: the “new normal” of the world of work. After the Corona Occupational Health and Safety Ordinance expired on Thursday, many companies reopened their offices to more employees.
In the future, office workers will work in a mixture of office and home office. Even if one or the other is reluctant to hear it: the office will continue to be an important part of the modern working world in the future.
It may be more comfortable to sit at the kitchen table in everyday clothes and save yourself the hassle of commuting. However, after months of permanent home office, companies are well advised to order their employees to head office on a daily basis.
This is not only possible under labor law and due to the lower number of infections, but also urgently required to ensure the company’s success – and to uphold the well-being of the employees.
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It is not without reason that companies try to lure their employees with special campaigns, as a Handelsblatt survey shows: parties, free ice cream, barbecue evenings, nothing is left unturned.
Colleagues become lone wolves
If the corporations were still singing the praises of working from home in the midst of the pandemic, they now concede: 100 percent home office is not the right thing.
Siemens has made the experience that innovative work in and between teams in the permanent home office is decreasing. Symrise complains that employees at home “often become lone fighters”. Companies cannot want both.
>>> Read more: Party, team breakfast, free ice cream – this is how companies lure their employees back into the office
No, there is no need to return to the old working world. Making them more flexible is one of the few good things Corona has brought. What is needed is a return to the office by the day – even if many employees are more productive at home, as the companies report. But creative and complicated things can only be clarified, or much better, in the office.
Working from home is particularly disadvantageous for new employees
New employees in particular often only know their colleagues as postage stamp-sized images from video conferences. No trust and no internal network is built up in this way – innovative ideas don’t come about that way either.
According to work psychologists, employees are less motivated and less satisfied if they only work from home. And they lose their emotional attachment to their business.
Because the home office often promotes a group of mercenaries who do not work for the company in the long term, but change employers as quickly as the zoom conference.
Studies also show that employees with more office presence are promoted more often because they chat with the boss more often.
So many good reasons to work in the office at least two days a week.
More: Three bosses reveal how they keep talent in the home office era.