Tillmann Prüfer is a member of the editor-in-chief of “Zeit-Magazin”.
At the latest with the pandemic, the time of classic office work was declared over. A new era of working from home was about to begin. And that seemed so logical. Why should tens of thousands of people struggle through the streets every day when they can do the work from the comfort of their own homes?
To some it seemed like a golden age. Because from now on you could work from anywhere. Maybe live somewhere in the country or somewhere else in the world. The main thing is that there is internet. This completely forgets that working from home is by no means a modern invention. At the beginning of the industrial age, it never occurred to employers to provide jobs for workers. The materials were distributed – and the products were later collected again.
The workers then did all the manual work in their damp and stuffy shack. Central workplaces were only needed when machines became established. The proletariat gathered in the factories. The entrepreneurs were not comfortable with this. Because where workers came together, they could also agitate and arrange to strike.
Today people are sitting at home, using the internet they pay for themselves, printing on the printer they bought themselves, preparing their own food instead of eating subsidized canteen food – and think that’s a great achievement. Our company is a set of tiles that we talk to via Microsoft Teams or Zoom. I only know some employees as an image on the monitor. Some have resigned before I ever met them.
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I read in the “New York Times” that US companies are now declaring “Back to Office Day”, maybe in March or April. This day is then looked forward to like a birthday. It’s a bit like Freedom Day, except there’s no freedom, there’s a desk space.
Most companies want to put some pressure on because many employees are glued to their chairs. You are no longer used to working face-to-face with colleagues. And maybe you were quite happy not to have to see these people. Because of this, HR managers are puzzled as to how to make the office as beautiful as home has always been.
I wonder what great houses these people live in that they obviously don’t want to get out of there. I myself know home office as the art of working at a table on which the crumbs from breakfast are still sticking. I’d love to know what it’s like in all the houses people don’t want to get out of. Although – as soon as I would visit them there, they would certainly like to come back to the office.
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