Cologne The Germans’ love-hate relationship with working from home gave Katharina Hamma an idea. “The trend is irreversible, everyone is currently defining their optimal work mix – but the furniture in the home office often defies description,” says the Cologne native. “Here’s a huge issue for employers.” The kitchen table with fluorescent lights could become the expensive boomerang of New Work – through increased sick leave.
This is how Hamma discovered her founding gene at the age of 55. She managed the business of Koelnmesse for nine years. She has been running Myhomice, a trading platform for ergonomic furniture for the home office, since the beginning of the year. “When I saw that the first well-known manufacturers were starting to sell their chairs in the entry-level segment on Amazon, the need became clear to me. And I have all industry contacts to manufacturers and dealers,” says Hamma. Leading trade fairs in the furniture industry such as the IMM, Interzum or Orgatec fell into their ranks.
With a voucher system, Hamma wants to enable companies to set up a decent home office for their decentralized workers. Myhomice only lists furniture, soundproofing solutions and lamps that comply with occupational health and safety regulations. An ergonomics index, based on the criteria of the administrative trade association, categorizes everything as minimal, functional or optimal. A good 20 suppliers such as Living Chairs, Standsome or Leuwico already list around 1,000 products.
The corona-related home office obligation has been history since March 20th. But nothing is clearly regulated – on the contrary. Initial judgments show that stumbling on the way to the coffee machine at home is also considered an accident at work. Legally, however, working from home is “a big gray area,” says Norbert Reuter, head of the collective bargaining policy department at Verdi. He demands: “If employees spend a large part of their working hours at home, it is absolutely necessary that the employer pays for the appropriate equipment.”
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Verdi wants to prevent companies from reducing their costs by decentralizing work in upcoming collective bargaining rounds. However, Reuter sees the difficulty in clearly defining each case. “Sometimes there is not enough space within the four walls to set up an ergonomic workplace. This does not make collective agreements for mobile work and, above all, for home office easy, if you do not want to exclude employees.
Expensive back pain
“Employers are obliged, out of sheer self-interest, to offer healthy working conditions as well,” says Hamma. “On average, a back problem results in 21 lost working days.” The DAK sick leave analysis confirms the urgency. In the 2020 pandemic year, more than every fifth day of absence was due to problems with the musculoskeletal system, back pain increased by eight percent and caused 93 days of absence per 100 insured persons.
The feel-good factor for employee satisfaction has so far been underestimated.
(Photo: dpa)
The new flexibilization of the working world creates space for accompanying business ideas. In Munich, the architect Niao Wu spent a long time dealing with the topic of healthy working environments for BMW – and became self-employed in 2021. With her start-up Onyo, she promises “home office-as-a-service”. She is also concerned with the ergonomic design of the home office.
Unlike Hamma, she is not planning to sell, but relies on a usage-based subscription model to finance good lamps, tables and chairs for employees through their employer. “We start with a check-up to determine whether the apartment in question is suitable at all.”
In addition to a digital survey, there is also a virtual inspection on request – with a risk assessment and tips on how and where work furniture can be placed sensibly. “Many don’t know that a desk in front of the window is not good,” says Wu, who has already helped plan the innovation center and design studio for BMW in Shanghai.
Only high-quality, sustainably manufactured pieces of furniture are leased, for example from Girsberger, Aeris or Dauphin. She has won her first customers in the start-up environment, and a management consultancy is currently planning 200 jobs. Companies would have several advantages with the Onyo model. “As an employer, you live up to your responsibilities, but you have nothing to do with logistics, insurance and construction.” Above all, employees are given the freedom to choose the furnishings according to their own needs and taste.
potential for employers
According to the Industry Association Office and Working Environment (IBA), this feel-good factor should not be underestimated when it comes to employee satisfaction. “So far, the home office equipment has not been used much as an opportunity for employer attractiveness,” says IBA Chairman Helmut Link.
In a Civey survey in September, 58 percent of the decision-makers responsible for workplace design stated that their employees needed help furnishing their home office workplaces. However, less than a third actually became active. Nine percent of those surveyed bought new furniture, nine percent also loaned existing furniture and almost eleven percent made a subsidy.
Leasing and rental models were only 0.4 percent – but Niao Wu wants to change that. The average value of a leased Onyo workplace is 1,000 to 1,500 euros. The customer pays three percent of the object’s value every month, and the leasing is designed for 36 months. “Three years is also a normal time for job hoppers,” she says. After the end of the term, Onyo makes the employees an “attractive offer” to take over the high-quality parts. The offer is currently ten percent of the order value.
Katharina Hammer from Myhomice advises companies to let the furniture immediately become the property of the employees in order to clearly distinguish it from an accounting perspective. “Otherwise you would have huge, decentralized business assets that also have to be inventoried,” she says.
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Niao Wu thinks leasing is ideal. “The employer pays the installment like rent and can capitalize it immediately as operating costs.” After completing an accelerator program at BMW, Wu worked as a consultant at the Boston Consulting Group before she started her own business. Its co-founder Jens Wöhrle is a software expert, MBA graduate and ex-banker.
Chris Bieri also used the corona crisis to land his business idea. As co-founder of the Munich start-up Seatti, he offers a software solution with which office workloads can be flexibly controlled in order to facilitate the hybrid working model. As early as 2018, while working for Tesla in Amsterdam, the German-American sensed: “The practice of desk sharing is modern, but it should be much easier with a tool.”
Said and done. Seatti’s office management software is used by companies including Osram, Sartorius and Sixt. According to Bieri, two pharmaceutical companies also rely on the services of the ten-strong start-up. “Hybrid working is becoming the new standard,” he says. “Works councils are increasingly agreeing to desk sharing being introduced, but often insist on accompanying software to prevent chaos.”
There are classic horror scenarios of multi-local work organization, says Bieri. “You walk into the office and there is no space available. Or you can turn back straight away because there is no relevant colleague there.”
With the help of the Seatti software, workplaces, meeting rooms and parking spaces can be booked. Dashboards show transparently who is working where on which project. “Even if you are working from home or on a business trip, you can show where you are down to the district level and, for example, signal your willingness for a coffee.” The social component should not be underestimated. “I also met my girlfriend in the office,” says Bieri.
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