Employees who worked more remotely were less likely to be promoted.
(Photo: dpa)
If more people work from their home office, then that reduces the number of infections. Jean-Victor Alipour, Harald Fadinger and Jan Schymik demonstrated this in a study for Germany published in the Journal of Public Economics in 2021, to the delight of many health ministers.
The three economists have shown that this association was particularly true at the beginning of the pandemic and gradually weakened thereafter. At the same time – and this is where it gets exciting for the economics and social affairs ministers – more home office reduced the proportion of short-time work. In regions where more work could be done from home, companies reported less short-time work.
From an epidemiological and macroeconomic point of view, working from home had the desired effects. The question remains whether the companies themselves and, above all, the employees were so happy about working from home.
Studies by Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington on American online retailers during the pandemic, or by Nick Bloom and co-authors on a Chinese online travel agency before the pandemic, show that the transition to working from home increases worker productivity by an average of five to ten percent.
Top jobs of the day
Find the best jobs now and
be notified by email.
This is mainly due to the fact that fewer breaks are taken at home. And it may also be because you don’t want to give the impression of being “lazy” when working from home.
Out of sight, out of mind?
So, from a business perspective, the widespread belief that you have to force people into the office to do their jobs properly seems to reflect more of an illusion than reality. Such insights will certainly become important for the design of the working world after the pandemic – keyword right to home office.
A challenge for this, however, is an effect that was found in both studies mentioned: employees who worked more in the home office were less likely to be promoted. So is home office a career killer?
>>> Read here: Save taxes in the home office: when is the home office considered a study?
The data suggests that “out of sight, out of mind” could also apply to working from home. For this reason, in Nick Bloom’s study, almost all of the people wanted to go back to their company offices at the end of an evaluation period.
However, if working from home becomes an essential part of our working world in the future – and there is much to be said for it – then companies will have to think about how they can evaluate working from home so well that people in the home office have the same career opportunities as those who work entirely in the corporate office.
More: Inside Valley – Episode 2: Google is moving away from the home office