Vor- und Nachteile von Homeoffice nach der Pandemie
During COVID-19 pandemic finally delivered: millions of workers around the world were forced to retreat from their company offices into their homes as the deadly novel virus raced across the planet.
It quickly became evident that the reality of working from home (WFH) was different than the pre-pandemic fantasy many of us had.
All this time later, many of us still haven’t returned to the traditional office structure, many businesses opting for hybrid working instead or remaining entirely remote. What does that mean for the future of work? To answer that question, we need to look at the pre-pandemic context of remote working.
The pre-pandemic allure of WFH
Pre-pandemic studies found that many employers were interested in remote working options as a way of retaining top talent. WFH was generally thought to be a way of lowering absenteeism and illness, while improving quality and productivity. Working people also wanted the option to work from home. And, in fact, many were already doing that.
Many surveys in many different countries around the world showed that about 80 percent of all working people wanted the option to work at home at least some of the time. Gallup's data on WFH attitudes, found in a late 2019 survey that more than half of American workers would change jobs for the opportunity to work remotely some of the time.
It’s important to remember, however, that much of this research was done before millions of people around the world were forced into WFH situations that had significantly different conditions than the pre-pandemic period.
The impact of COVID-19
Simply put, the WFH situation we faced in 2020 was not the situation envisioned by employers and employees in the pre-pandemic period. First and foremost, almost no one predicted a massive transition of workers to the home-based office, with all of the accompanying technological and family complications.
For example, we can be reasonably sure that no one envisioned multiple people working from home and competing for space at the dining room table. And those studies certainly did not consider the complicating presence of children, who were driven from their classrooms at the same time offices were being shuttered.
Finally, most of the pre-pandemic studies linked interest in WFH with the opportunity to have the best of both worlds: stay home for work, with the option to go into the office from time to time to reconnect with managers and co-workers.
Lamentably, remote working became an all-or-nothing proposition with no hybrid option, which no doubt changed some attitudes towards the whole idea of working from home.
Given all that, is WFH still the future of work?
Back in July 2020, a post by a Google employee on Blind, an anonymous online network for IT professionals, asked if remote working was having an impact on mental health. More than 9,000 people responded, with two-thirds agreeing that their mental health had suffered from remote work being forced upon them. That number jumped to more than 80 per cent for employees at organisations such as Yelp, Facebook, PayPal and Yahoo.
In August, Blind followed up with another poll where 42 per cent of respondents have reported feeling more stressed in a WFH environment while 29 per cent said they were less productive. Of greater interest, 55 per cent of the people who responded to the poll said they miss going into a physical office.
It’s worth noting that there are other polls, surveys and studies that provide other data points that claim WFH was very popular and successful during the pandemic. However the Blind results did predict a longer-term trend in the grand WFH experiment: the longer it goes on, the less popular it becomes for both employees and employers.
There were quite a few people ready to lambaste former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer in 2013 when she famously told her employees they could no longer work from home. But, according to this NYT article on the history of WFH, Mayer was really at the forefront of a growing trend.
In 2017, after years of boasting about how up to 40 per cent of its employees worked remotely, IBM issued a broad directive recalling its people to the office. This happened after Big Blue suffered 20 consecutive quarters of falling revenue. By the end of that decade, a number of iconic global brands – Bank of America, Yahoo, AT&T and Reddit – had recalled all or at least some of their remote employees.
The allure of WFH has continued beyond the influence of the pandemic. Evidence found in a PNAS study states that there has been a cumulative reduction in greenhouse gasses from the reduction in people commuting to work. And employers are similarly doing the calculus around savings in commercial real estate and office equipment.
Most importantly, now COVID-19 is mostly a thing of the past, remote workers find they are able to enjoy a pre-pandemic WFH environment where they no longer have to compete with school-age children for Wi-Fi bandwidth.
In other words, the story of WFH has not yet been completely written. The pandemic is merely helping us to sketch out the next chapter.
Want to learn more about getting to grips with working from home in a post-covid world? Consider EZRA's world-class employee coaching, built to fit into today’s working life. We’ve redesigned leadership coaching for the modern age to help transform people through affordable, scalable and high-impact solutions, with equitable access through our world-class coaching app. Find out today how digital coaching could make a big difference to your organisation.