Home Office

More and more often, I observe the issue among executives who are mutually demanding a return to the office or struggling with it. A typical example …

I had to fire several employees because they refused to return from home office to the office. During the pandemic, everything seemed to work well; initially, productivity even increased. But later, the numbers painted a different picture. The team dynamic suffered, and performance gradually declined. Nonetheless, the employees accused me of being wrong and not communicating enough. Is home office a blessing or a curse for companies?

My Assessment

The central question is how we can establish remote work where it is fundamentally possible. How do we find a balance between the preferences of employers and employees?

Company culture, that initial artificial intelligence of the workplace, plays an outstanding role in this.

Sometimes, traditional reflexes of executives and self-chosen exits of employees reveal discrepancies that could be addressed together—if one so wishes. This is undoubtedly exhausting, but dealing with home office is becoming increasingly decisive for competition.

Interestingly, such questions on social media often go hand in hand with an underlying mistrust towards employees. For instance, a recent similar discussion was 'illustrated' with a photo of an employee mowing the lawn in shorts. The view extends over the living room table with an abandoned laptop into the garden. For me, this is a form of communication that says more about the leadership mindset itself and the trust within the team than about the actual productivity in the home office. What numbers were the initial assessment based on, anyway?