Around the world, many companies are now urging their employees to return to the office on a more regular basis. They justify this choice by arguing that working from home is detrimental to productivity. In Germany, however, this line of argument might fail to make headway, since the country’s employers seem to take a more positive view of WFH productivity.
The majority of German companies believe that the productivity level of remote workers is equivalent to that of in-office workers, according to a survey* by the Ifo Institute. In fact, 60.1% of them believe that their employees are just as efficient working remotely as they are in the office. Only 31.6% of those questioned by the institute believe that workers would be more productive if they worked solely in the office.
However, there are slight disparities across professional sectors. Employers in the wholesale trade, for example, are particularly inclined to think that their workers would benefit from coming into the office full-time. Nearly 40% of them think that they would be more productive with this type of work organisation. Similarly, 32.7% of construction firms think that full-time on-site working would increase productivity.
Business leaders in favor of in-office working believe that face-to-face meetings are synonymous with productivity gains for employees. A significant proportion of them (39%) estimate this increase at between 10% and 20%. They think that is mainly due to better coordination and communication between teams when they are brought together in the same place (87%). Coming into the office every day also facilitates internal knowledge sharing and transmission (77%), as well as team management (51.8%). Another advantage they envisage is that on-site working presents fewer distractions to employees.
One WFH day per week
Unsurprisingly, employers in favor of remote working don’t agree. Two-thirds of those surveyed (64.5%) claim that workers are less distracted when working from home, as they are not exposed to the hubbub inherent to office life, especially in open-plan set-ups. These companies believe that workers are more effective in their missions thanks to the organisational flexibility offered by remote working (68.9%). They also believe that workers are more satisfied with their professional lives (64%), and that they maintain a better work-life balance (59.5%). All these advantages lead them to believe that a return to the office full-time would be detrimental to working people’s productivity. According to their estimates, these potential losses could range from 5 to 20%.
Contrasting though they may be, the findings of this survey show just how far remote working has progressed in German workplace culture. In fact, Germany is now one of the countries with the highest working from home levels. On average, Germans enjoy one day of remote work per week, according to research by the Ifo Institute and Econpol Europe, based on a sample of 42,400 respondents in 34 industrialised countries. That’s on par with workers in the Netherlands, Finland and New Zealand.
Against this backdrop, German workers are unlikely to be expected to forego the advantages offered by teleworking, especially if they have the backing of their employers. “The majority’s positive experience with productivity is an important reason why working from home has become established in many German companies,” says Ifo researcher Mathias Dolls in a statement.
*The Ifo Institute surveyed 9,000 German companies in August 2023. – AFP Relaxnews
