Opinion
Four years of working from home is enough. German employees should go back to the offices, to the coffee machines and to the canteens. Because home is the worst office in the world.
The mask-like faces of colleagues stare at you from the tiles on the screen, the beeping of the garbage truck enters the room through the open window, the coffee next to the keyboard slowly gets cold. A day begins at the worst workplace in the world: the home office.
In 2020, the Corona pandemic turned office jobs into home working. What had long been just a dream of commuters, office-haters and time cheaters became a reality overnight. No more tensing up when the boss comes down the hall, no more awkward conversations at the coffee machine, no more invitations for an after-work beer from a colleague who really wants to become a friend.
Oh, how beautiful it all could have been.
Home office is fundamentally wrong
By the time the pandemic is officially declared over in April 2023, a new way of working will have long since become established. Between 2019 and 2022, the number of employees who worked exclusively from home quadrupled – from 674,000 to 2.3 million employees.
The company’s own four walls became a branch of the company, and the laptop became a window into the private sphere of colleagues. The conformist office routine became an extended phase of free work, only interrupted by occasional video calls. All of this felt impermissible, forbidden and fundamentally wrong. And that is exactly what it was and still is today.
The end of home office is long overdue.
Work can be fulfilling
As attractive as the idea of seemingly uncontrolled home working is, it is just as boring and annoying in reality. Anyone who works from home has misunderstood what “work” can be at its best: not a drudgery that you sit through on the couch at home, but an activity that may not necessarily be fulfilling, but can at least be satisfying.
This ideal cannot be achieved in a home office. Between doing laundry, cooking, cleaning the house – these much-praised advantages of working from home – there is no room for professional self-realization, no matter how banal and stupid it may seem to some employees.
If you are a fan of working from home, you are also a fan of cold coffee.
Source: Stern
