Tough home office announcements from companies – why do they do that?

Presence work in the office is causing trouble at two large German companies: Deutsche Bank and Otto are significantly tightening the rules for home offices – to the frustration of many employees. At Otto, they want to try out a test phase with 50 percent attendance starting in January. The announcement is said to have immediately caused dissatisfaction on the intranet.

Deutsche Bank is now implementing the tightening of its rules announced in February: from 2025, employees will be allowed to work remotely for a maximum of two days, and managers will only be allowed to work one day. Attendance is mandatory for the remaining four or five days. Two weeks of home office in a row are allowed once a year. The home office limit is therefore 40 percent of working hours plus six days. The “Handelsblatt” first reported.

The bank argues that there are too many vacant properties and the desire for better utilization of office space – including on Mondays and Fridays. Employees criticized the company’s inflexibility and referred to Commerzbank, for example, which was more open.

“Deutsche Bank is currently arguing primarily with corporate interests,” says executive coach Teresa Stockmeyer. In her work, she ensures that teams can work better together. From an economic perspective, Deutsche Bank’s move is perhaps understandable. “For employees who work a lot in the home office, this wish initially has many disadvantages.”

She often hears that people can’t work as well in the office because there aren’t enough workstations and meeting rooms, because the noise level is high and they sit in meetings as much as they do at home. However, they would not have any interaction with colleagues who are still in the office – the actual motivation for face-to-face work.

According to reports from the Handelsblatt, bank employees’ reactions to the announcement revolved around exactly these topics. In total there were over 1,300 comments, most of them negative. This is what employees complained aboutAmong other things, the bank has already reduced its office space so significantly that it is not easy to find a decent workplace in the office. Others were annoyed by the across-the-board increase in compulsory attendance because their teams were spread out anyway and it was therefore impossible to meet all of their colleagues in the office.

The home office dispute at Deutsche Bank is part of several announcements by companies that they will tighten the adjustment screws on home working in the future: Amazon will completely ban its employees from working from home from the new year. At SAP, the works council even went to court because of what it considered to be too strict rules. The result: SAP employees are now allowed to continue working remotely for two days.

Exceptions “for personal reasons” are still permitted at Deutsche Bank after consultation with superiors. There is also a transitional arrangement for employees who have previously worked 60 percent of the time from home: they receive an additional twelve flexible home office days. From 2026, the same rules will apply to everyone. Abroad, where the works councils do not have to agree, the 40 percent rule was immediately enforced.

If you want your employees to come to the office regularly, you have to offset the disadvantages with a good working environment and good materials, says Stockemeyer Capital. It’s also about the way of communication: What added value does more presence have for whom?

“If employees have the feeling that they are heard and seen more when they are in the office, they will certainly have much less of a problem with being asked about work progress and results,” says Stockmeyer with regard to the topic of control and productivity.

From her point of view, a first important step to promote exchange is to reduce meetings. “Or you can organize physical, moderated meeting formats such as workshops, creative and strategy sessions in which you work together on ideas and measures in a structured manner,” she says. “At the end there must be results that make it worth coming together physically.” In addition to formal meetings, informal formats such as monthly team lunches, “blind lunch dates” or “walk and talk meetings” could be additional incentives to encourage people to come to the office.

What is particularly important in all of this is that managers must be role models and be approachable and available to the team on attendance days.