Opinion
Anyone who is still working from home has not understood the meaning of work
Four years of home office 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 your colleagues stare back at you from the tiles on the screen, the beeping of the garbage disposal comes into the room through the open window, the coffee next to the keyboard is slowly getting cold. A day begins in the worst workplace in the world: the home office.
In 2020, the corona pandemic turned the office job into working from home. What was for a long time just a dream of commuters, office grumps and working time cheats became reality overnight. No more tensing up when the boss comes down the hall, no more unpleasant conversations at the coffee machine, no more invitations for a beer after work from a colleague who really wants to become your friend.
Oh, how beautiful it all could have been.
Home office is fundamentally wrong
When the pandemic was officially declared over in April 2023, a new way of working had long since been established. Between 2019 and 2022, the number of employees who worked exclusively from home quadrupled – from 674,000 to 2.3 million employees.
Your own four walls became a branch of the company, and your laptop became a window into the privacy of your colleagues. The conformist everyday office life became an extended period of free work, only interrupted by occasional video calls. It all felt illegitimate, forbidden and fundamentally wrong. And that’s exactly what it was and still is today.
The end of the home office is long overdue.
Work can be fulfilling
As attractive as the idea of seemingly uncontrolled home work is, the reality is that it is boring and annoying. Anyone who works from home has misunderstood what “work” can be in the best case scenario: not a hard grind that you sit through on the couch at home, but an activity that doesn’t necessarily have to be fulfilling, but can at least be satisfying.
This ideal cannot be achieved when working from home. Between laundry, cooking, cleaning the house – these much-praised benefits of working from home – there is no room for professional self-realization, no matter how banal and stupid it may seem to some employees.
Anyone who is a fan of working from home is also a fan of cold coffee.
starEditor Doris Schneyink wrote a reply to this text. You can read her article “Home office – the best invention since capitalism” here.
This article first appeared in July 2024.
Source: Stern
