As of: January 24, 2024, 4:49 a.m
By: Franziska Kaindl
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More and more companies want to lure their employees back to presence.
But do employees actually perform less when working from home?
The corona pandemic has caused many employees to work from home.
And they have learned to appreciate the advantages: 84 percent of German employees now want to work from home at least two days a week, as a study by management consultants
EY
from 2022 showed.
However, as restrictions end, more and more employers are demanding that their employees return to physical presence - reasons include better communication between employees and a stronger sense of belonging to the company.
According to a survey by the recruiting agency
Königsteiner Group
and
Stellenanzeigen.de
, 14 percent of employees even had their option to work from home completely removed.
Are employees actually less productive when working from home, as some companies fear?
Many employees no longer want to do without working from home.
However, employers often fear reduced productivity.
© Finn Winkler/dpa
Researchers in a recent study from the
Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco
find little evidence that the shift to remote or hybrid work has significantly slowed or increased companies' productivity growth.
This means that employees are neither more productive nor less productive when working from home than when they are present.
For their study, the scientists looked at 43 different industries in the USA - including the chemical industry, retail and the hotel and restaurant industry.
This also includes professions that are difficult to do from home.
They assessed the possibility of remote work based on the job mix of each industry and the proportion of jobs that can be completed remotely.
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“If remote work increases productivity to a significant extent, then it should improve productivity performance, especially in those industries where telework is easy to organize and widespread, such as:
B. in professional services, compared to the industries where tasks must be completed in person, such as.
B. in restaurants,” economist John Fernald and his co-authors wrote in the study.
However, they found only a small statistical connection between productivity and the frequency of working from home.
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In the USA, more than 60 percent of employees worked remotely at the height of the Corona crisis.
Before the pandemic it was only five percent.
In December 2023, the value had leveled off at around 30 percent - so the hybrid model is currently the preferred one.