Last week I already reported on the dilemma of tracking hours and how we deal with it at #Teleconnect.
The discussion about the workplace is similarly interesting: until I returned from abroad, I never had a conversation in twenty years about whether you had to show up for work or not. It was simply a matter of course. Even if you were able to complete your specifications from home one day a week in the USA, you always made sure that you were online and available.
The conversations that take place here in Germany after coronavirus are different: How many days a week should employees be allowed to work from home and on which days? Let's write a policy that spells this out in detail so that employees can demand it! And in return, employers are making statements about this and think they have to ban working from home, even if it has worked for a long time: Everyone back to the office!
In my view, we are once again treating adults as if they were underage children. On the one hand, we entrust them with projects that, if not done properly, could jeopardize the company, on the other hand, we don't trust them enough to make the decision to go to the office themselves!
We at #Teleconnect are in the project business as product developers. Sometimes there is more to do, sometimes less. We expect our colleagues to do everything they can to make the project a success. This can also mean working on Saturdays or staying at the customer's hotel for a week.
To compensate for this required flexibility, we give our colleagues complete freedom to work from home as long as they put the needs of the project before their own interests. That means 100% home office if you want it! But it also means that, if the project requires it, they can work at our site for weeks at a time.
The result: 95% of our colleagues come to work every day, probably because they need our hardware lab to do their work!
There is no discussion about the right to work from home! And that's a good thing!
How do you feel about this? Do you think that employers should offer the right to work from home?