The working-from-home versus office debate has a way to run

We've known Professor Andreas Pfnür of the prestigious Technische Universität Darmstadt for many years now, and we keep a beady eye out for the studies he publishes. That's because he often takes an assertion that has gained currency in public discourse, and then proceeds to test it - scientifically - for veracity. In the past, he's punctured holes in several shibboleths by scrutinising them scientifically - the result is often surprising.

Prof. Pfnür and his research team have recently been examining the question of Working from Home (WFH) and asking who are the winners, and who the losers. In their thematically broad-based survey, Pfnür's own department, Real Estate and Construction Management teamed up with the boffins at the TU Darmstadt's Department of Marketing and Human Resource Management, set about surveying office workers across Germany shortly after the onset of the first lockdown, a year ago, when the phenomenenon of widescale working from home first took root.

The researchers asked a series of questions - How and where do people work at home? How do employees perceive working at home? How productive is home office work and what determines its success? Over a series of three waves of surveying, a universe of 952 employees were questioned in June, August and October 2020.

The results of the survey paint a nuanced, differentiated view, in which there is a wide gap between the reality of working from home and its perception in society. Even before the pandemic, many more people had already been working from than was widely assumed. And - the extent to which knowledge work can be really done from home is far lower than expected. More than a third of respondents admitted that they were less productive working at home than in the office. This last fact seemed to become clearer to respondents over the course of the year, in proportion to the amount of experience they actually had with working from home.

The most important cause of this has to do with where people actually work. Their specific home situation was the key determinant in the success of their actual productivity. "How people actually live says a great deal about whether they can successfully work from home", says Pfnür. "Their specific housing environment is more meaningful to the result than the type of work they do or the number of children at home. Frankly, we hadn't fully expected that to be the case." In other words, those who had the highest degree of overall satisfaction with their home living arrangements, including space, location and general amenities, the more satisfied and productive they were from their home office.

In addition to a good domestic situation, the researchers identified other factors that were associated with favourable productivity from home working. In particular, complex and multifaceted tasks involving a high degree of autonomy were associated with successful outcome from working from home. Older, higher-earning and professionally experienced employees worked more successfully, as did full-time employees compared to part-time employees. Singles obviously found it particularly difficult to work from home. Isolation, as well as career development, played a role here.

"Direct social interaction with colleagues, the opportunity to learn from older employees and career opportunities are less pronounced in the home office," said Pfnür. "Accordingly, a feeling of personal identification with the job falls away for younger employees, and this affects overall life satisfaction."

The study highlights how not all forms of office work are suited to be carried out from a home office, and that the traditional office will continue to play a role. However, used correctly and under the right conditions - such as better infrastructure and it being a voluntary decision to work from home - the home officer route offers numerous opportunities to further improve the individual success of individuals with their work in the future. 

But Pfnür warned: "Without an active change process, the risks of work-from-home, which the empirical data in our study reveals, threaten to get out of hand." A home-office-based work environment could result in social dislocation for many unless the public sector and employers take active measures to control and manage it, he said. 

"Home office offers the risk of creating a new split between officer workers in what would be a dual-class society," Pfnür said. On the one hand there would be employees who could work extensively at home because they could do so in comfort or because their jobs were suitably attractive. On the other would be people who would be less successful in worse conditions in the home office or would be exposed to addtitional burdens from working from home. "Home office could very well end up becoming a status symbol marking out the winners in the new worlds of work."

The findings of the study have important implications for employers, policymakers, the real estate industry and urban planners, said Pfnür, for which he and his team of TU researchers are currently developing recommendations. In addition, data from the international arena will also be evaluated.

REFIRE: We'll be interested to see what comes out of this. Our own view is that, in the long term, there may indeed be two classes of home office worker and it may partly come about as Prof. Pfnür forecasts.

But we think there is another whole side to this story, and that effects the younger staff in any organisation. A whole cohort of white-collar workers, more driven by notions of work-life balance than personal career ambition, are likely to want to see, and be seen, in the head office, where the upper echelons of management in their businesses reside. The most thrusting and ambitious employees will actively seek out visibility and a physical presence close to the movers and shakers in the firm, and will eschew the home office option where they can in favour of advancement. 

Much too will depend on the technology that becomes available in the coming years to stay in touch with the office. It's not always just a choice of office or home. There's also the 'on the road' variant for customer-facing staff, which many were practicing even before the pandemic. Change is here, in any event.