Banks in Germany are rapidly reducing their office space as more and more employees are working from home.

Industry representatives such as Deutsche Bank AG and BayernLB play a pioneering role in Europe.

Foreign competitors such as Credit Suisse, UBS and UniCredit have also announced that they will ultimately use less office space.

But only a few have become as specific as the banks in Germany:

BayernLB has signed a desk-sharing agreement with the works council that provides for 70 percent desks for 100 percent of the workforce from 2022, CEO Stephan Winkelmeier recently said in a Bloomberg interview.

Deutsche Bank is giving up several floors in one of its buildings in Hameln, as a spokeswoman said when asked.

DZ Bank is working on a new room concept for the bank, where the current 1.1 jobs per employee will soon become just 0.7, said CEO Thomas Ullrich in a Bloomberg interview.

Instead of six buildings, only one

BNP Paribas Germany only wants to provide jobs for 60 percent of its employees at its new headquarters in Frankfurt, said Germany boss Lutz Diederichs at a conference last month. HSBC Germany plans to occupy around 55 percent less office space in Düsseldorf at the end of the year than at the beginning of 2020 - instead of six buildings, HSBC will soon only be using one complex on Hansaallee, said a spokesman.

The reduction in office space was primarily triggered by the severe mobility restrictions during the Covid 19 pandemic, which forced many bank employees to work from home for a long time for the first time. In June, the proportion of employees who at least partially worked from home was a good 28 percent, according to an Ifo study published on Monday. Since there are hardly any problems with working from home, the banks have switched to making a longer-term strategy out of necessity.

Most institutes now have flexible working guidelines that allow many employees to work from home two or three days a week.

As a result, banks have increasingly switched from the fixed allocation of workstations to models in which employees choose a free desk when they come to the bank.

The reduction of office space promises the banks high savings, but is usually slow because leases run for a long time or early termination can result in high compensation payments.

In addition, many banks have only recently decided how they want to deal with the topic of home office in the future.

In some cases, however, the downsizing of the office space was planned before the pandemic.