The question of how much home office is left after the corona pandemic worries many.
Federal Labor Minister Hubertus Heil would like to prescribe that all companies must allow their employees to work from home.
The Verdi union wants to enforce a right to stay at home for all bank employees in collective bargaining.
But while others are still brooding and negotiating, facts are already being created in many banks. Together with their employees, they negotiate what appears to be sensible and feasible for the respective institute. In the end, solutions emerge from which both sides benefit: For many employees, it should be much easier to combine family and work if they do not have to commute to the office at least a few days a week. The banks believe that there will be considerable cost savings if they have to keep less office space in the expensive financial metropolises.
The first examples of such agreements show that in a free market economy, the state does not have to decide what lessons companies should learn from the pandemic. How well the new world of work works in practice remains to be seen, however. According to the reading of the banks, anyone who is no longer in the office from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. can no longer rely on a desk being reserved for them five days a week. The flexibility on the one hand leads to less reliability on the other. That too is not for everyone.