New study: Does the home office lead to less engagement?

The home office has become a common form of work since the corona pandemic.

But many business leaders are currently thinking about how to get their office workers back to work more locally.

The idea behind this is often that, above all, presence ensures that employees do their utmost for their company.

But is that even true? Two researchers have now investigated how the home office affects the famous “commitment” of employees, that is, on emotional attachment, identification and engagement. And they have found that the opportunity to work from home, at least temporarily, increases identification with the company. But especially if the employees do not have the impression that work and leisure are blurring. If employees experience their work and leisure time as unbounded, the willingness to get involved with the employer decreases.

For these results, Yvonne Lott from the union-related Institute for Economic and Social Sciences (WSI) of the Hans Böckler Foundation and Anja Abendroth from Bielefeld University evaluated survey data from the Linked Personal Panel of the Institute for Employment Research.

They used a wave of surveys from the pre-Corona period.

In this way, you can rule out pandemic-related effects.

The results are representative for companies in Germany with more than 50 employees.

Hardly any loss of productivity

Around half of those employees who were working from home at the time of the 2014/2015 survey said that working from home had improved their work-life balance. The other half said just the opposite. According to the researchers, there is a connection between fairness in work relationships, for example treatment that is perceived as fair by the superior, and a positive feeling of working from home. A lack of fairness, on the other hand, means that the home office is often perceived as delimiting, i.e. the lack of separation between work and private life is perceived as stressful.

Overall, employees working from home (at times) answered questions about identifying with the employer more frequently than employees working exclusively in attendance. Such statements about commitment were, for example, “This company has significant personal value to me” or “I regard the company's problems as my own”.

The results are in line with other studies that looked at the productivity of employees working from home.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering (IAO) and the German Society for Personnel Management (DGFP) found out in a survey of around 500 executives during the Corona period: During the lockdown and increased home office work, there were only very few Company lost productivity.

More than half of the bosses said that employee performance had remained the same and more than 30 percent reported that productivity had actually increased.

Only 0.5 percent felt severe restrictions.