Since the global pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, working from home has become firmly established. Of course, working from a home office for individual employees had long been known. However, it was far from becoming standard practice. As recently as 2016, Marissa Mayer ordered Yahoo’s workforce to be present in the office — as CEO of an internet icon from which one might expect innovative, digitally supported working practices. The same standard rule applied at many other companies, whether in the tech sector or not. At most, field staff or parts of the IT department were regularly absent from the office.
From today’s perspective, that is hard to comprehend. What began as an isolated form of organisation became, out of necessity during the crisis, a mass phenomenon — and has left its positive mark. Everywhere, people have realised: it works! The culture of physical presence is not always the decisive factor for creative peak performance or even for routine tasks. So everything is fine?
Not quite — because the culture of physical presence undeniably has its advantages too. People get to know each other personally and share large parts of their professional daily life. This inevitably creates a closeness which, ideally, significantly increases the productivity and innovativeness of a company. In the worst case, however, it harbours considerable potential for conflict, though the advantages are likely to outweigh the disadvantages.
It is within this culture of physical presence that the major recent management trends have emerged, including in particular:
- Lean Management
- Resilience
- Open-plan offices / Open Space
- Agility
and their derived specialised offshoots. The advantages of these methods and schools of thought are by now self-evident and are no longer questioned. The home office, however, brings entirely new challenges.
Any company or unit that wishes to integrate working from home more extensively into its operational processes must ultimately build a hybrid organisation. Because not all tasks will be performable from home in the future either. Furthermore, not every employee will remain enthusiastic about working from home on a permanent basis.
Working from home requires discipline — and not everyone has it. After all, most management methods to date have been developed within a culture of physical presence and are supported by corresponding rituals. The daily stand-up in agile working is a typical example. Hybrid organisations therefore need to find their own, entirely new solutions here.
Organisational Rules
- Maintain uniform technical equipment
There is still often a proliferation of different IT set-ups, particularly when employees partly use their own devices. Only when everyone uses the same software is maximum efficiency and data security guaranteed. Also ensure sufficient bandwidth and capacity wherever you have the ability to influence this.
- Keep data and documents digitally accessible
Much of this is already standard practice, but there are still breaks in the media chain. These must become the absolute exception, and even in unavoidable individual cases (e.g. prototypes, presentation objects, renderings, etc.), every team member must be given the best possible access to view them.
- Standardise digital storage locations
A hybrid organisation only functions if all authorised persons can access the relevant data and information simultaneously. The quick trip to the neighbouring office is no longer practicable. Digitally based knowledge management becomes a prerequisite for work.
- Introduce scheduling discipline
Particularly highly interactive teams — for example those working agilely with Scrum — must ritualise their digital interaction just as much as their physical presence in the office. When teams organise themselves, the use of uniform software and organisational infrastructure becomes indispensable.
Requirements for Managers
- Place a high degree of trust in employees
Managers with a tendency towards distrust often find the hybrid organisation uncomfortable. The fact is: working from home mostly means a loss of control — but only in relation to physical presence, not to work performance! Good managers find correspondingly robust metrics to assess the results of their employees during home office phases as well.
- Assess employees’ suitability
Who is suited to working from home more extensively, and who is not? In cases of doubt, managers must determine the relevant aptitudes and resilience of their team members through a professional evaluation, ideally with the support of the HR department.
- Take on board employees’ wishes
Alongside aptitudes, the wishes of the team also play a decisive role. Someone who considers themselves well suited to the home office may in practice only be so under certain conditions. Flexibility in terms of time — which days are spent on-site and which remotely — or spatial circumstances at home would be typical factors here.
- Optimise working conditions in the home office
The legislator has already set out requirements in this area. The basic principle applies: permanent work from the kitchen table or balcony rarely functions in practice.
- Avoid work excesses
Some team members may actually work more, not less, when in the home office. Managers should make clear from the outset that permanent availability is not required (see also the point on “scheduling discipline”).
- Explain inequalities
In hybrid organisations, there are employees who, by the very nature of their role, have less flexibility and may not be able to work from home at all. This harbours potential for conflict, which the manager must defuse through transparent explanations and, where appropriate, further compensatory measures.
- Assess performance fairly and based on results
In hybrid organisations, classic performance evaluation parameters are only partially effective, as the emphasis is considerably more on work results. Drawing conclusions from attendance behaviour is only partially, and sometimes not at all, possible. A new understanding of performance assessment is required.
Organic Pitfalls and Prerequisites
Since 2010, we have been conducting regular studies on the organic development of companies. From this, a compendium of factors has emerged that significantly influence the functioning of a hybrid organisation. This is less about absolute truths and more about sensitivity to cultural-organisational factors and their ideal configuration for one’s own company. The following factors with their guiding questions are presented here as examples:
Goal Management
—► Do we have clear, realistic, and measurable goals that are aligned with our strategy? Assignment of responsibility —► Is responsibility clearly assigned within our organisation and is it accepted by those concerned? Communication
—► Are our communication channels effective, and is our personal as well as company-wide communication style positive and motivating? Capacity for trust
—► Do we give our employees sufficient freedom, or do we exercise too much control and demand too much reassurance? Customer engagement
—► Are we sufficiently customer-oriented, do we recognise important customer suggestions and do we respond to them quickly?
The Organic Square
Differences between large corporations and SMEs
The typical, well-managed, and growing SME aims for a higher degree of organisation in order to manage risk and improve efficiency, but wishes to retain its practised spirit of cooperation.
The typical well-managed large corporation, on the other hand, wishes to break up what it perceives as overly rigid structures and regulations in many areas and to become more dynamic and entrepreneurial. Both types of company are ultimately striving for the same ideal state — they are aiming for the organic ideal point in grid square 2.
The successful hybrid organisation must not jeopardise the organic ideal point, but must on the contrary support its achievement or maintenance. The integration of agile elements through to full Scrum implementation.
Hybrid organisations with a high proportion of digital communication and data exchange are subject to specific data protection regulations. Working from home harbours risks for the confidentiality, integrity, and possibly also the availability of personal data. Furthermore, the threat of data theft for industrial espionage is very real. This gives rise to corresponding requirements for data management.
Entrepreneurs must therefore, in addition to clear employment law requirements for the home office, introduce data protection measures that comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Violations of data protection guidelines can result in significant fines for the employer. These risks are to be addressed in accordance with Art. 32 GDPR, Art. 24(1) GDPR, and Art. 5(1)(f) GDPR by implementing technical and organisational measures that exclude or minimise these risks.
In order to prevent third parties from gaining access to personal data through business documents, the company should also establish the data protection agreement for work carried out from the home workplace. At the latest with the introduction of the GDPR in May 2018, data protection in Europe was tightened, and the heavy fines imposed in the same year demonstrate that governments are consistently enforcing data protection.
When planning the workplace at home, the data protection officer should therefore be involved at an early stage and the employee should be informed of the protective measures via a home office agreement.
Data Protection Requirements
What exactly is personal data?
The most important question is first whether personal data is processed in the workplace at all.
If no personal data is processed, the guidelines of the GDPR do not need to be taken into account. Art. 4 GDPR stipulates when personal data is involved and defines the term as follows: “Personal data means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person, or information that makes a person identifiable.” Examples of personal data include name, address, telephone numbers, credit card numbers, vehicle registration plates, account details, personnel numbers, online data such as IP address or location data, nationality, or religious affiliation.
In the home office, the employer bears data protection responsibility. The following points (non-exhaustive) should therefore be observed. The rule here is: the more sensitive and worthy of protection the personal data, the stronger the protection must be:
- The home office should be a separate, lockable room.
- Business documents should be stored in a lockable cabinet.
- IT equipment provided for professional use should not be used for private purposes.
- The hard drive of the PC or laptop should be encrypted, as should external storage media such as USB sticks.
- The operating system must be protected with a password.
- Electronic data transmission (e.g. email) must be encrypted in accordance with the current state of the art.
- If spouses, children, or third parties (e.g. in a shared flat) live under the same roof, the computer should be locked even when left briefly.
- Business emails must not be forwarded to private email inboxes.
- A concept for handling and destroying sensitive documents and printouts must be in place.
- Access must be granted to the employer and the competent data protection authority in individual cases for inspection purposes.
When processing special categories of personal data, the legal consequences of § 42a BDSG must always be borne in mind when setting up a home workplace. These can be triggered by a loss of data and may lead, among other things, to a duty to inform the competent supervisory authority. If the home workplace is designed in a manner that addresses the above-mentioned and other individually arising requirements — i.e. if a legally compliant concept is in place — there are no objections from a data protection perspective.