The home office is with us again and still here! It is all the rage: in job interviews, candidates increasingly ask for or insist on this information - while many HR managers are reluctant to answer. I have noticed that this desire on the part of the employees is becoming a crucial new question in recruitment.

However, there were already problems with this in the past from the employers' side. The home office question can “poison” an introductory interview round. It can get tricky when employees asked whether hours spent on the way to work were to be credited.

Now the discussion has taken on a much larger scale. Company representatives enter this process rather cautiously, almost suspiciously, with a mixture of six of one, half a dozen of the other. On the one hand, the bosses are concerned about the health of their employees and their families. At the same time, managers and their HR departments are striving to keep work performance steady. They struggle to ensure that the work process is as "normal" as possible. Ultimately, the aim is to continue to offer services and products and to push ahead with projects. That is why many supervisors hope that the home office craze may soon come to an end.

Although many employees in home offices are currently performing at a high level, new challenges are increasing in boardrooms.

The following sticking points must be resolved at management level:

• How does management deal with employees who install new home office equipment without taking the company's IT infrastructure into account?
• How do you react to the increasing demands for compensation payments for home office equipment?
• What does a generally applicable, binding set of rules for recording working time in the home office look like?
• What framework conditions does a company set up so that employees are reachable in their home office?
• Which departments work from the home office, and how often?
• How do you ensure that teams can continue to meet physically?
• How can new employees be well integrated so that they can make contact despite their virtual working?

With questions like these, those responsible are walking a new kind of tightrope: when Novartis recently launched the "Workplace analytics” app, it was intended to help employees structure their everyday working in their home office. It was supposed to help with self-organisation. Well-intentioned, but sensitive at the same time: many critics understood the new app to be a new monitoring tool and questioned this indignantly.

Extra work pushes those responsible to their limits

Many managers are doing significantly more work because of these new sticking points and criticisms: under difficult conditions, they continue to be responsible for the results of their work. While distance working you must keep up team spirit and solidarity among employees. They must lead newly agile project teams in home offices and prove themselves in virtual leadership.

Important messages get lost

And this with unforeseeable consequences: I wonder, for example, what happens in the long run if we only really notice a fraction of the communication in video conferences? How do we understand or misunderstand each other when vocal and facial expressions are perceived in team meetings, but at the same time many non-verbal statements are missing? Research has shown that a large part of the effect occurs via non-verbal communication. Thus, important messages can demonstrably not be conveyed via video.

Home office increasingly considered a competitive factor

So, while companies are still struggling with the risks, challenges and extra work, more and more well-trained employees are demanding a home office in the long run. They appreciate the new freedoms associated with this and rely on personal responsibility. Of course, there are also employees who have difficulty with the home office because they feel isolated or seek more personal interaction. But I am increasingly hearing calls for generous home office regulations. Companies who can show it off therefore have a competitive advantage.

The downside of the new freedom

But watch out: employees may well have to pay a high price for their new freedoms.

Because the current development also brings new risks for employees:

• Some companies are considering whether to buy in some of the work externally in the future, rather than hiring permanent staff. Jobs may be lost as a result.
• Remote Office replaces home office: bosses and managers are wondering why shouldn’t they immediately move jobs abroad when the local employees are no longer present or do not want to be here anyway?
• Companies are considering whether to give up their expensive office spaces in prime inner-city locations. If highly prized meeting zones in open-plan offices are abolished, canteens and rooms for employee events will be lost, for example.

Wanted: more personal responsibility and discipline

Employees also pay a price when they work directly in their home office. In addition to the new freedoms, they will also have new obligations: employers and supervisors insist on checks and rely on measurable, agreed productivity. If employees want to be guided by results and do their work from home under their own responsibility, then they work independently. That means they also must be strict with themselves and regularly exercise discipline.

This is not easy in the long run. It takes a great deal of maturity and personal initiative to critically review one's own performance, to correct one's approach, if necessary, and to motivate oneself to have another go.

Goethe was probably also looking into the future when he once said, "He who does not command himself remains a servant forever."