The great study – in an interview with Dipl.-Psychologe Joachim E. Lask from WorkFamily-Institut

The home office has come into focus with the coronavirus pandemic. For companies, this is often the only way to process projects and orders at the present time. But how do companies and employees master the new challenge of home office? After all, work and private life suddenly find themselves under one roof?

What can employers do to prepare and support employees individually for home office so that work goals are achieved and employees remain healthy? Diplom-Psychologist Joachim E. Lask, born in 1962, father of five children, author, founder and director of the WorkFamily Institute in Darmstadt and Professor Dr. Eleonore Soei-Winkels at the FOM University of Applied Sciences for Business Psychology have conducted an extensive study on exactly this complex of topics, in which almost 500 participants have already shared their opinions and experiences. In an interview with Joachim E. Lask, we therefore talk about the advantages and disadvantages of home office as well as managing private and professional life under one roof.

DIGITAL FUTUREmag: Working from home is the order of the day. Mr. Lask, what was your main motivation for conducting a study on the subject of home office at this time?

Joachim E. Lask: “Order of the day…” is quite accurate. During the pandemic, we wanted to make our contribution by creating good knowledge on how employees and managers can remain productive and healthy in the home office. After all, our expertise as the WorkFamily Institute lies precisely in how employees can successfully manage the private (Family) and professional (Job) contexts and even use this experience productively. We call this Work-Life / Work-Family Enrichment.

DIGITAL FUTUREmag: Participating in the study requires high concentration for over 25 minutes. Nevertheless, nearly 500 participants, many of them managers, took part in the study. This already sets it apart from many comparable questionnaires and studies. What is the most important finding for you from this study?

Joachim E. Lask: First of all, our most valuable finding: Several participants gave us feedback along the lines of: “Just participating in the study gave me good impetus for better structuring my home office.” This, of course, makes us extremely happy at the WorkFamily Institute. Now to two key results of the study. (1) Our analyses clearly show: The active support of employees in transitioning to the home office by their manager is crucial. Unfortunately, this is not standard and especially newcomers to home office have received little support. Our analyses show significantly that with pre- and onboarding, productivity increases and employees’ health is well maintained.
(2) Accordingly, 3 out of 4 managers demand qualified training for home office onboarding. This is also reflected in the assessments of employees: More than 80 percent complain that their managers have not received any training for home office.

DIGITAL FUTUREmag: In the study, you also ask how managers view working from home and how they organize themselves and their employees. What can you say about this area of questions?

Joachim E. Lask: Managers have clearly recognized the benefits of working from home. On the one hand, they trust their employees to be just as productive at home as they are in the office (87 percent). On the other hand, they want to expand opportunities to work from home (84 percent). Yet there is still a huge gap between aspiration and reality: only 16 percent of managers say they have successfully onboarded employees to work from home.

DIGITAL FUTUREmag: What needs to improve in the onboarding process?

Joachim E. Lask: Well, when working from home, employees have the fridge, the bed, possibly the kids, and their partner right next door. It all depends on how home officers manage this situation. So we asked participants how they prioritize their roles as employees and private individuals under their own roof. Simplified, there are two types: (1) Segmenters want to clearly separate both roles. (2) Integrators allow both roles to overlap to a greater or lesser extent. The key point is that employees need to decide which role prioritization they want to live by. Only then can they communicate this, for example, to other people in the household. However, this conversation is missing between managers and employees. This leads to misplaced expectations or exaggerated skepticism—on the part of employees toward their managers. Confusion and conflicts lead to stress and, ultimately, poor work motivation. There is an urgent need for action here.

DIGITAL FUTUREmag: Is it more difficult for employees with children to concentrate on their work tasks at home?

Joachim E. Lask: Yes, it’s a multiple burden for parents who suddenly have to cope with it, especially during the pandemic (e.g., homeschooling). Yet parents do not report higher stress levels than employees without children. On the contrary: “being a parent” even seems to be an advantage for successfully working from home. This didn’t surprise us. Parents, for example, describe themselves as significantly more competent in negotiation, organization/planning, and cooperation—so-called home office skills. This result confirms the Work-Family Enrichment Theory, according to which parents learn skills in the family that they can use to their advantage in their jobs.

DIGITAL FUTUREmag: Which employees are coping well with the work-from-home situation and which are not?

Joachim E. Lask: We don’t have a simple answer to this. On the one hand, we can show how personality traits such as extraversion and conscientiousness have a direct influence. Moreover, it is clear that working from home is not something people are born with; it is learned through everyday experiences. What is crucial here is the willingness to develop the necessary home office skills (further). Finally, the influential factors—employee-manager relationship and corporate culture regarding the home office—play a decisive role in whether employees can cope with the home office situation.

DIGITAL FUTUREmag: And which skills are important for working from home?

Joachim E. Lask: Our analyses also reveal a differentiated pattern of results here: We asked participants from 15 home office skills to prioritize the five most important. Across all positions, participants agreed that self-management was among the top five home office skills, while perspective-taking was not. However, when we correlate the predefined skills with the outcomes, perspective-taking proves to be a key skill in the home office, whereas self-organization does not make it into the top five. What does this mean for future training? Subjective and objective needs in skill development must be considered in personnel development.

DIGITAL FUTUREmag: If you were to summarize all the results and findings of the study, would you recommend to CEOs and decision-makers in companies to push for more work being outsourced to the home office in the long term or not?

Joachim E. Lask: The Covid pandemic has demonstrated the high potential of working outside the company. This also entails a shift from presence orientation to results orientation, which is very welcome. Our study shows how important it is to actively support employees working from home, especially in the first days and weeks. Video conferences or attending online lectures have become commonplace at record speed. Working from home is currently a quality feature of modern work, but in the medium term, it is a necessary intermediate step toward New Work.

DIGITAL FUTUREmag: Thank you very much for this insightful interview and the associated findings.