Andreas Biel, Managing Partner, in the HRU Blog March 2025 – Critical comments on the abandonment of home office

Many companies are currently “whistling” their employees back into the office, and rightly so. Previous and sometimes extremely generous solutions are being abolished and/or simply no longer offered. This is absolutely right, and not just in my opinion. I will explain why this is the case below, but not exhaustively:

• Since the tiresome home office story was obviously born out of necessity – and was never really an issue before – this does not justify an automatically derived right of employees to work from home. The mistake many companies made at the time with coronavirus was simply that they communicated very poorly. If it had been communicated clearly and unambiguously at the time that this was a temporary matter, the current reactions would probably have been less severe. Then there would be no need to justify the return with tepid slogans today, but could simply announce that the special solution is now over.

• When “HR experts” in the Handelszeitung then accuse companies of “stone-age behavior” in abolishing the home office and that this is only due to incompetent superiors, this proves one thing above all: complete ignorance of the situation on the front line in the teams and proof that these “HR experts” have probably not worked on the front line for a long time, or never at all. Presumably, however, they have simply “forgotten”, in line with the situation, that they would never have advocated such solutions, let alone invented them, when they were still working for larger companies. Some of them are probably a little too high-minded and too far removed from reality😊.

• No employment contract in Switzerland – except perhaps for working from home, which has almost disappeared – was ever intended for home offices. This is proven by the difficult handling of the corresponding regulations alone. Which is absolutely right, because our Swiss work culture does not allow for this and, especially in dynamic times, employees need to be on site because communication is more direct and of higher quality. As an interim manager for many years, I have observed that working from home, especially in crisis situations, is definitely the worst of all the wrong solutions.

• Accusing a manager of being incompetent if he cannot lead his team with many home office employees is simply unfair. This is a gross generalization and does not really reflect the individual situation of each manager.

• I can’t confirm the myth that you are less distracted at home. Quite the opposite. The fact is that “strangely” many employees are not so easy to reach while working from home. What’s more, we hear increasingly absurd reasons: my child is ill, a mechanic is coming by, furniture is being delivered, etc. This is exactly the kind of thing home offices are not designed for.

• Working from home requires clear rules, sufficient space and much more. However, I have been observing for many years that most employees at home are far from being able to set up, let alone operate, truly capable home office logistics because their home environment simply does not allow for this.

• As already mentioned, there is also a lack of sustainable and modern regulations in many places. After all, home office is only one part of “mobile working”. I therefore recommend first introducing such regulations before talking about working from home. Incidentally, www.hr-unlimited.ch is very happy to help with advice and assistance and an enormous amount of experience, providing the company with practicable and attractive regulations. It is unacceptable for someone working from home to suddenly be working from their vacation apartment, or even worse, from abroad.

• We have already got to know the “HR experts”. If they then no longer want to have the equal rights of employees that have been cultivated and installed at great expense for years from one day to the next, in that it is apparently OK to allow some employees to work from home but not others, then I also feel very queasy. It also proves that such experts usually have no industry experience and are only theoretical. As an interim manager, I can confirm from years of experience that it’s not a good idea to let certain employees work on site while others “enjoy” themselves in the home office for days on end – that simply doesn’t work and should be avoided. The two-tier society will be back sooner than you would like. And the effort required to compensate for this is immense.

My conclusion: home office can be approved in individual cases, but must never become the rule. Working from home must be regulated as part of a modern mobile working policy and yes, training must also be provided. In addition, modern digital approval tools must be used to massively reduce the administrative effort involved. Working from home is not an entitlement for employees, nor is it a fringe benefit. There are very few employers where generous home office solutions make sense. So let’s all get back to work and implement our employment contracts as they were originally intended, namely with our employees on site at the employer’s premises.

HR Unlimited AG is an owner-managed company specializing in interim management based in Glattpark Opfikon, Switzerland, and has been offering interim assignments in Switzerland and abroad since2002. HR Unlimited AG is Andreas Biel, Tanja Biel, Balz Schlittler, Marcel Brader, Christian Hobi, Christoph Müller, Andreas Gnepf, Gramoz Lekaj, Benjamin Roth, Kadir Kirmizitas, Natalia Minnig, Fabio Feller, Gabriella Karch, Doris Liechti and a large, qualified pool of personally trusted interim managers.