We are back in the home office. For me personally, this is not a new experience, because after the birth of my daughter more than 20 years ago, I already worked for my former employer for two years exclusively from home. At that time still a rather exotic model, with not comparable working conditions. The alternative would have been parental leave, and I am still grateful to my supervisor for preventing this. In these two years I worked on a project that did not require frequent coordination within the team.
Today there are much better tools for virtual collaboration, so there were hardly any delays in ongoing projects during the pandemic. This also makes voices louder to expand home office as a working model. The Pros and Cons are currently being exchanged in the current discussion.
One aspect is neglected in my view: how innovative is a virtually cooperating team?
Innovation is driven by the (sometimes hard) clash of ideas, abilities, points of view, opposites, contradictions, which cannot be avoided. Competition, tension, ambitious goals additionally fuel innovation.
As long as we do not have an answer as to how we want to shape innovation in virtual collaboration, we should not send innovation teams to the home office or bring them back as soon as possible. Once a lead has been lost, it is difficult to make up for it.
Yours, Christine Deininger
PS: If you want to know more about the new working conditions in engineering, please contact us.