First studies about digitization, home-office and collaboration released by DAK and FIT

The Corona crisis has suddenly made the relevance of digitization even clearer. Millions of workers had to stay at home. Digital forms of work and home offices suddenly became the norm in many companies. The health insurance agency DAK in Germany made a study with more than 7500 attendees about home-office, digitization at work and health during the crises. And the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied IT released a study about home-office and remote work with 2000 attendees.

satisfaction over time

After month in home office employees are getting on even better with the home office than before. According to the FIT study 79% of women and 85% of men were satisfied in the home-office. The satisfaction of both team members and managers has increased further and now stands at 90%. In addition, individual performance and team performance are now rated as better. Factors that were initially perceived as negative have been partially overcome. This applies equally to all sectors, with the IT sector showing the highest level of satisfaction due to its affinity for digital solutions. This is followed by the financial sector and the manufacturing / processing industry.

“Not only has satisfaction increased. Individual performance and team performance are now also better assessed. However, team performance is rated lower than individual performance. This means that individual work works better in the home office than team work. In the case of team performance, the first evaluation had shown an even more divided picture. The decisive factors were the accessibility of colleagues and problems with technical equipment. However, these obstacles seem to have been largely overcome,” says Prof. Wolfgang Prinz, Deputy Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT.

For example, many different communication tools were still being tested in the first home office exploration phase. Therefore, the use of too many different communication media was also perceived as negative. In the meantime, the multitude of tools does not seem to be a problem anymore, and conventions for appropriate use have been found.

According to the evaluation results, the reasons for the increased performance and satisfaction are very likely to be that the separation of professional and private life is increasingly less missed. One factor here is probably also the opening of schools, which makes it easier to keep a regular budget.

There are, however, still negative aspects. Social contacts are the most frequently missed. In response to the question “What is missing in the home office?”, the respondents said that personal (85%) and professional exchange (66%) was missing. Coffee breaks and lunch (each around 60%) and joint creative sessions (just under 60%) are also missing. About 20% of those surveyed missed the way to work. This is initially surprising, but is probably due to the fact that the way to work is also used for relaxing things like reading or listening to the radio.

Increase of telefon and video conferences

All these results confirmes the study of DAK, but they are going further. They figured out that 50% on average of companies are greatly expanding their digital forms of work and their digital processes. The insurance and financial sector increases the most: 80%.

great expand of digital forms of work and digital processes in german companies and industry´s sectors

Sources (both in german):

www.fit4homeoffice.de

www.dak.de/dak/download/folien-2295280.pdf

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