My experience with different types of offices and home office

Good morning everybody here in my blog. Today I would like to share our experiences with doing home office since meanwhile unbelievable four consecutive months at our company Vulkan do Brasil (https://www.vulkan.com/en-us/holding/vulkan-companies/brazil) in Itatiba, Sao Paulo, Brazil, and I would also like to share some personal experiences with You upon all the different offices which I already had at all the different companies, where I have been working so far in different countries on different continents.

Since the ofical outbreak and spread of Covid-19 in Brazil during the middle of March, we have implemented several protection measures and rules within our company and in our factory.  Our "Covid-19 Committee" (VP Admin, VP Operations, HR & Special Projects Director and myself) meets every two days for half an hour online and follows all developments in our company and in Brazil and the rest of the world closely and takes all necessary corrective decisions. This works excellently since we started with it.

One of the first measures implemented at our factory in Itatiba and at our sales & engineering offices in Rio de Janeiro, Bogotá, Colombia, and Mexico City was to sent approximately 50 of our employees in the administrative, sales and engineering areas to work from their homes. Against all our initial doubts and fears, this worked fantastic from the first day on and until now. None of the major concerns which worried us, when we started with it, really came true. In the contrary - since the very beginning of our new home office routine, most of us are very satisfied with it and state very positive results for us as single private persons and also in our functions as employees for our company. 

Within one of our "Covid-19 Committee" meetings the idea came up, to make an enquiry about this very interesting and so important subject. With the help of an external consultancy an anonymous employee inquiry procedure was set up and all employees doing home office were invited to participate and asked to share their experiences and opinions. 

Approximately 85% of all our employees doing home office sine thye middle of March participated. The external consultancy summarized the inquiry result for us. We had asked them before, to give us the overal results of all employees to each of the 15 questions and to give us seperately the added up results only for the members of our "Key Players" group of employees (supervisors, managers, directors, VPs) because we wanted to find out, whether our Key Players saw things differently to how all employees see them. 

The results were very interesting and showed a very clear picture with regards to the perception of the new home office routine by our employees. There was practically no "gray zone" of answers. And - and this makes me very proud - there was practically no difference between the results of the inquiry answers by all our employees doing home office and our Key Players group. 

Here some of the summarized inquiry results:

90% of all inquiry participants find the new home office routine good or even very good

Only 6% of all inquiry participants do not like it.

100% of all Key Players find it good or even very good

26% of all inquiry participants suggest to continue with 5 days per week of home office even after the end ov Covid-19

65% of them suggest to continue with 3 days per week

8% of the Key Players suggest to continue with 5 days per week

73% of the Key Players suggest to continue with 3 days per week

94% of all inquiry participants and 93% of our Key Players find that our home office infrastructure incl. IT systems are functionning perfectly

94% of all participants and 92% of all Key Players find that the contact with their management, the continuous alignment in all questions which are relevant for their own work and the feedback by the management are perfect

100% of the participants and of the Key Players group find that our well established routinary leadership procedures and processes incl. all routine meetings are continuing perfectly

This is champagne for my soul. You can`t imagine how happy and proud I am because of this wonderful response from our employees. This clearly proofs that our wonderful internal cultural concepts of the "Swiss Clockwork" (I will present this in a future post) and "Swimmy" (see my post from July 17: https://klausfhepp.blogspot.com/2020/07/our-great-friend-helper-swimmy.html) work strongly.

During the above mentioned inquiry we also gave our employees space for mentioning comments and opinions and for suggestions and some of these were as follows:

- Much higher work productivity and lower spendings because of the now missing transfers from home to the company and back home from there again

- Much higher quality of live with more convenience in a favorable personal environment, flexibility and much more and more frequent contact with the familly

- Much higher work efficiency because all meetings have to be preagended and all participants need to prepare all subjects more properly

- Much higher dynamic and agility of our work processes

As negative aspects our employees mentioned the following points:

- Missing means for travelling, especially to our customers

- Missing personal, physical meetings and contact with the colleagues

- Missing opportunity to practice "Go & See" (I will share some own experiences with this very important and highly efficient management concept) 

And we alltogether agree and are conscious, that to do work from out of our home offices requires a very strong and continuous self control and discipline from all of us. 

This was basically, what I wanted to share with You today. I hope, You found it interesting and I am curious, whether some of You will share their own experiences and opinions about home office with us.

As You can see from the collage of fotos from my offices at the different companies and in the different countries where I have been working during my career, I have made large experience with all types of offices. Some were really luxury ones - like my beautiful office at Schwarzkopf & Henkel`s "La Toja" factory in La Coruna, Galicia Spain, and my office at BOS Automotive in Irapuato, Guanajuato, Mexico - and some were totally different - like my first open-plan office when I joined Henkel`s corporate engineering department in Düsseldorf, my construction container office and later-on my temporary office in the warehouse at Irapuato during the construction of our huge new plant. 

Like always in live, whether You are happy or not depends on the coincidence of multiple factors. A nice office alone does not make a shit job better for You. And if You like Your company and love Your job, You don`t mind if Your office has some deficiencies. Would You agree on that? 

Please enjoy the rest of this wonderful - at least here at my home in Vinhedo - sunday and prepare Your energies for tomorrows start of the new week.