Andreas Pfnür, Kyra Voll, Martin Christian Höcker und Yassien Bachtal’s working paper “Work from Home: From pandemic necessity to the concept of multi-locational work – an empirical study of employees’ experiences for the future of distributed workplace environments” is a research project supported by German Property Federation (ZIA) and Art Invest Real Estate. It aims at comparing the status quo of work from home, working in the office as well as a third-place location and analyzing how employees’ work success is generated in the different places. The data for this project is collected through an online survey of 1,136 German knowledge workers via SoSci Survey in January and February 2023.
A key finding of this project is the illustration of the gigantic scale of the changes that multi-local work is causing in the world of work and other areas of social life, such as transport and the environment, or in relation to social welfare. For employees, the freedom of mobile working has become indispensable. The project shows how each employee adapts individually to multi-local work and makes the best possible use of the work from home concept, offices and third places. In addition to the great social value, another key finding is that the new concept of multi-local working also has great economic potential, which, however, has not yet been fully realized.
The findings of this project indicate that changing the office space requirements of companies requires adjustments to the business models and strategies in the real estate industry. This project offers a first step to a new concept of the physical organization of work: multi-locality. The return of employees to company offices, the simultaneous continued use of work from home and the experimentation with third places of work are giving rise towards it.
The working paper can be accessed here: https://www.real-estate.bwl.tu-darmstadt.de/aktuelle_projekte/work_from_home/studie_2023/baufi24_main_3.en.jsp