“Control demotivates”
Maschmeyer counters the Trigema boss’s home office blasphemy
October 4, 2023, 10:50 a.m
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Home office is out of the question for Trigema boss Grupp. Then his employees could immediately register as unemployed, he said in an interview. This statement causes horror, for example among entrepreneur Maschmeyer. He believes: “The return of face-to-face culture must urgently be stopped.”
Trigema boss Wolfgang Grupp is facing a lot of headwind and ridicule for his home office blasphemy in the “Tagesspiegel”. Carsten Maschmeyer, among others, reacted with horror to the statements of the 81-year-old, who has run his textile company with 1,200 employees since 1969.
“If someone can work at home, they are unimportant. The more people have studied, the more they want to work from home. But with me they could then immediately register as unemployed because no one notices whether they work or not anyway,” had Grupp told the Berlin daily newspaper. During the Corona pandemic in Germany, working from home became normal for many areas of working life, at least temporarily.
Entrepreneur Maschmeyer reacted clearly angrily. The 64-year-old replied to Grupp in the “Bild” newspaper: “If you don’t trust someone to work at home, you shouldn’t have hired them in the first place.” Maschmeyer believes that some bosses’ prejudice that their employees are less productive when working from home is wrong: “But it’s not the time spent sitting at the desk that counts, but the result at the end! Control demotivates. Control leads to unproductivity.” What characterizes a “smart employer” is that they know how to do things without being present in the office: “Home can be a place for concentrated deep work phases, while the office is the hub for co-creation and co-working . That’s where the team spirit comes from!”
He therefore declared that he would not encourage the increasing calls from bosses to order their employees back to the offices. “The return of face-to-face culture must urgently be stopped. There is too much at stake.” He explained: “Working from home not only benefits employees, but also companies and society as a whole.”
Office space as living space?
The home office is also an important tool for counteracting the shortage of skilled workers, says Maschmeyer: “If it doesn’t actually matter whether the IT specialist is 8,000 kilometers or eight meters away, this opens up completely new opportunities for companies to attract the skilled workers they urgently need .” At the same time, working from home also makes sense for ecological reasons, argued Maschmeyer. Fewer commuters would create traffic – and “fewer desks would be needed overall and the need for office space will decrease.” The 64-year-old emphasized: “There is an urgent need for living space in the cities anyway. Here it is!”
According to a company survey by the IFO Institute from August 2023, a quarter of Germans still work partly from home. Of course, this varies massively depending on the industry. That wouldn’t work for his 700 sewers, says Grupp, whose company has annual sales of more than 100 million euros. “But that’s also out of the question for the 38 employees in the administration. I’m in the company every day and I need my senior people on site, every day. That speeds up decisions. I make decisions quickly, with me everyone gets something straight away an answer.”