Why I Love Home Office

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2025 03 02 head

The Corona pandemic forced many companies to allow their employees to work from home. It was the first time that our culture accepted remote work as a valid option for most of the employees.

The major surprise for traditional managers was that remote work was not only possible but also more productive.

The current effort to bring employees back to the office is a mistake. Companies forcing employees back to the office will lose their best employees.

Knowledge workers can choose their company in the modern working world.

Workplace

I have a dedicated desk in a quiet room for working professionally at home. The desk height is adjustable, and I can switch between sitting and standing. The chair is ergonomic and supports my back.

The display is a 28-inch 4k monitor. A pleasure for my eyes. This is a better display than the ones I got in almost all customer offices I work for. I have a full-size keyboard and a mouse.

I tried working with two displays, but I never hooked up to this mode. I use the notebook display as a monitoring and logging display, and the external display for development activities.

Modern chat and video conferencing tools optimally support my communication with my team. You should buy a professional headset for your conference calls. Use a high-quality webcam so that your team can see you clearly.

All our development for products is done on GitHub. We have a git repository, a continuous integration and delivery pipeline, and an agile product board. Deployments in production are manually triggered through a command line interface.

Documentation is done in Asciidoc and stored in the git repository. The content is published as a static website.

Technical books are available as ebooks.

I can focus on my work without interruptions and immerse myself in complex development tasks. I am more productive than in the office due to the lack of interruptions.

Most of my technical training and continuous learning are done online. The quality of online training and conferences is excellent.

Office Time

I regularly meet with my team and customers onsite. The two days in the office are used for these meetings and for team building. This time is more than enough for these activities.

We put effort to eliminate all unnecessary meetings. General information is shared in written form through chat channels. Synchronization on initiatives and projects is done through transparent dashboards.

Meetings are used to discuss complex topics, identify potential solutions, and make decisions.

Office time is also nice to have a coffee with colleagues and to discuss non-work-related topics.

Be honest. In a well-run digital development I have seldom big or urgent problems.

Gains

My commute time is around one hour each way. Assuming I work three days a week from home, I save 6 hours of commuting time per week or around 270 hours per year in commuting time. I have 270 hours more time for my family. I can support my daughters in their homework and school projects.

The quality of life gains are tremendous. Better is the fact that the company has a more productive collaborator and additionally saves money on office space. It is a real win-win situation.