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Legal overview of home office in France
How does France, for example, deal with the hybrid work model of the home office? This article offers a small insight into the neighbouring country.
In mid-March, we at basecom decided to switch to a home office working mode. We have been returning to the office for a few weeks now. To make this as safe and smooth as possible, we developed the desk sharing tool 1.50 Office. After we successfully tested the tool together with our Grow partners brandence and MSO Digital, our workplace booking system has now been published.
On 18th March 2020, we reported our experiences after one week of home office in a small blog post: More than 90 percent of our colleagues had switched to the home office with very short notice. This was undoubtedly a big challenge for all of us. That was more than five months ago. Almost half a year in which we learned a lot about the possibilities and opportunities, but also the disadvantages of remote work and home office. Our balance sheet from the months in the home office is positive. The wish of many of our employees to be able to come back to the office at least on some days has also shown us that being in the office is valuable not only from the company’s point of view, but also from the employee’s point of view. The office is not only the desk where you work. It is also the coffee kitchen, the conversations with colleagues, the joint lunch break, the short distances and direct communication. Ultimately, it is the people we work with every day that make a company what it is. Home office alone is therefore not a solution in the long run. But we are sure that it will play an important role in the future, and not only for us, in the context of new, more flexible working models.
Back to the office: flexible and at a distance
Our desk sharing tool 1.50 Office is also about flexibility. We developed the office booking platform in an agile project to quickly find a good solution for two challenges we faced due to the Corona situation. Firstly, after weeks of lockdown with the Corona measures now beginning to ease, many employees felt the need to work in the office more often again. We wanted to make that possible. On the other hand, it had to be ensured that there was enough distance between the workplaces, even if many colleagues were in the office at the same time. Since according to the Corona rules there has to be a minimum distance of 1.50 m between the individual workstations and the maximum occupancy of the individual rooms is also limited, we could not use the entire office space. So we had to find a way to make the best use of the available space.
1.50 Office combines a desk sharing model with a web interface to manage the available office spaces. Due to the limited number of spaces, not all employees can work in the office at the same time. However, as long as the Corona crisis continues, we assume that a relatively large part of the employees will continue to work in a home office anyway. Those who want to work in the office can easily book a free place for a certain day or a longer period online via the booking system 1.50 Office. To do so, the desired time and place simply have to be selected in a visual web interface. All bookings can be viewed, cancelled or extended in the user’s own account. In this way, all employees have the possibility to switch flexibly between home office and office and can rely on finding a free workplace without complications.