Every morning, Marie Noll receives a message from a bot asking whether she is working from home or in the office. If she selects “office” while remaining at home, an error message appears. The system uses her IP address to determine her location. When her employer introduced the daily check earlier this year, Noll initially dismissed the notification. Her manager soon summoned her to a meeting and instructed her to comply with a new requirement to work in the office three days a week. If necessary, she was told, she could briefly travel in, log on and return home at lunchtime.
Noll, 52, is a human resources officer at an international corporation. Her responsibilities include advertising vacancies, reviewing CVs, preparing employment contracts and issuing formal warnings. Most of these tasks can be performed remotely, as can the virtual coordination of the small department she manages. Since the pandemic, she had worked four days a week from a spare room at home and travelled to the office on the fifth. The new attendance requirement has forced her and her partner to reorganise their weekly routines. “I lose a lot of time in my life through commuting,” she says. She exercises less, collects her children from school less often and has to complete more household chores after work that she previously managed during breaks at home.
“I quickly noticed how more compulsory attendance had thrown our whole rhythm into disarray,” Noll says. She believes the policy reflects a lack of trust in employees. “I feel monitored,” she says, describing the arrangement as a form of disciplinary treatment. Despite opposing the change, she is responsible for enforcing it within her own team. Management said the objective was to strengthen cohesion and increase productivity, but when she requested statistics to support those claims, she received no answer.
Her experience reflects a wider shift among employers seeking to bring staff back to physical workplaces. Companies including Mercedes-Benz, Deutsche Bahn, SAP and Amazon have restricted remote working through fixed office days, in-person meetings, requirements for managers to monitor attendance and limits on working away from designated locations. Some have presented the changes as part of a drive to improve productivity and restore closer collaboration between colleagues.
However, Johanna Bath, a researcher specialising in hybrid working models at Reutlingen University, argues that the evidence does not necessarily support a general return to the office. According to Germany’s Federal Statistical Office, 24 per cent of all employees regularly work from home. Among those able to work remotely, 46 per cent do so on fewer than half their working days, while 24 per cent work exclusively from home. These proportions have remained broadly stable in recent years.
Bath studied whether companies become more productive when more employees work in offices rather than remotely. “The opposite can even be the case,” she says. Other studies, she adds, indicate that many employees can concentrate better at home and experience less exhaustion. Remote working can also create mental strain, particularly for people living alone who may experience social isolation and loneliness. Bath argues, however, that this concern applies primarily to those who never or rarely attend an office.
She also disputes the use of alleged working-time fraud as a justification for stricter attendance rules. “Studies show that this affects only a small percentage of people — so few that it is negligible,” she says. Employees can waste working time in offices too, whether through extended lunch breaks, booking holidays or making private telephone calls from individual rooms.
Employers have also defended office attendance as a means of strengthening workplace relationships. Deutsche Bahn’s executive board told employees in a letter that physical presence strengthened collaboration and cohesion. Mercedes said its measures were intended to put personal collaboration, direct exchange and team spirit back at the centre of working life. Bath agrees that regular contact between colleagues matters but says companies could arrange shared office days when particular projects require face-to-face cooperation, rather than impose rigid attendance quotas.
She suggests that another motive may be to reduce staffing without paying employees to leave. Restricting remote work could encourage those who depend on it to resign, she says. But the approach carries a risk: employers cannot control which employees depart and may lose valuable members of staff.
Noll has already seen that happen. Around the middle of the year, her manager emailed her about an employee who had not been attending the office often enough. Noll was required to reprimand him, although she describes him as committed, well organised and successful in completing his projects. “Nevertheless, I had to reprimand him because he was not in the office often enough,” she says. He felt patronised and monitored, reacted angrily and resigned a few weeks later.
Verena Balz, 45, an IT officer who has worked for a logistics company for 13 years, is also considering leaving. Since the pandemic, she had worked predominantly from home. Her employer introduced one compulsory office day a week in mid-2025, increasing this to three days from the middle of 2026. Two days are fixed, while she can choose the third. “For me, working in the office has no advantages,” she says. She now spends more time in a bare open-plan office with inferior equipment, frequently searching for a room to hold virtual calls with colleagues elsewhere in the country. Customer communication remains by email, telephone or video conference. Travelling by train costs her two hours each office day.
Balz says she feels less balanced, exercises less and sees friends less often. Hundreds of angry comments appeared on her company’s intranet when the attendance policy was announced, she says, more than on any previous post. An analysis by the employee-review platform Kununu, seen exclusively by Die Zeit, found that only 24 per cent of employees subject to strict office-attendance requirements were satisfied, compared with 62 per cent of those without compulsory attendance.
Balz says a colleague recently resigned because the new policy was incompatible with her family life and her two children. Another employee now commutes more than 100 kilometres a day after moving several years earlier on the assurance that permanent location-independent working would remain possible. Balz is particularly frustrated that the company had previously reduced office capacity, closed entire floors or sublet them, only to require employees to compete for the remaining desks. Even some compulsory meetings have proved unnecessary: conferences scheduled over the previous two weeks were cancelled, she says, and nobody missed them.
