Employees: 62 percent demand permanent home office.

• Survey of 1,000 employees in Austria
• What people want from the "working world of the future" after corona

Vienna, September 17, 2020 - The majority of employees in Austria would like their employer to allow them to work from home permanently until there is a COVID-19 vaccine. At the same time, more freedom to make decisions and the desire to manage employees remotely online are also very popular. These are the findings of the Kapsch Group's "Workplace of the future in the digital world" study. A market research institute surveyed 1,000 employees for the study.

The survey results show that employees in Austria already have very specific ideas about a new corporate culture: 77% consider it important to very important in the digital age to manage home office employees remotely in online teams. 83% would like to make organizational structures more flexible, for example by eliminating departmental thinking. In addition, 89 percent advocate more freedom to make decisions.

Technology & leadership in the home office.

"During the coronavirus lockdown phase, we temporarily allowed almost all of our 6,500 employees in 40 countries to work from home," says Daniel Rutter, Vice President Human Resources at Kapsch Group. "Technically, we were generally prepared for such a scenario. As a digital company, we had already learned how teams work best online across national borders."

"During the crisis, we managed to provide all employees with the necessary hardware - although we had to upgrade some of it," reports Daniel Rutter. "The in-house support team also resolved technical problems, for example with video conferencing. Also very important for a successful transition to working from home: managing purely virtual teams requires new management methods, which we were able to adopt from our international experience."

Leadership with Objectives & Key Results (OKR)

Managing employees remotely means turning away from traditional management methods. The ongoing monitoring of physical presence, working hours and progress is no longer necessary. Supervision by the manager is replaced by a bottom-up approach in which the entire team agrees quarterly targets online for all to see. The agreed "objectives" are prepared in a way that is understandable for all participants and made measurable with defined "key results". This management method, known as Objectives & Key Results (OKR), originates from IT companies in Silicon Valley and has been tried and tested in digital companies for years.

Combining the best of the working worlds.

"Managers no longer have to look over the shoulder of every single employee to keep up to date," says Daniel Rutter. "There is also a new transparency across departmental boundaries. However, it is important to create a healthy mix of old and new working environments. If you only work from home, you miss the chance conversations with colleagues in the coffee kitchen. These are needed to develop new ideas and a bond with the company. Therefore, analog rituals should also be made possible in hybrid workplaces. Ultimately, the aim is to combine the best of both worlds."

Employees in Austria rely on working from home and more flexible working structures.

About the survey.

For the "Workplace of the future in the digital world" survey, a market research institute conducted a representative survey of 1,000 employees in Austria on behalf of the digital company Kapsch Group. The results of the field study are analyzed separately by gender (50% women, 50% men) and age group (20-40-year-olds and 41-60-year-olds). The survey was also conducted in Germany (N=1,000) and in the USA (N=1,000).

The Kapsch Group is a globally active technology group based in Vienna. The company's areas of expertise - digitalization and mobility - are addressed by two business units which, as end-to-end providers, offer solutions along the entire value chain. K-Businesscom is the ideal partner for digital transformation. As an expert in traffic management, K-Businesscom TrafficCom offers intelligent solutions for toll collection, smart urban mobility, road safety and connected vehicles.

K-Businesscom pursues the goal of global quality and innovation leadership in all areas and invests around ten percent of its total revenue in research and development every year. The Group's own R&D centers work consistently to bring new technologies to market maturity. Long-standing collaborations with scientific institutions and strategic acquisitions provide additional expertise.