The employees of one of the largest private health insurers in Australia receive in addition to their annual salary $ 1,200 if they continue to work from home. The insurance company NIB wants to switch completely to a remote working model after the corona crisis.
NIB boss suggests: Home office for everyone
NIB Managing Director Mark Fitzgibbon is convinced that the era of office commuting coming to an end. He prefers to “rent space in people’s homes”. More flexible working models are important and, in the opinion of the NIB boss, could even mean the end of the five-day week – although he does not want to question the weekly working time of currently 38 hours.
More on the subject
- Gateway from home office: Study shows massively increasing security problems in companies
- 7 arguments with which you can finally convince your boss of the home office
- Office of the future: What does it take to become more attractive than your own home?
One of the main reasons NIB employees overwhelmingly support the new plan is the considerable travel time this saves. On average, Fitzgibbon The Australian calculates that workers would save the equivalent of five weeks that they would otherwise spend in cars, trains and buses on the way to work.
NIB benefits from the solution
In the future, the company will have 75 percent of its offices in Newcastle, Sydney and sublet Melbourne. The remaining space should remain available for inevitable meetings between colleagues. NIB employees should be able to come to the office on a maximum of one day per week.
So while everything seems to be in the best order at NIB and its boss Mark Fitzgibbon, and the business result should not have deteriorated so far, other companies are seeing the change increasingly critical of their workforce in the home office. This is not just about doubts about the productivity of employees when they always have the choice between work and Netflix.
More on the subject
- 4 compliance sticking points when home office becomes the new normal
- First companies make the home office the new work normality
- Court ruling: Falling from home is not an accident at work
Where is the solidarity with the infrastructure?
It is also about solidarity with an infrastructure that has formed due to the office workers. For example, Sydney’s city center is currently only three percent full, and local businesses are in dire need of customers to stay afloat. National Australia Bank manager Ross McEwan says clearly: “I want our employees to come back to the office to support the city.”
That is also the goal of politics. Dominic Perrotet, the newly appointed Prime Minister of New South Wales, is considering various measures to help bring workers back to the deserted business districts of the big cities – including free public transport is under discussion.
