Homeoffice — Working from Home

Homeoffice: no right to it, and rules that follow you home

Working from home in Germany is common, contested in detail, and governed by rather more law than the informality of the word Homeoffice suggests. Start with what does not exist: a general legal right to work from home. Proposals for one have been debated repeatedly and none has been enacted, so whether you can is a matter for your contract, a works agreement, or an arrangement with your manager — which is precisely the conversation in this dialogue. What your employer cannot do is order you to work from home against your will either, absent agreement, because your place of work is part of what was agreed. German law distinguishes two things that English lumps together. die Telearbeit is a permanent home workstation that the employer sets up and is responsible for, and the workplace regulations apply to it: desk, chair, screen, lighting. die mobile Arbeit is working from wherever — the kitchen table, a train — and the obligations are much lighter. Most Homeoffice arrangements are deliberately written as the second, which is why your employer supplies a laptop and not a chair. What does follow you home is the Arbeitszeitgesetz. The limits on daily hours, the eleven-hour rest period between working days, and the rules on Sunday work all apply identically at your kitchen table, and a German court has held that employers must have a system for recording working time — which is part of why Zeiterfassung and the Zeitkonto have become more visible rather than less. Overtime does not vanish because nobody saw you do it: it goes onto the account, and der Ausgleich as a day off is the normal way it comes back. Whether unrecorded hours can simply be worked on trust — Vertrauensarbeitszeit — is exactly the area this case law unsettled. Two practical footnotes. Tax: days worked at home can be claimed against income tax as a Homeoffice-Pauschale, a flat daily amount, which is one of the Werbungskosten from lesson 71 and needs no separate room to qualify. And data protection: the DSGVO applies to work you do at home, so confidential material on a kitchen table is a real compliance question and some employers restrict homeworking for that reason alone. On the culture, one observation. German offices tend to care less about visible presence than about reliability within agreed hours — Krause's das Ergebnis lieber als die Uhrzeit is a common attitude. But the corollary is that the agreed hours are taken seriously: being unreachable during Kernzeit is a real failure in a way that leaving at four-thirty is not, and the fixed points, like the weekly Redaktionskonferenz, are genuinely fixed. Ask which days are immovable before proposing your own.