Conventional workplace, home office, coworking space - where is the journey going?
Cosying up (or pretending to) with your laptop under the Christmas tree, your thoughts caught between projects that still need to be completed this year, last-minute gift shopping at Amazon and planning the Christmas menu. So it's just the right time to reflect on the topic of working hours and legislation, isn't it?
Today in the home office, tomorrow in a coworking space with other freelancers or home office workers who have had enough of having lonely conversations with the fridge. Everyone agrees that the new world of work no longer resembles that of our grandparents. But is that a good thing for everyone? And are we at odds with the legislation?
Seco is trying, more or less successfully, to adapt the rules on time recording to today's realities. But for every rule, there are a number of scenarios that fall off the grid. And the law isn't just interested in our working hours - it's also about protecting our oh-so-fragile health. Article 6 of the Labour Act requires employers to design their operations and work processes in such a way that health hazards and overexertion are avoided wherever possible. The law even stipulates that the employer must ensure that employees do not consume alcohol or other intoxicating substances at work. This makes you smile - especially when you consider that more and more people are coming to work "doped up" with medication rather than alcohol. Stimulants, anxiety blockers and the like are taking the place of alcohol. And they are even more dangerous because they are not initially recognised by those around them. However, anxiety blockers in particular can lead to destructive behaviour at work because the natural inhibition thresholds simply no longer work.
And such things are even more difficult to identify in people working from home. How can an employer influence the work process in the home office at all? And how can they avoid the aforementioned overstressing "if possible"? The phrase "where possible" alone leaves plenty of room for interpretation. Do you have to protect employees from themselves? Large German companies do this - by shutting down their mail servers at night, for example. The employee who only gets up to speed at night will feel restricted in his or her freedom. Others, on the other hand, like it.
It is interesting to note that not all generations on the labour market today have the same opinion in this regard.
Christian Scholz analysed the behaviour of the different generations with regard to the requirements of labour law. Generation Y agrees that labour law is patronising and should be ignored if possible. Generation Z, on the other hand, sees it as a friend and helper in the pursuit of strict Offboarding between work and leisure.
Not surprising really, since everything in life always runs in cycles. So the very young are the very old when it comes to their attitude to work, and they are probably right. So protection or harassment is just a question of mindset.
The trend is increasingly moving towards project workers, ego-companies, freelancers who take on tasks on a one-off basis and move from one assignment to the next. Nota bene: This also existed in the past. And even today you still see them from time to time - the journeymen dressed in black on the road as a prerequisite for the master craftsman's examination.
The employer is in the clear. They are no longer his employees, so he is not responsible for their working hours or health and safety.
Many so-called goodies that are "sold" to employees today as luxuries are, on closer inspection, primarily benefits for the company. Office space too small or too expensive? Home office provides a remedy, and only in the rarest of cases does the home office flat rate cover the real costs of the home office. BYOD is trendy and practical, but exacerbates the problem of permanent availability. The motto is to take a close look. The fact that the very young generations in particular like to have two mobile phones with them shows once again that they are sticking to the clear Offboarding of private life and work.
However, the constant availability of employees not only raises the question of constant stress, but it must also be clarified which category this time falls into. On-call time? Working time? Answering a business email is clearly working time. However, if emails are repeatedly answered during what is supposed to be free time, the uninterrupted periods in between become shorter and shorter and can therefore no longer be meaningfully used as free time. Would the whole time then have to be declared as working time? According to this view, many of us would probably have 18-hour days and 7-day weeks. And if employees do this voluntarily? Because they can't manage to sing Christmas carols for two hours, but are constantly checking their emails or feeding the company's social media accounts? Can Christmas then be counted as overtime?
Solution
There is no solution, at least not a perfect one. The legislator is certainly right to want to regulate certain things. Emphasis on "want", of course, because rigorous demands and, above all, round-the-clock monitoring are not possible and certainly not desired by any generation.
How about a pinch of common sense, self-responsible employees with integrity, companies that treat employees as people and delicious Christmas biscuits. And, of course, plenty of alcohol under the Christmas tree... :-)
Who wants to answer emails?