For our employees, 2018 began with new staff regulations in which we introduced many new things – only to their benefit, of course. Among other things, we switched from a 42.5-hour week to a 40-hour week. But why? And how did we get the “missing” 2.5 working hours per week, and thus almost 900 missing working hours per month across the whole company, past the executive board?
A question of mindset
Of course, everyone was aware that if you look at the matter purely on the basis of numbers, the sums do not add up. Because with this change, all employees now actually only work 94% for the same salary as before. Not bad, I would say. However, when it comes to people, it is not always a simple calculation, and certainly not when it comes to people’s performance. Sure, you can run a machine 2.5 hours longer per week and it will be correspondingly 2.5 hours more productive per week, which in turn means you can bill the customer for 2.5 more hours and bring in more revenue accordingly. But no human being in this world works like that; no one becomes more productive by exactly this factor just because they have to sit in the office for longer. And that is precisely the principle behind why we discussed the 40-hour week. We asked ourselves what a person needs to be productive and perform well, to be creative, to develop new ideas and products, to be committed to the company and to think and act in the interests of the company and the community. These questions were the first step in the change of mindset. Why? Because we started asking these questions at all.
Our statement, our goal
By introducing the 40-hour week, we wanted to make a statement. It is enormously important to us that the people who work for us every day are healthy both mentally and physically. This requires a good balance between work and leisure. It is important to us that everyone feels at home with us and can therefore perform well. Because, as pretty much everyone knows on a rational level: healthy and committed employees make happy customers, and happy customers generate more revenue, and so on and so forth. But truly feeling and living this principle to the full – the mindset, in other words – does take quite a lot of (HR) work.
We are aware that “just” introducing the 40-hour week does not create a new world of work and that employee health and satisfaction have not been “achieved”, but it is a first step on a long road towards our vision – starting tomorrow’s world today.
