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August 5, 2008 - Richard Donkin
The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, moved one step further towards removing France's statutory 35-hour week last month when legislators agreed measures that will allow employers from September to negotiate separate overtime arrangements with their employees.
Mr Sarkozy, who views the shorter working week as an impediment to labour flexibility, competitiveness and economic growth, had been seeking ways to sidestep the barriers imposed by statutory hours. The new legislation will permit company-specific negotiated agreements between employers and trade unions on working hours. Extra hours will still attract an overtime premium but for hourly-paid workers the weekly maximum limit will rise to 48 hours.
While this still leaves France some way short of the sort of flexibility established in the UK, large French companies have already achieved degrees of flexibility by introducing annualised hours agreements, allowing them to match their work schedules to seasonal fluctuations in demand, thereby avoiding costly overtime.
But how popular are these new measures among employees? White collar workers, who fear that they will loose some of their holidays as a result of the changes, have been protesting that the move is a retrograde step. When the senate passed the new laws workers were demonstrating outside with placards saying: "there is life after work."
It's a significant philosophical point. What is an economy for but to offer people a healthy quality of life? While earnings go much of the way to underpin the wealth of nations, should governments also be considering the "time poverty" and associated stress that can result from overwork.
In companies where time restrictions are not imposed on employees, where technology exists to allow 24-hour working, concerns are beginning to surface about the potential for overwork.
At Microsoft, the software producer, for example, training is provided to help employees organise their work so that they achieve a reasonable balance between work commitments and their domestic lives.
"We know that people don't stop working when we don't see them and we know from the feedback in employee satisfaction questionnaires that this can be a problem. So now we try to help people make the right decisions about work," says Theo Rinsema, general manager, Microsoft Netherlands.
Microsoft believes it must take such issues seriously if it is to attract and retain the best staff. In the formative years of the company when developers were building the first Windows software it wasn't unusual to find office workers sleeping under their desks.
Today such behaviour would be viewed as a symptom of poor work management. Management thinking on productivity has switched from viewing work as something that is measured in hours to looking at the quality of output. If people can achieve great work in fewer hours, why should employers worry about time?
"When work shifts from a place where you do things to an activity that you control, you need to develop the competence of when to stop working," says Rinsema.
The French trade unions are worried that the ability of companies to secure their own agreements instead of the current sector agreements negotiated nationally will erode their hard won rights. The fear is reasonable. Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer and the largest private employer in the US with 1.3m employees, has announced a staff scheduling system that will end existing shift patterns.
The new computerised system called the "optimiser," to be introduced by the end of 2008, will allocate staff on a ratio basis depending on the number of customers in the stores at any one time.
The system is deliberately designed to alert managers to the number of hours that staff are working so that shifts can be scaled back to avoid the possibility of people working the equivalent hours of a full time job. In that event, part-time workers might achieve permanent status giving them full time benefits and better hourly rates.
The system would mean that some workers would have to make themselves available "on call." Other companies have introduced the optimiser successfully in the US. Is this the future of flexible working?
There are alternatives. Best Buy, the US consumer electronics retailer, has introduced what it calls a "results only working environment" (ROWE) that has led to productivity gains of 41 per cent and reduced staff turnover by 90 percent in some divisions.
Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, the consultants responsible for introducing the system, describe in their book, Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It, a kind of laissez-faire workplace where people can do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done. "You get paid for a chunk of work, not a chunk of time," they say.
Ressler and Thompson, argue that many companies focus on order rather than excellence. The hours that people work is a bigger concern than the quality of their output, they say. At Best Buy these concerns have been reversed, creating a more productive and more engaged workforce.
While President Sarkozy's concerns over the working week are understandable, he would be mistaken for assuming that more hours on the job will deliver greater productivity. While I wouldn't disagree that the existing 35-hour week has been too rigid, I fear that too many employers will resort to the time-honoured practice of measuring work by time rather than quality.
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