On Tuesday, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that employers must henceforth record the daily working hours of all employees. The aim of the ruling is to ensure compliance with the labor law enshrined in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, which grants every employee the right to a limitation of maximum working hours, daily and weekly rest periods, and paid annual leave.
Trade unions welcome the ECJ ruling “as a clear protective measure,” as the legally mandated working time recording makes it easier for employees to assert their interests and rights. According to the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB), two billion overtime hours were accumulated in 2018, half of which were unpaid.
Employer associations, however, fear the resurgence of the “punch clock mentality,” which they believed was almost overcome, where employees drop their pens or shut down their computers promptly at 6 PM.
The Modern World of Work
In the modern world of work, the principle of trust-based working hours prevails, where the focus is not on the employee’s physical presence but on the completion of agreed-upon tasks.
If a billion overtime hours remain unpaid and more and more people are facing burnout because they constantly have to be/want to be available, this is undoubtedly a societal problem. The 8-hour day is a civilizational achievement fought for over decades. The only question is how much struggle is still needed in the modern world of work. Is a state-mandated process the best answer? What do solutions look like in agile organizational cultures?
Working Time Recording in Agile Teams?
Agile teams (approximately 5-8 members) plan their workload themselves. Out of their own interest and that of the company, they are responsible for protecting themselves from external exploitation or self-exploitation. From the perspective of traditional class warriors, this might sound naive. In reality, however, agile working offers approaches and practices to understand economic activity beyond the punch clock.
Agile teams are self-organized teams of knowledge workers. They operate in a complex and dynamic environment and strive to develop something useful for the customer in a short time. In this context, a brilliant idea under a private shower can have much more value for the customer than thousands of hours in the office.
Velocity
With regard to the predictability of products and projects, one thing is particularly crucial for agile teams: the so-called Velocity. Velocity describes a measurable speed at which agile teams reliably create customer value. It is up to the team to estimate before each iteration how many tasks (User Stories) it can complete, for example, in a two-week sprint. Most teams deliberately refrain from estimating in absolute numbers, such as days or hours. People estimate better relatively than absolutely. For example, when looking at the sky, it is easy for people to determine whether one bird is flying lower than another. The exact distance in meters, however, is much more difficult to estimate.
Story Points
To estimate efforts for frequently changing requirements and tasks, agile teams use, for example, Story Points. Here, only the complexity of the tasks is estimated, by relating one User Story (e.g., 8 Story Points) to another User Story (e.g., 2 Story Points) through the assignment of points. Over time, a certain trend emerges that a team, for example, implements between 20 and 40 Story Points per iteration. What is gained? Productivity can be planned iteratively and self-organizingly.
And what about self-exploitation or pressure from investors or executives? If employees are absent due to burnout, this affects velocity. The goal is the constant delivery of value. Planning for recovery phases is therefore up to the self-organized team. More and more executives understand this.
In Summary
Therefore, it remains all the more exciting to see what this ruling will do to employees and, above all, to employers. And how it will affect work. But the digital world of work probably has an answer to that too: instead of punch clocks, there will be apps on smartphones in the future that record working hours.
