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GERMANS TOLD: WORK IS NO FUN

A young media entrepreneur is igniting an office revolution in Germany with her bestselling suggestions for bringing Prussian discipline back to the workplace.

With the German economy in a desperate state, employers are snapping up her book, which banishes table football games, flirting at the sandwich trolley, private e-mailing, idle gossip and English business jargon. The return of the German work ethics has been ordained by Judith Mair, 30, who for three years has been successfully applying the principles in her Cologne-based web design and advertising company.

Her point, advanced in Fun Is Out, is that the boundary between work and leisure has become too blurred. Working hours stretch into the evening and, to compensate, time-wasting “fun” has been brought into office. Throw out the fun, make working time more effective, and the Germans will boost their productivity and recover their lives. The office, she says, has become too intimate and too sloppy.

The Mair system might just catch on. The German government press office, for example, has already introduced clocking in and questions all telephone calls longer than ten minutes. Frau Mair wants medical evidence of illness and that too seems to be the trend again.

The Germans, on paper at least, put in far less office time than people in Britain or the United States – 1,480 hours a year, compared with 1,720 in Britain and 1,979 in the US. But that figure is distorted by longer public holidays and part-time working – in most German companies the trend is towards the Anglo-Saxon model, with work increasingly consuming leisure time and yet losing effectiveness.

THE TIME, Dec. 6, 2002