This has been pretty common in German offices for the last five to ten years but it’s all a facade. Sure you are allowed to put in your eight hours (or less) however you like from 6:00 to 21:00 or so, but in reality you’re there from 8-16 because that’s when your coworkers are there and calling you and scheduling meetings. I’ve often been teased for “sleeping in” for showing up and returning calls at 8:30 by colleagues who start at 6:30.
At least everyone respects your free time in the evenings and there’s no expectation that you answer emails or messages after 16:00 or so. Not yet anyway.
You can tell your coworkers to shove it and probably should in this scenario, I think the more pressing matter is that realistically you are free to set your hours freely between 6:00 to 21:00 except you have to be there from 9:00 - 15:00 or some other six hour chunk as a “core time”.
Does give you some options but the only real flexibility you get out of it is you can put some more overtime in if you want
I could and I probably should. We used to have the 9-15 core time but that was completely dropped at some point. Still hasn’t changed the cultural expectation that you’re available from 7 or so onwards.
yeah my job became this way during the pandemic and it never went back to normal. for the first year or so I was able to fuck off more but then like the proverbial frog in a pot they kept cranking up the heat and the expectations/meetings/phone calls/task pileup leads to me being there 8-16 a day.
This has been pretty common in German offices for the last five to ten years but it’s all a facade. Sure you are allowed to put in your eight hours (or less) however you like from 6:00 to 21:00 or so, but in reality you’re there from 8-16 because that’s when your coworkers are there and calling you and scheduling meetings. I’ve often been teased for “sleeping in” for showing up and returning calls at 8:30 by colleagues who start at 6:30.
At least everyone respects your free time in the evenings and there’s no expectation that you answer emails or messages after 16:00 or so. Not yet anyway.
You can tell your coworkers to shove it and probably should in this scenario, I think the more pressing matter is that realistically you are free to set your hours freely between 6:00 to 21:00 except you have to be there from 9:00 - 15:00 or some other six hour chunk as a “core time”.
Does give you some options but the only real flexibility you get out of it is you can put some more overtime in if you want
I could and I probably should. We used to have the 9-15 core time but that was completely dropped at some point. Still hasn’t changed the cultural expectation that you’re available from 7 or so onwards.
yeah my job became this way during the pandemic and it never went back to normal. for the first year or so I was able to fuck off more but then like the proverbial frog in a pot they kept cranking up the heat and the expectations/meetings/phone calls/task pileup leads to me being there 8-16 a day.