Communiqué, issue 6, 2004
Special Foundation Forum 2004
- Time to re-think work-life balance: Second Foundation Forum debates key issues
- Do we need to work longer hours?
- Time and flexibility
- Investing in work-life balance – a win-win situation?
- Work and care - payback for the elderly or investment in a new generation?
- Keynote round-up
- An economy or a society: where do we live and work?
Articles
- Focusing firmly on the year ahead
- Foundation forges closer ties with the EP
- Disability and social exclusion: Reversing the trend
- Europe ‘not losing jobs’ due to outsourcing of ICT services
Previous issues of Communiqué
Hubert Krieger (Foundation) and Anneke Goudswaard (TNO, the Netherlands) debate a point
The emphasis should be on ‘smarter’ rather than longer working hours, argued Anneke Goudswaard, TNO, the Netherlands. Ms Goudswaard echoed a widely-held belief among workshop members that it’s an employee’s productivity, not the amount of time they work, that matters.
She also highlighted that the goal of the modern workplace should be to improve the individual’s health and quality of life – key ingredients for a successful, productive organisation – and not simply to increase an employee’s ‘mechanical’ productivity through new technologies and other methods. To achieve this, she recommended that companies and employees negotiate work schedules in a way that strikes a balance between the business’s need for flexibility and productivity and employees’ needs to combine work with family life and to stay healthy.
As other participants at the workshop pointed out, productivity also tends to decline significantly when staff work excessively long hours, typically beyond eight hours a day. The risk of accidents and other occupational health problems also increases.
However, as Jan Grönland of the Ministry for Industry, Trade and Employment, Sweden, stressed at the workshop, productivity gains alone won’t be enough to maintain Europe’s welfare systems in the long run. He added that more people, including immigrants, young people, the elderly and those on long-term sick-leave, needed to be encouraged to join the labour force. Referring to Sweden’s experience, where the Government has enticed 69% of older people back into employment, compared to the EU average of 40%, he proposed a number of ways to do this.
To encourage more women to take up full-time employment, for example, he suggested: basing direct taxation on an individual’s income, rather than on a family’s income; developing more sophisticated parental leave schemes that are equally attractive to both men and women; and providing more affordable childcare.
Potential ways of attracting older employees back into the workforce, he added, could include a stronger emphasis on life-long learning, supported by adult vocational training, and ensuring that any income earned by staff after a pensionable age is taken into account in any final salary pension arrangement. To encourage immigrants into the market, Mr Grönland recommended that there should also be a larger number of trainee positions, anti-discrimination campaigns, as well as induction courses for foreign-born employees.
Workshop 1 key issues
- Productivity tends to decline significantly when staff work excessively long hours, typically beyond eight hours a day.
- In Sweden, the Government has enticed
69% of older people into employment, compared to the EU average of 40%.