Celebration-evening. The German word for the end of the working day, and there is no English equivalent because English has no word for the thing.
Ich mache Feierabend — I am making Feierabend — is a complete sentence and a complete explanation. The day’s work is over, and what follows is not called leisure or free time. It is called a celebration.
Das Bundesurlaubsgesetz. The Federal Leave Act, in force since 1963, sets a statutory minimum of twenty-four working days of annual leave on a six-day week. That is the floor. Most German collective agreements provide substantially more, and the statutory minimum functions as a level nobody works at.
Die Sonn- und Feiertagsruhe. Section 9 of the Working Hours Act prohibits work on Sundays and public holidays as a general rule, with exceptions for healthcare, transport, hospitality, emergency services and media. The protection of Sunday is not a workplace policy. It is a general prohibition with specific carve-outs, and the carve-outs have to be justified.
Das Arbeitszeitgesetz. German law caps the working day at eight hours, extendable to ten only if the average returns to eight within six months. The ten-hour limit is absolute. Eleven uninterrupted hours of rest are required between working days. Breaks are mandatory: thirty minutes after six hours of work, forty-five after nine.
Since a Federal Labour Court ruling in 2022, all working time must be recorded.
Vacation, taking sick days, maternity leave…work-life balance is really different in Germany & the USA.
So my question for you is: How do you feel about work-life balance? Is there anyone out there who prefers the way that it’s done in the U.S.? And people with children, what’s the parental leave been like where you’ve lived?
Classic factors of employee motivation continue to play an important role. A new study shows that every second employee attaches great importance to a secure job. However, only around a third of those surveyed are willing to make sacrifices for this.
Job security is an important motivating factor for every second employee: 52 percent of women and 58 percent of men attach great importance to it, according to the results of the study “The future of work: A journey to 2022”. For the study, the consulting company PWC asked around 2,000 employees in Germany about their ideas about the future of work, 46 percent of whom were male and 54 percent female.
According to the study, however, only around a third of those surveyed are willing to sacrifice their work-life balance for a secure job: 36 percent of the male and only 32 percent of the female respondents say they would be permanent for the prospect of a secure job available to your employer.
A new report shows where in Germany it’s easiest to strike that perfect balance between career and personal life. Sorry Berlin and Frankfurt – you didn’t make it into the top ten.
It’s common to hear that Germans are great at switching off once their working hours are done, but according to a new survey, this may not be entirely true.
The survey commissioned by Novotel surveyed around 5,000 adults across Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Poland to investigate their habits and working schedules. Surprisingly enough, it found that the Germans have the worst work-life balance of all four countries, with 58 percent work and only 42 percent leisure time.
A key issue for many workers is flexible working time in order to have a work-life balance. Negotiating a work/life balance can help enable parents (both men and women) to reconcile their work with their family lives and women in particular to participate in the labour market.
Finding the right work-life balance can allow workers to take leave from work so that they can participate in education or training or take up an interest, hobby or leisure pursuit. This may mean that employees can reorganise their working lives and hours around shorter days, weeks, months or years.
German families tend to be small with only one or two children. The men are still quite often considered to be the head of the household, even though both the wife and husband work.
Work-life balance is of such extraordinary importance to Germans that it is embedded in their labor laws, in how their companies treat their employees, in their expectations as a society.