New book: work should not be fun!

[/ dave /]

Germans told: work is not fun
 From Roger Boyes in Berlin

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 ethic 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 the office. 
Throw out the fun, make working time more effective, and Germans will 
boost their productivity and recover their lives. The office, she says, 
has become too intimate and too sloppy.

(...)

"The rules of our grandmothers were not so bad," says Frau Mair, who 
refuses to give details about her private life. "They are: conscientious 
work, punctuality, accuracy." When her company moved into a Cologne 
building, she could see software designers in neighbouring offices 
playing table tennis and brainstorming in baseball caps. They have since 
gone bankrupt.

Frau Mair has drawn the moral: fun is out. There will be no Christmas 
party this year. Or any year.

And no laughing

Judith Mair's golden rules include:

* Working Monday to Friday only from 9am to 5.30pm
* A half-hour lunch break for which a stand-in is found
* No work taken home
* All desks cleared by the end of the day
* Conversations about non-business subjects to be no more than five minutes
* No laughing. "There is no place for anyone who thinks that the only 
good work is work that is fun"
* Mobile phones to be switched off in the office. Private e-mailing at 
lunchtime
* Colleagues should be addressed formally. No one has to be cheerful. 
Grumpiness is tolerated if it does not interfere with work
* Working clothes to be issued wherever possible. Frau Mair has 
introduced a stewardess-like uniform in her own company
* Employees are discouraged from meeting after hours and are under 
instruction not to talk shop.
* Banned words include: workflow, deadline, briefing, brainstorming
* No skateboards, no baseball caps

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-3-504376,00.html

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/  dave  /