Flexible Arbeitszeiten versus COPEP & Chronoworking Über den neuen Trend „Chronoworking“ hatte ich ja bereits…
I have already written an article about the new “chronoworking” trend. Essentially, it’s about taking into account the chronobiological parameters of employees and, of course, their chronotype in particular. People who work from home certainly have more opportunities to live their genetic sleep/wake rhythm and to align their work, household and free time with it. Theoretically, as long as the biological rhythm of the other family members does not conflict with this. But here, too, there is now CoFam, i.e. chronotype-optimized family management, in order to put together the best possible package for the respective situation.
Sleep duration sleep quality
- In the last 40 years, the average amount of time people sleep has increased by 1.5-2 hours.1 depending on the survey. Meanwhile, the mental strain caused by digitalization, additional stress due to a shortage of skilled workers, the pandemic, existential fears, etc. has increased many times over. However, an evolutionary “high-speed” adaptation of our body is not possible and habituation does not mean that damage no longer occurs.
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According to a 2016 study by the Rand Europe Corporation, the damage to the economy caused by a lack of sleep now amounts to €62 billion (extrapolated to 2025 at the time). With 44 million employees, this currently means around €1,400 per person. This total sum is therefore now far higher than the federal defense budget of just under € 52 billion2the second highest federal budget. Converted into working hours, this means that around 2.1 million working hours are wasted every year in Germany.
However, it is also about improving the quality of sleep, because those who sleep in their biological rhythm do not have to fall asleep through artificially induced sleep pressure or excessive sleep pressure. The remaining sleep-related bodily functions should therefore also carry out their work “on time” and not at times that do not correspond to their genetic programming.
Who is responsible for the sleep deficit?
The conventional wisdom is that everyone is responsible for their own sleep deficit. But if you actually take a look at the parameters that the individual cannot determine themselves, then a different picture emerges.
Employers are, via predetermined working hours, No. 1 – responsible for exactly this sleep deficit. This is (so far) not meant in a bad way, because very few people would have thought that this main responsibility lies with the employer or that this could result in damage to their own company. Due to the conditioning to traditional working hours since industrialization, there has been no reason to question working hours. In addition, flexible working hours already seemed to cover this situation anyway.
As a result, sleep has always been the private responsibility of employees, which is supported at most by information events as part of the OHM. In addition, there was no scientific basis on which to efficiently optimize individual needs regarding working hours that went beyond simple private wishes.
DLMO provides a scientific basis for the first time.
The chronotype, or more precisely the DLMO (DimLight Melatonin Onset), on the other hand, is the first scientifically and biologically measurable and therefore verifiable proof of the position of the biological sleep/wake rhythm. The focus of a change is no longer the private wish of an individual employee, but valid scientific data on the chronotype of each individual employee, which for the first time enables healthy and efficient working hours in terms of individual prevention.
Since then, no employer has been able to argue that sleep is a private matter because the company has no valid basis for adjusting working hours.
In addition, our pilot projects have also enabled us to demonstrate how COPEP can be implemented and, above all, the positive effects it has on employees. The project locations, e.g. a clinic with 3-shift operation, are certainly among the most complex situations in terms of staff deployment and shift planning. If something works there, it is even easier to implement in other areas.
Flexible working hours vs. COPEP
I am often told that the company already offers flexible working hours. In Germany, around 38.8 % of3of employees offer flexible working hours. However, this proportion varies greatly depending on the profession and sector. Managers, for example, have the greatest influence on their working hours at 70.3%, while this only applies to around 19.4% of workers in the manufacturing industry. In professions such as science, bureaucracy and in the commercial sector, flexibility is over 50%, while professions in the service sector, skilled trades or machine operators offer significantly less flexibility, in some cases only around 13%. Of course, shift work is completely excluded, which is reflected in the meagre 19.4% in the manufacturing industry. There are also hardly any flexible working hours in sectors such as the police and healthcare.
This means that there is definitely still enough room on the market to offer companies without flexible working hours potential for optimization. Nevertheless, flexible working hours and COPEP differ in essence, as the aim of COPEP is exclusively health-related. When flexible working hours are used, it is not uncommon for counterproductive situations to arise, e.g. when early or normal types come in later purely for personal reasons, which is why late types have to come in earlier. A sensible balance does not take place.
The differences in effects are also clearly evident in practice. One study4by Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) showed that employees got an average of 8 minutes more sleep per night after using flexible working hours. This means around 1 hour per week and just under 46 hours or 5.75 days per year, depending on the vacation and vacation situation. Our scientifically supported COPEP projects, on the other hand, enabled an average of 30 minutes more sleep per night. This means a whole 2.5 hours per week and 115 hours per year, which equates to over 14.5 days. In other words, 22 minutes more sleep per night compared to flexible working hours. That is a huge amount.
The acceptance of flexible working hours also suffers from a phenomenon that has been shown time and again in our projects to be persistent. Employees avoid it because they don’t want to be one of the “bums”, because “the early bird still catches the worm” in the minds of many people. A hidden phenomenon that often prevents potential from being exploited. However, as soon as we officially integrated the explanation of chronotypes into the BGM and HRM communication on the part of the management, their use increased considerably. So even without COPEP, a lot can be achieved through awareness of chronobiology alone, as our“Getting up without an alarm clock” project has impressively demonstrated.
Conclusion
Flexible working hours are definitely better than static ones, there is no doubt about that. However, the COPEP approach is a much more powerful tool for making work healthier and work performance more efficient and therefore much more cost-effective, as concrete data is used as the basis for developing scheduling and shift planning, and not just the “will” of employees. What’s more, COPEP can be used in areas that cannot be covered by flexible working hours, such as shift work.
The chronotype or DLMO therefore offers employers a powerful tool for the first time to plan and implement targeted measures that can then achieve scientifically proven, strong and, above all, measurable effects. If you look at the damage per employee caused by a lack of sleep, the introduction of COPEP pays for itself after just a few months on average, as the positive effects in our projects became apparent after just 4 months of observation.
COPEP therefore offers the perfect basis for the introduction of chronoworking. In contrast to all other previous trends, such as new work, agility and flexible working hours, COPEP offers completely new possibilities, especially for shift work, e.g. liquid chrono shift schedules.
We have developed the ChronoCoach Business training program so that we can also implement such projects with the expertise of our own staff. The first ChronoCoaches will soon have completed their training.
If you would like to know more about COPEP or the training, please feel free to contact me or have a look at www.chrono-coach.de.
Quellen
1 https://www.wieden.com/chronobiologie-news/7-stunden-schlafdauer-reichen-gefaehrliches-fazit-einer-neuen-studie/
2 without € 20 billion in special funds for the procurement of military equipment
3 https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Arbeit/Arbeitsmarkt/Qualitaet-Arbeit/Dimension-3/flexible-arbeitszeiten.html
4 https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/flexible-work-schedules-improve-health-sleep
