29 September 2020
It is a news story that has caused quite a stir in Japan. From October onwards, Yahoo Japan will let its employees choose their working hours and their place of work. In a country where human resources management is often synonymous with long hours in the office and a rigid collectivist spirit, the rise of remote working due to the Covid-19 health emergency is beginning to shift boundaries.
8 September 2020
The US digital giant has for the second time encouraged its teams globally to take a Friday off in order to enjoy a 3-day weekend. This second day ‘off-work’ was implemented for all workers on Friday 04 September and notably allowed the US work teams to enjoy a 4-day weekend as Monday, 07 September 7 was also a public holiday (Labor Day). Google, which announced several months ago that it would maintain teleworking on an ongoing basis until the summer of 2021 at the earliest, is also aware of the consequences...
27 August 2020
Only a fifth of UK companies plan to re-open their offices to staff next month, according to a survey conducted by specialist HR site People Management, reported on 25 August. The same study indicates that one third of employers will ask their staff to come into the office only a few days per week and that 15% of companies still do not know when staff will be brought back into the office. The desertion of UK offices is a concern to the Confederation of British Industry, the UK business organisation, which has...
20 July 2020
On Thursday 16 July, the German multinational unveiled a plan that will see two to three days of remote working become the norm for at least 140,000 of its employees. Developed in the wake of the pandemic, during which remote working has been practiced and experimented on a large scale, the plan has been dubbed the “New Normal Working Model”. It is geared towards promoting employee well-being and the transition from a management centred on “presence” to a results-based approach.
14 July 2020
Since the beginning of July, the Hungarian subsidiary of telecommunications group Vodafone has been offering its telephone customer service staff the opportunity to continue working from home after the pandemic, should they opt to sign up. The introduction of remote working in this area of operations had taken longer than for other employees, who were already equipped to work remotely. However once the necessary steps were taken, the company saw no reason not to continue in this vein. Initially, 50% of such staff...
23 June 2020
In the coming weeks, the government will launch a second tranche of tests conducted to shed light on ongoing discrimination in hiring within companies. It will be conducted among 40 randomly selected large companies in the SBF 120 index (Société des Bourses Françaises 120 Index; French stock market index comprising all 60 stocks in the CAC 40 & CAC Next 20 indexes plus 60 further stocks listed on the Premier Marché & Second Marché). France inaugurated this type of initiative with a campaign that ran...
22 June 2020
This is what the public Brazilian petroleum corporation told Reuters following the lifting of lockdown in the country. The conditions are still to be defined, but the objective is to offer every administrative employee the option to work remotely. According to Petrobras, the experiment has proved successful in terms of productivity and has revealed potential avenues to reduce office costs as the company works to reduce its operational costs. Remote working will be voluntary, although the company anticipates that...
15 June 2020
On 9 June, the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB) published its third study since 2007. It is based on more than 4,000 interviews and details the average cost of dual training by region, size and business sector. In addition to a comparison between the periods 2007, 2012/13 and 2017/18, the study offers a fairly high degree of accuracy on the type of costs incurred by an apprenticeship, as well as on the average gain generated by apprentices depending on the number of years of training....
4 June 2020
The Hans Böckler Trade Foundation (German Federation of Trade Unions – DGB) has presented its first study on the phenomenon of ‘internal crowd work’ and its implications for both work organization and human resources management. The study is based on several elements including multiple company case studies from the automotive, telecoms, and IT sectors. In addition to the different variants and principles of ‘crowd work’, the study’s authors highlight the enormous advantages that ‘crowd work’...
29 May 2020
Despite encouragement from the UK government for business to gradually return to normal, only 4% of UK employers have made their employees come back to work since coronavirus lockdown rules were relaxed in the country, specialised HR site People Management revealed on 28 May. According to a survey of more than 500 professionals, 55% of employers plan to keep remote working arrangements in place for an unspecified timeframe. Meanwhile 24% of respondents are waiting to find out more about the health-related guidance...
