ÜAbout advertising agencies, the cliché persists that campaigns are often fine-tuned and budgets wrestled with until late at night. And the parties that celebrate successes are also legendary. Terms such as timekeeping and time clock do not fit into this picture. So it is not surprising that the recent judgment of the Federal Labor Court, according to which all companies should record the working hours of all their employees, was met with shaking heads at an industry meeting. “That suits the pig slaughterhouses, but not for us,” fumes the head of an agency, who prefers not to read his name in the newspaper. In times of New Work, which is about agility, mobile working and creative processes, the verdict for the industry is the wrong decision at the wrong time. His company will probably not get into difficulties, because the hours worked by the employees are already booked to the corresponding customer accounts. Therefore, it is already transparent who works how much.
Helmut Hechler, head of finance at the Frankfurt-based creative agency Ogilvy Germany, which develops advertising campaigns for brands such as Milka, Deutsche Bahn, Aldi and Coca-Cola, agrees. The judgment only affects the complete recording of working hours, he says on request. “Experts assume that this means tracking the beginning and end of the daily working time; This means that the good old time clock could experience a renaissance in the German economy,” says Hechler, adding: “Regulating this by law is an interesting undertaking in times of New Work.” That can only be done with the help of digital solutions. “We’ve already reached a high level of digitization at Ogilvy, so adding another small digital building block isn’t a serious problem.”
