British Workers and their Tea Breaks

Bingo! We've had both British and a variety of eastern Europeans in to do jobs on this flat over the past few years and frankly, the eastern Europeans work circles around the Brits. Our limited experience has been that they have been faster, cheaper and have done better quality work. 

Reminds me of a documentary from a few years ago that ran on BBC1 called "The Day the Immigrants Left".  They replaced Eastern Europeans at a farm and Indian waiters at a restaurant with British people who were unemployed.  It did not go well.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00r3qyw

Hi,

A slightly different perspective for you all!

In my previous family business, we would do many calculations and one of them was the 'cost' to us for two 15 minute breaks for our staff. Over a year the cost was a smidgeon under £25,000 !

We'd also calculate the cost to us for when staff 'sneakily' took an extra 5-10 minutes here and there for lunch etc. Although an 'estimate' as we obviously didn't know 100% if everyone was taking sneaky extra minutes, we averaged it out at about £5000 in lost productivity time.

When our 'lazier' staff would then ask for pay rises.. ..   

But your calculations fail to take into account the cost to you if your then miserable staff started leaving and you had to keep training new people.

Reminds me of a documentary from a few years ago that ran on BBC1 called "The Day the Immigrants Left".  They replaced Eastern Europeans at a farm and Indian waiters at a restaurant with British people who were unemployed.  It did not go well.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00r3qyw

Oh I remember that documentary! The Day the Immigrants Left, Part-2/6

Dennis, I thought employers were required to give at least one 15-minute break if someone works six hours?

In my previous family business, we would do many calculations and one of them was the 'cost' to us for two 15 minute breaks for our staff. Over a year the cost was a smidgeon under £25,000 !

We'd also calculate the cost to us for when staff 'sneakily' took an extra 5-10 minutes here and there for lunch etc. Although an 'estimate' as we obviously didn't know 100% if everyone was taking sneaky extra minutes, we averaged it out at about £5000 in lost productivity time.

Out of interest, what sort of business was it?

Because I often wonder at these sort of stats and unless it's a production line that has to stop it's difficult to quantify. Yes you can base it purely on what the hourly rate of a person is, but providing the work is being done then it's difficult to say that  a tea break etc is actually costing you money.

Hi,

Chary - as we owned the business fully 85% of our staff were great! we all got on well, although we were the bosses and owners, we felt as though everyone felt like part of the team as it were and thus, we gave plenty of leighway and benefits off the cuff and not necessarily 'part of a contract' - flexibility is great when you are the owners and can help and be there for staff when things are needed etc. Sure we had 'miserable' staff who thought by skiving off at every opportunity, calling in sick often on mondays when we knew they'd been out partying hard etc, doing as little work as possible etc, and when it came to meetings discussiing their performance after 3 months or so, we'd just say goodbye to them. The calculations were based on us just looking at their hourly rates of pay and us seeing how much they skived off etc. Our other 'good' staff were great in comparison ! the figures were an average overall   for 'training' it wasn't hard to train someone to 'pick that up and move it there' as such! our more capable staff were chosen and offered jobs based on their ability to carry out their tasks and 'overall' didn't need much training

Morgan - we gave two official breaks some were on 10 am starts and 4pm finishes, other's asked if they could come in early some days and be let off early for various reasons, other's didn't mind coming in on saturdays to 'help out' 

Tykeman - Importing, warehousing, distribution and retail in the motor sector. Started small, and with effective strategy, rocketed to the 2nd biggest specialists in the UK within about 10 months - went from 3 to 28 staff, a mix of office and warehouse mainly. I know exactly what you mean about the really complex ways of calculating productivity etc, however although not that in depth, we knew within a few hundred pounds or so our costs.. as it was our pockets it was coming out from

Costs in a business are exactly those, 'costs' - drilling down in other areas for instance, we did work out our per unit storage costs based on the 24,000 Sq Ft we had for storage space and then went on to drill down by 'colour' for certain products - I then re-jigged the warehouse so we could get to our most popular products quicker, sounds easy when I type it, but a mission when 16 containers per month were turning up at the premises and forklifts needed to move each 'item' !

We were MUCH more  concerned with those much more important areas of our costs, the tea break thing was one of those bits where could do it when we had the chance to!

Cheers, DtM! West London & Slough UK!