These, for us, radical changes were controversially and heatedly

discussed. Will the employees take advantage of this? Will many

employees skip work in December on the assumption that they have
already done enough, meaning our planned results go unexpectedly
into the negative? After heated debate we decided, despite our
concerns, to implement the changes. The set of rules we now have
is only one and a half pages long.
Two years later we feel reinforced. The removal of bonds and
contraints increases motivation and employee satisfaction, as well
as leading to improved financial and economic results.

Up until 2016 we didn’t pay out overtime and we only allowed

people to reduce a small amount of overtime by taking days off.
Based on employee feedback, we changed this policy in 2017,
essentially telling our competence area managers that they could
decide on overtime leave themselves, as long as their financials
supported this. This policy change contributed to a steep increase in
employee happiness. Unfortunately, we didn’t provide our
managers with the numbers to manage the situation soon enough.
The policy changed in January, but they only received numbers in
July. In addition, the skill to interpret these numbers needed some
honing, which takes time. During that time, most leave requests
from employees were just granted without a second thought. To
make matters worse, we had not agreed on target results for all
business units in relation to each other, leading to a misleading local
focus from everybody involved. When we realized things were
moving into the wrong direction (meaning people didn’t work
enough on customer projects but instead on internal activities), we
asked all employees to make an extra effort for the last months of
the year. They did, and we not only achieved our goal, we even
exceeded it.
The good thing about this mistake is the tremendous amount of
learning we achieved. People today better understand the impact of
their behavior on their numbers. While in January the term “C-
Prod” (average customer days per week) was unknown to almost
everybody, today everyone knows what the impact of changing
even a small fraction of this number means for them and the
company. Also, people largely behave responsibly when it comes to
taking leave. For example, some managers feared employees might
do a lot of overtime during the year and then collectively stay home
for several weeks during Christmas, stripping our customers bare of
support and reducing our profit margins. This didn’t happen. Only
very few individuals took an imbalanced approach between their
individual needs and NovaTec.