The bargaining power of workers has changed radically - interview with György Bőgel

Görgy Bőgel: It's a complex question. It seems to me that in Hungary we have a very serious problem with labour productivity, i.e. how much GDP we produce per working hour. For quite some time now, we have been very much weaker than other countries, and we are among the worst performers in Europe (only Romania and Bulgaria are ahead of us in the ranking - editor's note).In order to have enough time to work in four days and to produce as many products and services in four days as a country or the majority of companies could in five days, productivity needs to increase. Unfortunately, productivity in our country is stuck, it is not increasing, and the spring figures show that the economy is not really trying to get going, so I do not see much chance of introducing this.

So the 4-day workweek seems to be bleeding to death. Is there a way of flexible working that could work in Hungary?

Covid has proven that a lot of work can be done quite efficiently from home. Obviously it depends on the profile, where it works well and where it has caused problems or where it doesn't work at all.I am a proponent of the possibility of introducing hybrid working in many places. There are companies where you have to go on site 2-3 days a week and the rest of the time you can work from home. There are also conditions for this, e.g. the technical conditions to be able to do the work safely from home. In Covid's time, many people tried this out of necessity. This had many advantages, such as saving the time and cost of commuting to work, saving the company on office rent and many other expenses. These were short-term benefits, but the long-term effects, such as the impact of isolation on knowledge sharing, innovation, work morale, people's mental state, will only become clear over a period of years, and not necessarily in a positive way. Perhaps that's why I see a backward-looking "let's go back to the office", at least in part.

But the "back to the office" slogan is not just being issued in our country, but also in more developed economies where GDP would allow working from home. Why?

It's a global trend. Covid was a constraint, not a natural situation. People got it as a sort of "earned right" to work from home, and it is very hard to take that back. But the downsides of the solution, as I said before, have slowly emerged. So to overcome them, the return is a bit forced, but it is being done - even in places where a home office would otherwise work just fine. This is why I think hybrid is going to be the way of the future. Of course, the boundaries between how much indoors and how much outdoors may change in the future depending on economic and other circumstances.

Some companies are worried about whether their employees work at home enough, even though many certainly don't see home working days as days off. Could it be that the problem is inadequate measurement and monitoring of home performance?

Flexibility is very important, I think, for an employee. It is not a new thing. I worked in the early 1980s in a ministry back office, an industrial economics institute, where we worked flexible hours even then. In an initial form, but they started to deviate from everyone working 8-16 hours. You could go earlier or later, the point was that you had to work 8 hours a day. However, there are a lot of jobs where it is uncontrollable who works how many hours, obviously "it's not necessarily" work to go into an office and face it. Where performance is measurable, freer working hours can be given.

The issue of working hours has recently come up in many companies because they want to create a work-life balance, as there is a growing demand for it from employees. What should we look out for? Do you see any good practices?

In the past, there was also a need to feel comfortable in the workplace, to be able to work a suitable work schedule, and for employers to take care of our health. What has changed radically in recent years is that workers have a bargaining position that if those needs are not met, they will move to another job, because we are in a boom economy. Because this has been going on for at least 10 years, there is a generation that has grown up that is used to this. I was at a well being conference the other day and that was all they talked about. So it is in the air because of the demand and also because of the bargaining power. The workforce is strong right now because there is a labour shortage.

You also hear at job fairs and conferences, one of the primary desires of many employees is flexible working hours, at least partial home office...

For a lot of workers this helps a lot, especially in Generation Z or younger. They just started working, just started a family, just want to get an apartment, just had a child, just need to stay home with the child or take him/her to daycare. It was good for me when I had these problems. A lot of people wouldn't even be able to work if they didn't get this. For example, stay-at-home moms, if they work in a home office in a call center job, it's good for everybody. The company gets labour and she gets a job and an income. A worker over 50 with children out of the house obviously has completely different needs.

So what kind of work arrangements can work in the economy that are viable?

A 4-day work week, hybrid working, telecommuting, the introduction of fractional hours can all work in their place. In the 1980s, sociological research led by Csaba Makó already addressed "atypical forms of employment". In some western countries, these were introduced much earlier than in our country. There are two extremes: one is that working hours last from 8 to 16 hours and you have to be in during that time. The other is that I assign tasks and the employee works as he or she can. There are places where this can be done, but not on a construction site or a car assembly line, for example. In a software development company, on the other hand, it's okay to work at night because you can be more efficient.

With the advent of Generation Z and slowly Generation Alpha, there are 4 generations in the workforce. How can you integrate the generations well in the workplace?

In my opinion, this integration is not an easy task. It's not easy to have up to 4 generations working together in a large workplace and it's a lesson for managers, but it's also true I think that this topic is a bit over-driven. I don't see much conflict in this, too much novelty, maybe the number of generations on the field at the same time is unusual. But in a larger workplace, young and old used to work together. A good manager can "checkmate" tasks by which ones are entrusted to the older worker, which ones to the young, and how these people can work together. Of course, you can't use the same tools to motivate, manage and control employees of different generations.

There is a lot of talk about artificial intelligence these days, with many experts predicting it will disrupt the job market, leading many to fear losing their jobs. How realistic do you think this is?

I think it will cause significant changes, but nowhere near the amount of froth this case is generating. With new technologies, there is always this notion of the hype cycle, which is about trying to make people believe that "those who miss out are left behind" when technologies are developed and promoted at huge expense. Of course, every major technological change so far has caused changes, sometimes radical ones - e.g. agricultural mechanisation has affected 70% of the workforce. A hundred years ago, 70% of workers were in agriculture, now it's only maybe 2%. I don't think AI will cause such changes, but it can certainly be used in many places. It could also create many new jobs. It could take over from people in medical diagnostics, quality control, supply chain management, customer service and many other areas, but I don't fear massive unemployment.

What are you working on these days, what topics are you interested in?