Nope, working in Norway, I can confirm that the office gets very empty very quickly after 16:00, and more than once have I been reminded not to stay all day when I was still at my desk around 17:00.
No in the Netherlands and then northern EU after that. The edge (which I notice too) is that you seem stronger if you have the balls to show up late, even if there are people 'higher up' in the room (or people you want something from). Anecdotal: in a meeting with an AXA director and his colleagues (a potential client) I was 45 minutes late (not on purpose, I don't do it on purpose) and he said; 'here is a guy who is more important than I am wink wink'. We got the project and we became friends.
Must say that in NL in the beginning of my career I always was punctual (getting up 1 hour early to make sure I was there ahead of time); when I stopped doing that, I got more successful. Not sure if that's related, but I also have no more stress, so I'm not changing that myself.
No, but taking a few hours off is annoying if it means you have to reschedule a bunch of things. I would much rather run “errand” type things like this in the early morning before work.
When I worked in Austria and Germany, most employees started between 6:00 and 8:00 AM at the latest. Although there was nothing against coming in after 9:00 AM due to flex-time, it would guarantee you'd miss all the morning coffee chit-chat with internal company gossip and by the time you'd leave work and head to the city, the shops would already be close to closing.
Yes, I usually leave at 9:15 arrive around 10 and leave around 5 or 6. As a software engineer my deadlines etc don’t lend themselves to a strict 9-5 approach.
I'm highly sceptical of this meme online that office workers in Scandinavia, Germany etc quickly get their work done and focus on productivity and leave as early as they can each day instead of waiting till 1730 or whatever. I know better now that this doesn't actually exist anymore these days.
Very much no. I log in around 8:00am, and log off around 4:00pm. On Wednesday's we have a team meeting at 4:30pm that I will join via my phone with airpods while I'm away from my home office, typically playing a game with my kids, and I bill for that extra half hour.
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