- At the Hiritik At cooperative, they decided that working hours should be 32 hours a week, "because we understand that work should not take up most of life." To measure working time, a tool has been developed to take control of hours. The table is "simple" and over time the work areas have been very focused: unpaid jobs for the community, internal organization and time since graduation are also included in this table. This tool allows them to take control of their own working hours, balance team work and know how much time they have spent on each client project. The objective, in any case, is to "ensure the most adequate, most appropriate living conditions". We set up companies with a transformative social economy to change the world, but changing the world doesn't make sense if we don't change our daily lives, our practices, our company status. For us this is very important: we want to live well, we want to have good conditions".
When the Hiritik At cooperative was created, the working week of these workers was 35 hours. "After a year we got better incomes and we were able to choose between raising wages or reducing working hours. We are committed to reducing working hours because we understand that in companies with a transformative social economy, work should not be the one that occupies most of life". Since then they have been working on a 32-hour working day.
How do you really do the 32-hour day?
"We have a great entrepreneurial spirit in the transformative social economy and there is a risk of falling into self-exploitation," he added. To avoid it, they started counting the hours from the beginning. Each one has his/her own report of hours, no one else controls it, but it is important to leave these hours recorded internally, as it provides a lot of information to organize the work group. Facing the outside, this tool allows measuring the profitability of each project: "If we do a job for x money and we dedicate many more hours of those than those corresponding to that money, that may mean that we have to work between 8 and 10 hours a day. It is important to know where the balance is: to do the work with quality, but without exploiting it."
A custom-made Excell table
There are a thousand applications on the Internet to measure working times. However, Hiritik At started with a simple excell table, which over time has defined and developed to his measure: "We work on projects and write in the table what budget we have for each project. We make a forecast of hours and a distribution among the workers according to the workloads of each one of them. The work of the company is also taken into account in their distribution: administration, communication... and also training, community work... we have stipulated the current responsibilities of each in the company and the percentage of the day we offer for each type of work, and we are anticipating and balancing the work of the coming months".
This tool does not seek the accuracy of hyper per minute: "We spent less than five minutes a day filling this table. For example, we'd write. 'I spent an hour on this project, another hour on this meeting'... and we also have generic bags, for example, if I spent half an hour answering emails, I would put 'project management' in the general bag."
Time does not always depend on the budget
The "Community works" section shown in the Excell table lists the jobs requested by the popular movements that will be carried out without charge: "We have defined that every worker can spend several hours a year on them," he said.
The number of hours dedicated to each project does not always depend on the budget: "We can recognize a project as having a different value, it may have a special interest for us, and in that case, maybe we don't look for economic profitability. But the table allows us to check that in a project we have spent the hours and we have to try to fine-tune the number of hours left or vice versa."
Maintain a sense of balance in the work team
This tool facilitates the prediction and monitoring of the work. "It's very good at keeping the sense of balance in the team," he added.
In the workplace they do not have a fixed schedule and each worker organizes their daily schedule: "One day we can spend fewer hours at work or none, to respond to the circumstances of life, and reclaim those hours other days. We use this tool to take control of the hours."
Looking forward
The large amount of data that can be extracted from this table is analyzed in different meetings: the profitability of the projects is reviewed once a year, but every two months of operation of each worker... for the future, they want to make a more systematized analysis of all this information.
Hiritik At will continue to develop the Hour Control Tool with the clear objective of: "We won't get rich at work, but working six hours and twenty minutes a day, with a decent wage, is the most amazing thing. The transformative social economy must aspire not to fall into self-exploitation."
FICHE
What it does: Combine the transformation of space with social transformation.
Workers and partners: 7 working partners, 1 worker
Created: 2013.
Residence: Irun and Bilbao.
Contact: hiritik-at@hiritik-at.eus