Working times in Germany: Representative results from the BAuA-Working Time Survey

Introduction: In a changing world of work, aspects of working times reflect changes and trends of work and private lives. Working times play a key role for employees’ health and well-being. Thus, the Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (BAuA) initiated the biennial BAuA-Working Time Survey (WTS) in 2015 to describe working time realities in Germany as well as to investigate relationships of working time, health and well-being of employees.

Material and Methods: The BAuA-WTS includes various aspects of working time arrangements, but also other working conditions as well as health and job satisfaction in a Computer Assisted Telephone Interview (CATI). There are special modules on key topics in each wave. The fourth wave of the panel study will be finished by the end of 2021 and deals with the Corona pandemic.

Results: We give an overview on working time duration and overtime, shiftwork and weekend work, working time control, variability of working time, on-call work and permanent availability. The results show that several working time demands are quite common in Germany, such as weekend work and working overtime.

Conclusions: The BAuA-WTS constitutes a long term project with the aim to provide representative, reliable and longitudinal data on working time and its consequences for German employees. Actual challenges of working time organizations are - next to globalization and digitization - the socio-ecological transformation and the Corona pandemic. The BAuA-WTS is tracking these changes to ignite discussions about healthy working time organization in the scientific and political debate.

The complete article is published in the Journal "Safety and Health at Work" (2022).

Bibliographic information

Title:  Working times in Germany: Representative results from the BAuA-Working Time Survey. 

Written by:  N. Backhaus, I. Entgelmeier, J. Nold, L. Vieten, A. Tisch

in: Safety and Health at Work, Volume 13, Supplement: 33rd International Congress on Occupational Health 07.02.-10.02.2022, 2022.  pages: S262, Project number: F 2508, PDF file, DOI: 10.1016/j.shaw.2021.12.1569

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Further Information

Research Project

Project numberF 2508 StatusOngoing Project Working time reporting for Germany: Implementation of the BAuA-Working Time Surveys 2021, 2023, and 2025

To the Project

Research ongoing