Diary of a balancing act

In Berlin, Ian Wylie discovers why cabbies have work-life balance off to a tee

This is not an insult, just an observation: Germans don't like to queue. I must have been beaten to at least a dozen cabs at Berlin Schönefeld airport last week until I learned the knack of hurdling Samsonites and luggage trolleys before lunging at a door handle.

In the end, the taxi I bagged was the oldest, clapped-out Mercedes on the rank. But at the wheel was Oskar, the first cabbie I've met who looked the spit of Willie Nelson. Oskar was keen to try out his English, and after we'd exhausted the forthcoming World Cup ("Ja, of course our stadiums are ready") he launched into the topic of golf.

Oskar had taken up golf in the past couple of years. Before the Wall came down there were just two golf courses within driving distance of east Berlin, and they were reserved for senior party apparatchiks. Other golfing enthusiasts had to "kiss feet", Oskar told me, to get a round.

When I arrived at my hotel, Oskar opened the rusty boot to proudly present his sand wedge. It reminded me that a taxi driver in Newcastle had once reached under his seat to show me his baseball bat - but that wasn't for sporting purposes.

Oskar spends two hours every day playing golf before he starts work. How many working people do you know that have the flexibility to play golf, or pursue any other hobby, for two hours every day?

But taxi drivers know a thing about work-life balance. They work only the hours they want to. They can knock off when they want to. They can work nights if they want to. They can stay in bed if they want to. They have complete flexibility over their working hours.

They have to Dettol the vomit from their backseats on Saturday nights, but most would agree that's a small price to escape the 9-to-5 office straitjacket. Taxi drivers ply their trade in a working world of flexibility while we toil in workplaces obsessed with presence, not productivity.

Most of us want to be trusted to do our work the way we feel is best for us. Yet for all the puff about the rise of flexible working, there's less flexitime available today than a decade ago. According to the TUC, flexitime was on offer to 14.9% of employees in 1995 compared with 11.5% last year, while 6.2% had annualised hours in 1995 against just 4.7% last year. (Annualised hours is where staff are contracted to work a basic number of hours with agreed extra hours set aside if needed.)

Do we really need to still debate whether clocking on at 9am and clocking off at 5pm is past its retirement age? Most studies show that giving workers some leeway to modify their working hours improves employee satisfaction, increases productivity, cuts labour turnover and reduces absenteeism.

Many women (and some men) with children or dependent parents are doing their bit to chip away at the rigid working day. But most end up dropping to part-time hours or stumping up cash for full-time child or elder care.

Here's an snapshot of how it could be. At the Minneapolis HQ of electronics retailer Best Buy, bosses don't care when 2,000 employees show up for work - so long as their jobs get done. The company goes way beyond offering variable starting and finishing hours - what most UK companies call flexitime. Instead, Best Buy calibrates the performance of its workers against the achievement of company goals rather than the hours they're at their desks. It sounds a gamble, but if it didn't work, Best Buy wouldn't have extended the perk to half its employees.

It demands a change of mindset, where workers are treated, and behave, as agents, not employees - in the same way taxi drivers are self-employed but attached to a single cab firm.

So, how come tax drivers are so far ahead of the curve? Maybe it's because doing "the knowledge" is a form of rote-learning and scientists have just learned that this swells the brain.

But of course, taxi drivers knew that already.