ECWTD protects Employees from Karoshi

In the news today is a story from Japan about a Toyota employee who died from karoshi – overwork.  The employee in question was regularly working 80+ hours a week, weekends and evenings, on the development of a new car.

Although the UK has one of the longest working weeks in Europe, in Japan things are more serious, with a formal condition, sudden death from overwork, being given it’s own name – Karoshi.

The EC Working Time directive is their to protect employees, to ensure that their working week is not excessive.  In fact the Road Transport industry has it’s own directive; the Road Transport Directive, to cope with the unique requirements of the industry.

The thing is that the ECWTD doesn’t apply to people running their own business, and a recent survey undertaken by Fantasy Couriers reveals that around 70% of small business owners would describe themselves are working “full time and a half” or “excessively”.

So this is something that we have brought into the game.  Your employees will be bound by the rules and regulations of the EWTD and the RTD, and if you’re a sole trader, doing all of the courier work yourself, then you’re allowed a bit of extra slack, to be able to do up to 60 hours of jobs a week on the game. 

So, you’ll have to think carefully about how you plan and schedule those routes, and which jobs you accept and quote for.  Can 2 drivers cover the trip in one working day, or is it cheaper to send one man on an overnighter?  All of this needs your carefull skill and consideration.

Who said white van man had it easy??

Do holidays make you not want to go back to work?

Although the weather is a bit crap, the summer holidays are still here, and with them comes that horrible “I don’t want to go back to work” feeling.   In the UK, nearly 500,000 people a year start up their own business, being their own boss instead of working for a company that they don’t like working for, and that doesn’t appreciate them.

We have lots of people emailing us and asking if playing Fantasy Couriers will help them build their skills and experience in the business world.  And the challenges in Fantasy Courier will stretch you.  You’ll have to juggle staff, jobs, premises, vans, and make enough profit at the end of it to pay yourself, and build the profits.

The experiences that you get playing the game will help you assess how good you are at running your own business, and although you may be thinking about starting a totally different type of business a lot of the situations, and concerns will be the same.

But the good thing about the game is that it IS fantasy.  And if you make a lot of mistakes you CAN start again, but without the bank manager chasing you!

Introducing, the new addition………

 

Da Da!!!!

Wimbledon Fever in Fantasy HQ

You may have thought that Wimbledon finished at the weekend, but you would be mistaken.  We have in fact been playing logo tennis here for several days.  Batting the thing backwards and forwards like Venus & Serena for days on end.

Well, after slogging it out, and being stuck at “deuce”, we now have a result.  And it’s definitely Game, Set & Match.  We called in the heavyweight (Mark Ballantyne http://www.eagleimagery.co.uk/) who amazingly has turned around a marvelous logo for us within 24 hours.  The difficult bit was incorporating the “game” element, it’s easy to produce a corporate logo, but game ones are a little trickier, in fact the first logo (which we all loved dearly) had a very strong resemblence to the scooby doo van!!

When will we let you see it – soon.  We promise.  It’s first outing will be here on the blog.  And then expect to see it EVERYWHERE!!!!!

Commissioning Viral Videos

Our big one to sort out this week was the commissioning of our viral video campaign.  We want something that’s going to be really funny, and have a wonderful “hook” to bring people to the websites.

We put out requests to three different agencies and got three different ideas back, along with the one that we came up with ourselves.  All of them totally different.  Some of them absolutely brilliant. 

So, we’ve chosen one, and I can’t tell you anything about it it’s a secret…….  But I can say that you won’t be disappointed.   Work starts next week, and they’ll be coming to you in a few weeks time.  Keep this page bookmarked because they’ll be here first.