A YOUNG media entrepreneur is igniting an office revolution in Germany with her bestselling suggestions for bringing Prussian discipline back to the workplace.

With the German economy in a desperate state, employers are snapping up her book, which banishes table football games, flirting at the sandwich trolley, private e-mailing, idle gossip and English business jargon. The return of the German work ethic has been ordained by Judith Mair, 30, who for three years has been successfully applying the principles in her Cologne-based web design and advertising company.

Her point, advanced in Fun is Out, is that the boundary between work and leisure has become too blurred. Working hours stretch into the evening and, to compensate, time-wasting “fun” has been brought into the office. Throw out the fun, make working time more effective, and Germans will boost their productivity and recover their lives. The office, she says, has become too intimate and too sloppy.

The Mair system might just catch on. The German government press office, for example, has already introduced clocking in and questions all telephone calls longer than ten minutes. Frau Mair wants medical evidence of illness and that too seems to be the trend again. Recently, a woman collapsed in a Berlin newspaper office and, having gone home for the day, had to produce a medical chit the next morning.

The Germans, on paper at least, put in far less office time than people in Britain or the United States — 1,480 hours a year, compared with 1,720 in Britain and 1,979 in the US. But that figure is distorted by longer public holidays and part-time working — in most German companies the trend is towards the Anglo-Saxon model, with work increasingly consuming leisure time and yet losing effectiveness.

Frau Mair blames “team management” that protects weak performers and confuses the lines of command. She also claims that the social conformity of office life has got out of control: “If you don’t go with colleagues for the weekly visit to the sushi bar, or chat next to the coffee machine, if you prefer to lunch alone on a park bench or leave early from one celebratory drinks party or another, then sooner or later you get marginalised.” The intimacy of the office can poison rather than oil the daily routine.

A clear separation of private and office personalities makes it easier to take criticism, reduces the role of office politics and boosts productivity.

“The rules of our grandmothers were not so bad,” says Frau Mair, who refuses to give details about her private life. “They are: conscientious work, punctuality, accuracy.” When her company moved into a Cologne building, she could see software designers in neighbouring offices playing table tennis and brainstorming in baseball caps. They have since gone bankrupt.

Frau Mair has drawn the moral: fun is out. There will be no Christmas party this year. Or any year.

And no laughing

Judith Mair’s golden rules include:

• Working Monday to Friday only from 9am to 5.30pm
• A half-hour lunch break for which a stand-in is found
• No work taken home
• All desks cleared by the end of the day
• Conversations about non-business subjects to be no more than five minutes
• No laughing. “There is no place for anyone who thinks that the only good work is work that is fun”
• Mobile phones to be switched off in the office. Private e-mailing at lunchtime
• Colleagues should be addressed formally. No one has to be cheerful. Grumpiness is tolerated if it does not interfere with work
• Working clothes to be issued wherever possible. Frau Mair has introduced a stewardess-like uniform in her own company
• Employees are discouraged from meeting after hours and are under instruction not to talk shop.
• Banned words include: workflow, deadline, briefing, brainstorming
• No skateboards, no baseball caps

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