Technical jargon: What does "FTE" mean?

If you want to brag about the size of your department at cocktail parties or other occasions where simple conversation is a competition of linguistic abbreviations, it's best to talk about FTEs. The abbreviation originates from English and has recently become very widespread here. It stands for Full Time Equivalent and is a key figure for employee planning. In German it would be called Vollzeitäquivalenz, but VZA sounds more like an office and less like a dynamic, free market economy. And the corresponding term "headcounts" was at some point too bellicose even for the most hardened, since the industry is considered casual and not necessarily military. That's why everyone now talks about FTEs and defines their self-esteem by how big this number is.

Number of employees at risk

When a marketing manager mentions to an agency head that he needs 12 new FTEs next year instead of 5, he actually means three things: "1. I'm more successful in the case than you are, and 2. I'm planning to insource, and 3. Find new clients or you'll have to cut jobs at your agency!" But what does the value - besides its implicit messages - say in purely mathematical terms? An FTE actually refers to the ratio of hours paid to the number of hours worked in a given period (day, week, month, year).Thus, it is used to quantify employees, regardless of the difference in total hours worked. Excluded from this figure are freelancers, gig workers and interns, of which it is well known that agencies and large companies are teeming. So an FTE will hardly tell the truth about how many employees are actually working, especially where a contemporary approach to flexible working hours is non-existent.

*Benno Maggi is co-founder and CEO of Partner & Partner. He created the section "Vom Fach" in the NZZ FOLIO and was in charge of it for years. He presents and decodes words and terms that can be used either for small talk, being important, getting excited, playing Scrabble or simply for fun.