It's great that your organization is responsible about it. Sounds like there's a great deal of trust in your organization.
It sounds like there are numerous ways for this to go badly - ie: when it gets noticed that you went over 37.5 hours in some organizations that might start to be a blame game, or you'd start getting requests to "we need it done, but we also need you to do it off the clock so we don't get into trouble for breaking EU regs".
It's great that your organization sees that people might be in trouble and has a mature (aka: not blaming) attitude. I guess I always assume organizations will adopt ROWE without making the appropriate cultural changes.
just to briefly defend the EU - the 37.5 hour mandate is how much a contract can oblige you to work, not how much work you can actually do. That was, more controversially, recently capped at 60 hours per week or something, which was a massive problem for medical students/interns who wanted to qualify in less than 10 years.
Back to the company, by the time I left the culture had morphed a bit, and people were encouraged to work extra hours to compensate for their slip, where necessary. Still much better than (what I hear of) the US, where stupidly long hours are expected (apparently).
It sounds like there are numerous ways for this to go badly - ie: when it gets noticed that you went over 37.5 hours in some organizations that might start to be a blame game, or you'd start getting requests to "we need it done, but we also need you to do it off the clock so we don't get into trouble for breaking EU regs".
It's great that your organization sees that people might be in trouble and has a mature (aka: not blaming) attitude. I guess I always assume organizations will adopt ROWE without making the appropriate cultural changes.