The more the merrier - a phrase which we have often used in our daily lives has crept into the office spaces, where sometimes the employees as well as employers gauge it (working hours) as a tool to define Productivity.

Needless to say - when the end result is a shoddy job or missing deadlines or "not to the benchmark" output, management is often left squandering to find the reason for a poor performance. Somehow a belief has crept in with today’s work culture, where employees are made to believe that they need to work long hours in order to get more work done and succeed in professional life.

We at Grazing Minds supported a young researcher completing his/her PhD thesis who surprisingly debunked this belief. In this research, the researcher found that productivity declines sharply when a person works more than 50 hours a week.
Infact if you put more than 55 hours a week, the drop in productivity is so high that adding more hours to your work schedule becomes pointless. Also those slogging upto 70 hours a week are delivering work equal to someone who put's in 55 hours!!!

This research concludes that people get more done when they work fewer hours, and less done when they work more hours

Working fewer hours leads to happier, healthier and a more engaged workforce - which allow people to feel more rested, gives better ability to juggle tasks or even spend less time distracted by personal thoughts. This also helps keep workplace maladies like burnout, boreout and depression at bay.

Let's validate this with data even!

Within Europe, Greece has one of the longest working weeks, however it comes at the bottom in the OECD’s measure of GDP per hour worked. Similarly Japan is another country, where culture of long working hours does not resonate with increased productivity.
As a result, Japan is now working on minimising overtime and using innovative mechanisms like turning Off lights at the end the day to reverse this trend of over-working.

The future
There are multiple reasons why shorter working hours is not the holy grail for success. It just won’t work for every role or every industry. More so in the client-focused jobs with potentially deepening inequalities, streamlining working practices will also require significant up-front organisation.

Experiment have demonstrated that removing a few hours from the workweek actually does make a difference. Companies are doing beta experiments by shaving a day or a few hours off the workweek and gauge productivity levels - which interestingly are on the higher side!!!

We must exercise caution and thoughtfulness when implementing such radical models of work, however post WFH becoming the new norm - this just could be the right time to try!!!!