Less is More When It Comes to Productivity

Conventional wisdom is that hard work pays off, and the harder and more you work, the more productive you are. Or is that a myth? There is abundant evidence to prove the reverse. Studies have shown that the most successful and wealthy people work substantially fewer hours, and the poorest, lowest-paid workers work the most.

According to the OECD, between 1977 and 2017, full-time employees in the U.S. increased their average working hours by .5 hours to a 47.1-hour workweek, and the numbers have been rising since. In contrast, in most European countries, the workweek is 35 hours, with Canada at 40. In contrast, the average workweek in South Korea and Japan is 30% longer.

In their?Hidden Brain Drain Task Force?study published in the?Harvard Business Review,?authors Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Carolyn Buck Luce state that professionals are working harder than ever and that the 40-hour work week is a thing of the past. Catherine Ornstein, author of?No Longer Is The American Dream Ozzie Nelson of Father Knows Best, It's Donald Trump and Survivor in the Office Tower,?argues workaholism is a reflection of our culture's embrace of an extreme ethos. For many professionals, work is the center of their social life and friendships. Personal connections, once made exclusively through family, friends and civic organizations, are now made in the workplace.

There are other social issues related to how much people are working. European attitudes toward work, where the social fabric including the welfare of children and quality of life are more important, are very different than North American attitudes toward work. Unlike Scandinavian countries--which have pursued a humanization of work agenda with the emphasis on equal opportunity, childcare, gender equity and the central role of the family--the U.S., the U.K. have turned away from a consensual approach toward political polarities. Canada is somewhere in the middle of these two positions.

The way most of us work isn't working. Study after study has shown that companies are experiencing a crisis in employee engagement. A Towers Perrin survey of nearly 90,000 employees worldwide, for instance, found that only 21% felt fully engaged at work and nearly 40% were disenchanted or disengaged. That negativity has a direct impact on the bottom line. Towers Perrin found that companies with low levels of employee engagement had a 33% annual decline in operating income and an 11% annual decline in earnings growth. Those with high engagement, on the other hand, reported a 19% increase in operating income and 28% growth in earnings per share.

In an article in the?Harvard Business Review, Tony Schwartz, CEO of the Energy Project and the author of?The Way We're Working Isn't Working: The Four Forgotten Needs That Energize Great Performance,?describes how a decade ago his company, the Energy Project, examined work performance and the problem of employee disengagement. Schwartz says, "we believed that burnout was one of its leading causes, and we focused almost exclusively on helping individuals avoid it by managing their energy, as opposed to their time. Time, after all, is finite. By contrast, you can expand your personal energy and also regularly renew it."

Schwartz ?conducted a poll on?Huffington Post?about people’s experience in the workplace. Of 1200 respondents, 60% said they took less than 20 minutes a day for lunch, 20% admitted they took less than 10 minutes and 25% said they never left their desks. That’s consistent with a study by the?American Dietetic Association, which found? 75% of office workers eat lunch at their desk at least two days a week.

In his previous book, written with Jim Loehr,?The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal, he argues that productivity means "managing energy in all facets of our lives. Emotional depth and resilience depend on active engagement with others and with our own feelings."

Schwartz argues that once people understand how their supply of available energy is influenced by the choices they make, they can learn new strategies that increase the fuel in their tanks and boost their productivity. If people define precise times at which to do highly specific activities, these new behaviors eventually become automatic and no longer require conscious will and discipline. They include practices such as shutting down your e-mail for a couple of hours during the day, so you can tackle important or complex tasks without distracting interruptions, or taking a daily 3 PM walk to get an emotional and mental breather.

There is little evidence to link by cause and effect that working harder and longer improves productivity, but there is considerable evidence to show the reverse, and that it's not the management of time that may be the key to employee productivity, but the management of energy.

Evidence suggests that one of the biggest advantages of working fewer weekly hours is that it makes people better workers. Research shows people get more done when they work fewer hours, and less done when they work more hours. For example, a 2014 study from Stanford University by John Pencavel suggested that productivity?plummets after working 50 hours a week. After 55 hours, productivity drops so much that putting in any more hours becomes pointless. other experts suggest?35 hours?as the optimal work time before productivity begins to decline, while one school of thought says we should only work?six hours per day.??

“Buyness is not a means to accomplishment, but an obstacle to it,” writes Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, a Stanford scholar and author of Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less.”

One?high-profile study?in Iceland, conducted from 2015 to 2019, followed more than 2,500 government workers across diverse workplaces that went from 40-hour weeks to either 35 or 36-hour weeks with the same pay. The researchers found that the majority of offices saw productivity either?remained the same, or even improved. For example, in the Reykjavík accountancy department, workers processed 6.5% more invoices once they started working fewer hours; at a police station, meanwhile, the shorter workweek didn’t negatively affect the number of investigative cases closed.

The productivity boost derived from shorter working hours is about more than streamlining processes and incentivising employees with days off, however. A key factor, say experts, is that working fewer hours leads to happier, healthier, more engaged workforces.

We know that working long hours takes a toll on wellbeing. But shorter hours, that allow people to?feel more rested, better able to juggle?complex caring needs?or even just spend less time?distracted by personal tasks?at work, come with a health and wellbeing boost as well as keeping workplace maladies like burnout,?boreout?and depression at bay.

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