Impact of Limited Working Hours

on Productivity

Organization Behavior
Group – 7 | Sec - F
Term-1 | 2018

Kunal (0414/55) Shelley Singh (0443/55)
Manish Anand (0417/55) Ephraim Bhaskar Katikala (0403/55)
Akriti Gupta (0384/55) Cynial Alexander Kerketta (0401/55
Ankur (0392/55) Rondla Nikitha Reddy (0436/55)

List of Contents

• Objectives
• Literature review
• Demographic of Survey
• Updated Mindmap (Based on Survey)
• Factors Analysed and Results from Survey
• Scope of future explorations
• References
• Survey Questions

Objective

Productivity of an employee depends on factors like the amount of work, health of the employee, work
culture and gender (under certain circumstances).
In the following report we have presented the results from the primary research carried out in a
controlled environment of 93 respondents to understand the impact of limiting the working hours on
the above mentioned factors which directly impact the productivity.

Literature Review

Limiting the number of working hours is not a new concept. Robert Owen[1] in early 19th century
demanded for ten-hour work days while simultaneously setting a goal to reach eight-hour work days
universally. In early 20th century, Ford motors implemented eight-hour[2] work day and doubled the per
day income for it’s factory workers. This model was a huge success and immediately boosted productivity
and loyalty for the company among it’s employees and was widely adopted by a lot of manufacturing
companies at that time.
Cyril Northcott Parkinson once jokingly wrote “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its
completion”.
We examined the impact of limiting the working hours on productivity by dividing our workforce in 2
parts, the first fits the description above by Parkinson (people with fixed working hours and less work)
and the second group who have to remain productive for longer hours.
For the first group, reducing working hours does not directly lead to increased productivity as people are
used to completing a certain task in fixed number of hours but it makes them happy and based on a
research[1] done by University of Warwick, happy employees are more productive than their
counterparts(happiness shocks[3]) This will not only get the same task done in less time but will also result
in increasing the happiness quotient of the employees for a fixed period of time.
For the second group, it is difficult to gauge the effect of reduced working hours. We looked at research[4]
done by Stanford University to understand how overworking is negatively related to productivity. They
evaluated the marginal effects of working longer hours. For a person working 8 hours per day, he/she
might be most productive during the first few hours of that day and with time their productivity keeps
decreasing and eventually become negative which leads to mistakes and more time spent on reworking.
This is also valid for working more days in a week where probably the last day will be the least productive.
On the health front, a study was conducted in an elderly care facility in Gothenburg, Sweden in 2015
with 68 full time nurses to assess the impact of reduced work hours (from 8 hours to 6 hours) on the
productivity and health of employees[5]. The experiment was done for a period of 23 months and the
nurses were paid the same wages despite working for lesser hours. One of the nurses reported, “I used
to be exhausted all the time, I would come home from work and pass out on the sofa. But now I have
much more energy for my work, and for family life”. In addition, there was a 4.7 % drop in sick leaves
after reduction in work hours. After witnessing the positive effects of elderly care facility, Gothenburg’s
Sahlgrenska University hospital also reduced the work hours from eight to six. Most of the roles in

2

hospitals and health care facilities require high level of attention and so limiting working hours takes off
a lot of stress from personnel and is imperative to maintain the efficiency in their jobs.
The literature above suggest that long working hours lead to accumulation of fatigue and has a negative
impact on health but the impact on health is different for men and women. As per a study[6] conducted
by Department of Environmental Health, Harvard School of Public Health for 96,915 workers, women
had an odds ratio (Given an injury, it was a women) of 1.69 compared to 1.02 for men. They concluded
their research by affirmatively saying that women are more prone to the adverse effects of long hours
than men. Reducing number of working hours will encourage women to take jobs with higher pay at
high level of hierarchies[7].
Apart from the adverse affects on health, maternity poses a substantial burden on working women in
terms of time as well as health. Often, maternity leave results into career lag of about 1-2 years for
women. This usually happens because it takes significant amount of time for women to catch up with
the work after they return from maternity leaves. Therefore, decrease in number of working hours will
allow women to take shorter maternity leaves as this way they can manage child responsibility as well as
work with maximum efficiency. In this case, lesser working hours result in women to have positive
attitude towards job and less psychological distress resulting in higher productivity.
On the culture front, a case study for a leading French Retail store illustrated that reduced working hours
actually led to increase in employee productivity and increase in competitiveness among salespersons to
achieve pre-defined targets in reduced time. The same study indicated different results for managers. The
implementation would oblige the managers to ‘control’ the working time of their employees as per the
new structure because these employees wouldn’t be paid for the extra working time. There was higher
level of tension in work relationships as employees would feel they were being controlled and watched
all the time for being efficient[8].

Demography of Survey


Total Respondents: 93
Gender Distribution Marital Status

14
29

64
79

Female Male Unmarried Married

Work Ex in months Time Spent in Office

2 3
21 15
31 21

11

30 52

0 - 12 13 - 24 25 - 36 >36 Not Applicable <8 hours 8-10 hours

11-13 hours >13 hours

Updated Mind Map

Factors considered Subdivision Positive effects Negative effects Areas of exploration

Fig: Research design using Mind Mapping of impact of limited working hours on various factors

Factors analyzed & Survey Results

1. Amount of work and working hours

Actual no. of hours worked Total hours spent in office

14
11 12 21
8 7 15
56 5 6
4
11
7 9 9
3 3 5
2 1 21 2 3 2 2 2 2

upto 4 4 - 6 hours 6 - 8 hours 8 - 10 hours >10 hours upto 8 hours between 8 and between 11 more than 13
hours 10 hours and 13 hours hours

0 - 12 mos 13 - 24 mos 25 - 36 mos >36 mos 0 - 12 mos 13 - 24 mos 25 - 36 mos >36 mos

It is evident from the graphs above that the people spend much more time in office than it is required
for them to complete their daily tasks. For example, 58% of the respondents spend between 8 and 10
hours in office but only 9% of the respondents actually work for 8-10 hours.
Also, to draw further inferences we categorized underworked employees as people working for less
than 6 hours and overworked employees as people working for more than 8 hours. (This is just to test
our initial thoughts on under and
82.5 85.7
overworked employees, there is no
theory suggesting the same and this
area can be explored further)
25 28.6
We observed that overworked and
underworked employees had similar
It will be easy to adapt to Limited It will be more difficult to meet responses to adaptability to the new
Working Hours targets regime and difficulty in meeting
Underworked (< 6 hrs) overworked (>8 hrs)
targets. More overworked people
think that it will be difficult to
meet targets under limited working hours regime which is coherent with our conjecture but
more overworked people think that they will easily adapt to the new regime which is opposite
to what we had proposed.

2. Employee health and working hours

Based on our survey approximately 84% of the respondents thinks that limiting the number of work
hours will allow them to focus more on their health.
Overall, our survey corroborates our initial conjecture that limited working hours will directly impact the
health of the employees which in turn will improve the productivity of employees with
77% of the respondents indicating that it will not be more difficult to meet the targets under the limited
working hour regime among the respondents who thought that they will be able to devote more time to
their health.

5

3. Gender and Working hours
93.1%
86.2% 82.8% 85.9%
82.8%
71.9%
69.0%
62.5%

34.4%
34.5%

It will be easy to It will be more They will be able to It will improve their It will be difficult to
adapt to limited difficult to meet give more time to work life balance work with people in
working hours targets their health different time zones

Female Male

Our survey consisted of slightly more than 30% females spanning all the 4 possible ranges of work
experience in months. As can be seen from the bar graph above, women in general believed that limited
working hours will be easy to adapt and will contribute to better health and work life balance when
compared to men. The outcome also suggests that women think it will neither be more difficult to meet
targets nor more difficult to work with people in different time zones when compared to men. When
taken together, these results suggest that women think they will be more productive under the limited
working hours regime.
Our survey thus corroborates our conjecture that gender is an important factor when considering the
productivity of employees under limited working hours.

Scope of future explorations

Roughly 91% unmarried people think that limited working hours will improve their work-life balance as
compared to 71% married people. This contrast is also observed with respect to perceived difficulty of
working in different time zones and the difficulty in meeting targets.

91.1%
84.8%
78.6%
71.4%75.9% 71.4% 68.4%
64.3%

42.9%
34.2%

It will be easy to adapt It will be more difficult They will be able to give It will improve their It will be difficult to
to limited working hours to meet targets more time to their work life balance work with people in
health different time zones

Married Unmarried

Above stated results can be further studied with more respondents to understand whether this difference
is due to skewed sample or there is an actual relationship between marriage and productivity.

References

[1] Bebusinessed. (2017, September 5). History of the 40 Hour Workweek | From The Industrial
Revolution To Current Times. Retrieved August 30, 2018, from
https://bebusinessed.com/history/history-40-hour-workweek/

[2] Ford factory workers get 40-hour week - May 01, 1926 - HISTORY.com. (01, May).
Retrieved August 30, 2018, from https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/ford-factory-
workers-get-40-hour-week

[3] Retrieved August 30, 2018, from

https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/63228/7/WRAP_Oswald_681096.pdf

[4] Crunch Mode: programming to the extreme - The Relationship Between Hours Worked and
Productivity. (n.d.). Retrieved August 30, 2018, from
https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/crunchmode/econ-hours-
productivity.html

[5] Oltermann, P. (2017, November 28). Sweden sees benefits of six-hour working day in trial for care
workers. Retrieved August 31, 2018, from
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/04/sweden-sees-benefits-six-hour-working-
day-trial-care-workers

[6] Wirtz A , et al. (n.d.). Gender differences in the effect of weekly working hours on occupational
injury risk in the United States working population. - PubMed - NCBI. Retrieved August 31,
2018, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22466526

[7] Working women: Key facts and trends in female labor force participation. (n.d.).
Retrieved August 31, 2018, from https://ourworldindata.org/female-labor-force-participation-
key-facts

[8] 5 MEASURING AND MANAGING INDIVIDUAL PRODUCTIVITY | Organizational

Linkages: Understanding the Productivity Paradox | The National Academies Press. (n.d.).
Retrieved August 31, 2018, from https://www.nap.edu/read/2135/chapter/6#112

Survey Questions

Implications of limited working hours in organisations

For the purpose of this survey we have assumed that the workload will remain same despite the reduction in working hours

Gender

o Female
o Male
o Prefer not to say

Are you married?

o Yes
o No

Have you worked before? If yes, then how many months of work experience do you
have?

o 0-12
o 13-24
o 25-36
o >36

How much time did you spend in office?

o Up to 8 hours
o Between 8 and 10 hours
o Between 11 and 13 hours
o More than 13 hours
o Not applicable

How much time did you actually work in office?

o Up to 4 hours
o 4-6 hours
o 6-8 hours
o 8-10 hours
o >10 hours
o Not applicable

Do you think it will be easy to adapt to limited working hours?

o Yes
o No

Will it be more difficult to meet targets?

o Yes
o No

Do you think you’ll be able to give more time to improving your health?

o Yes
o No

Do you think it will lead to improvement in Work-life balance?

o Yes
o No

Do you think it will be a problem to work with peers in different time zones?

o Yes
o No