I would like to discuss what should be the ideal working hour for employees.
Let us try to find correlation between working hours and productivity of employees.
To start with, we can say productivity is directly proportionate to longevity of working hours.
This is not true because of following reasons:
1. Too much of work deteriorates people’s health.
2. Since they will spend more time in office, they will have little time for society and hobbies. These things will add to their frustration hence less zeal to live life.
3. They already know that they have to sit in office for long time, so they pull down the efficiency. They concentrate more on ticking clock rather than work.
4. Organization’s resources like Internet bandwidth, e-mail server, electricity are more likely to be abused.
It is known facts that European and American people work 40 to 50 hours a week and most of the technological innovation has been done by them. On the contrary Indians works 90 hours a week on an average.
I have experience of working in pure hostile production environment where profitability is directly proportionate to the line of code churned out by developer. The working hours were 10 AM to 10 PM. I tried to think that really those people are working 10 AM to 10 PM innocently and incessantly, including weekends. I have firm belief that had mastered the art of pretending to look busy and working hard.
Indian corporate has yet to get matured and learn professionalism.
I believe 70% of working days should not be more than 8 to 10 hours long. The focus should be on making people more efficient and motivated not pretenders.
I should mention that this holds true, only if organizations are looking for long term relation with people resulting in less volatile workforce.
