Editor’s note: This article was first published in March 2012, during the economic crisis in Spain. The references to staff cuts and fear of dismissal reflect that moment.
It is said that 80% of workers spend more hours at work than their official working day. Many of them are young.
What about you? Can we say that the days of working fixed hours are over?
There are arguments on both sides, and several factors explain why work takes up more of our day than anything else.
There are reasons behind those familiar lines: “I have so much work I can’t keep up” and “I can’t get it done within working hours.”
The workers who put in more than their official hours are found in equal measure among civil servants, employees and the self-employed.
In many cases the reasons vary, and some of them show how committed workers are to their companies.
Social reasons
The economic times we are living through give us reasons to justify working more hours than our job requires. The current crisis has reduced the number of employees in companies, and those who remain have to take on the workload left by those who are no longer with us.
Fear of dismissal and fear that our commitment to the company won’t be valued are social reasons that keep people at work. The same reasons explain why absenteeism in companies has fallen, in terms of sick leave, between 2007 and 2010.
There is also an external factor in working hours: in the rest of Europe the working day ends between 5 and 6 p.m., while in Spain it runs until 7 p.m., including the different meal breaks customary in Europe and in Spain.
Professional reasons
For the self-employed, longer working days may also be driven by the desire for higher profits, or by the time it takes to reach the business’s profitability targets.
An inexperienced or clumsy employee may end up working longer hours because of how they cope with pressure, how they organize their work, or the amount of work they are given.
Poorly organized tasks can leave employees doing work that contributes little to good results. The answer is to streamline those tasks, eliminate them, or find ways to get results without spending too much effort on unproductive work.
Drawing up short- and medium-term plans means analyzing the work with the aim of lowering its production costs and finding new options for better business results.
An employee who lives in and for the company is one who is looking to grow within it: they feel the company is their own and give it their best efforts. Look at their professional abilities: their capacity to grow, or whether they spend their time on tasks that do little for the business.
Featured image: Floris Oosterveld, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
