Editor’s note: This article was first published in July 2013; its working-hours figures, 1,902 hours a year on average worldwide and 1,582 in France, and the GDP per capita of $36,500 are from a 2013 report.
A new study by UBS shows once again that the French work fewer hours per year than anyone else. The average in the rest of the world is 1,902 hours a year, but France is where people spend the least time at work in this global comparison, with 1,582 hours a year.
This figure, which had already come up in other studies, ended up wrongly portraying the French as the laziest workers, when in fact the real message is that French workers are the most productive. Just look at GDP per capita: $36,500 per person while working 16% less than the average citizen of other developed countries. If you go to France, you can see that their standard of living is real. They live well, they save and they enjoy a comfortable, well-off retirement, and most of their companies also make a big effort to achieve a good work-life balance.
We Spaniards still don’t come out well when it comes to productive hours: not only do we work more hours than everyone else, we are also among the least productive workers in the rankings. That brings us to the following point: “a lazy person in a car gets to point B before an extremely hard-working person on foot.”
So, are we the least productive workers, or do our companies still struggle to encourage productivity at work? Hard work or long hours are not everything when it comes to making our companies more competitive. It’s about working less, but smarter, and on that front the French seem to have a lot to teach, and we Spaniards certainly still have a lot to learn.
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Featured image: Kristof Verslype, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
