
Dr Georgina Bremner
Senior Advisor
The pandemic has dramatically shifted ways of working, with 57% of employees now wanting either full time home working or ‘hybrid working’ – where they are in the office for some of the week and at home for the remainder. At the same time, working hours have increased for remote workers during the pandemic, bucking the 150 year trend where working hours declined in Western countries.
Long working hours harm our wellbeing and our physical and mental health, as well as reduce productivity. They also damage workplace equality, as women tend to have less time to begin with due to disproportionate caring responsibilities, reducing their capacity to work long hours.
So how can we create great workplaces that promote productivity and well-being?
Employers are already trying a variety of different approaches to tackle long hours while increasing productivity. BMW and Volkswagen have limited after-hours employee emails, and some investment banks have introduced policies to cap working hours. However, many organisations see low uptake of such policies among employees because of organisational culture. This is something we’ve seen first hand in our Gender and Behavioural Insights (GABI) programme where we designed a number of interventions to tackle the gap between the prevalence of flexible working policies and actual take-up.
A key behavioural barrier is a strong social norm of working long hours within an organisation, which may drive employees to work longer than they need. Employees may choose to work late simply because others are, or because they fear being judged. The amount of time we spend in the office (or increasingly online), often just to be seen at work (‘face time’) is frequently used to infer performance and commitment, especially in knowledge-based industries where measuring real productivity is hard. But the reality is that this presenteeism is associated with lower productivity. A culture of ‘face time’ is particularly detrimental to women, who are more likely to work part-time. Furthermore, harmful norms such as the stigmatisation of flexible working can prevent take-up of policies which are potentially beneficial to reducing long working hours.
Remote work may also exacerbate long working hours, since the boundaries between working time and free time are blurred making it more likely for work to infringe on free time. This raises significant challenges for companies given that increased working hours can have detrimental effects on both job performance and productivity.
If you are an employer and would like our help in designing and piloting an intervention to improve employee productivity, please contact us to explore opportunities to collaborate.
Senior Advisor
Associate Research Advisor
Head of Work and Finance
The Behavioural Insights Team
Head of Crime, Security & Justice
Head of Capacity Building Programmes
Design and development by Soapbox.