So Greece has decided to buck the trend in the rest of the world and make the work week LONGER for many workers. The law just went into effect this month and it is a spectacularly bad idea that WILL backfire in the worst possible way. And in this article I’m going to prove it with science!
What does the law say / not say
But first – what does the new law actually say and why are they passing it?
Greek companies can now compel employees to work more hours. It’s been widely reported as a move to a 6-day workweek, but in reality some workers will have to either work 6 8-hour days OR an extra 2 hours a day 5 days a week. Each of these options will take the workweek from 40 to 48 hours. In return they get a 40% wage increase for the extra hours and more for working Sundays. The law doesn’t apply in all workplaces, only in private companies that operate around the clock in shifts and which are facing labor shortages.
The pro-business Greek government believes this law will boost the economy by addressing a lack of skilled employees. Of course many other countries are facing similar challenges due to falling birthrates and other factors, so it’s tempting to assume that we can make up for a lack of workers by making existing workers work more hours.
And indeed, many countries and workplaces are itching to make people work more. For instance, here in Denmark, the government just canceled one of our beloved annual public holidays because – they claim – we need to boost productivity to counter the threat posed by Putin and Russia. I’m sure Putin is just quaking with fear now that Danes will have to work one more day every year.
In reality, research clearly shows that increasing working hours is going to have the opposite effect and hurt the economy! Here are 6 reasons why.
1: Lower output
First of all – let’s make this very clear: Greek companies will not be any more productive or profitable with a 6-day workweek.
Why not? It really isn’t a big mystery: When employees work more hours they get more tired, They lose cognitive capacity which means that overworked people:
Are less productive
Are less creative
Make worse decisions
Make more mistakes.
Studies even show that overwork makes you dumber. A study of British government workers found that those who worked longer hours scored lower on various cognitive tests than their coworkers who worked 40 hours a week.
It’s important to make a clear distinction between PRODUCTIVITY and OUTPUT. Output is how much work a given person or team or company completes. A certain number of widgets produced in a factory or lines of code written in a tech company, for instance. Productivity on the other hand is output per hour worked, so how much gets produced per hour worked by employees.
For instance: If a car factory with 1000 employees makes 80 cars in an 8-hour shift, their output that day is 800 and their productivity is .01 car per man-hour.
Now, many people accept that a person who works 60 hours a week will probably be less PRODUCTIVE than one working 40. They intuitively get that the last 20 hours are probably going to be less effective than the first 40.
I asked about this on LinkedIn and people understand that. Only 17% believed that more working hours would lead to higher output.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that only 37% got the correct answer: that productivity actually drops so much for people working more than 50 hours a week – for all of the reasons we just saw – that their total OUTPUT is lower – not just their PRODUCTIVITY. This is true for both factory workers and knowledge workers. It’s not just a matter of diminishing returns on the extra hours – there’s a negative return on those hours and the company is overall LESS profitable.
This is not a new discovery. Back in world war 1 the British army needed as much ammunition as possible, so they desperately wanted to maximize the output of their munitions factories. So obviously they made workers work more – up to 90 hours a week. When that mysteriously didn’t work, they started gathering data connecting working hours to output and found something very curious.
This graph shows actual output (not productivity) vs. hours worked for two groups of women workers doing two different kinds of tasks. As you can see, beyond a certain number of hours – in this case 51 a week – working more hours did not increase output. Every hour worked after that was essentially wasted. We have known this since 1917.
This effect has been found again and again in many different studies from both factory settings and office-type knowledge work.
Granted, Greece isn’t moving workers to a 90-hour work week but only 48 hours every week, but the data shows very clearly that a 20% increase in hours will NOT lead to a 20% increase in production.
This new law is extra ironic because Greece already has the longest working hours per worker of any European country and 7th highest in the OECD.
So if Greece is hoping that companies will be overall more profitable and therefore boost the economy, the data shows the exact opposite – this will lead to lower productivity and output among Greek businesses.
2: More illness
So overwork is bad for the workplace – but it’s even worse for employees. Studies show that permanent overwork is connected with a long list of mental and physical health problems including strokes, depression, alcoholism, diabetes and heart disease.
This is not just bad for the individual, it’s also going to hurt Greek workplaces. If the problem they’re seeking to address is a lack of qualified workers, you don’t want your current workers to get sick and miss a ton of work.
And of course more illness among workers will also hurt the Greek economy because it will increase healthcare costs.
3: More workplace injuries
Also, a longer work week will lead to more workplace accidents. Research shows that an increase in normal hours worked increases injury risk because workers are more fatigued.
This is especially relevant for Greece because most of the workplaces that can extend hours under this new law will probably be in manufacturing.
4: Worse work-life balance and more burnout
This is so obvious that you hardly need to say it but if you’re working 6 days a week, your work-life balance is going to suffer. You’ll have less time for your family, your friends, your children, your partner, your hobbies and everything else in your life.
Research clearly shows that longer working hours lead to:
Impaired sleep
Job stress and burnout
Worse partner relationships
Worse family relationships
Lower life satisfaction
More burnout
And again, more burnout leads to more workers being absent from work and higher healthcare costs for the country.
5: More brain drain
Brain drain has been a huge problem for Greece. The financial crisis hit that country especially hard and the tough economy made hundreds of thousands of mostly young and well-educated people leave and find work in other countries. Authorities estimate that 600,000 young professionals left to work abroad between 2010 and 2021.
Greece really wants them back. Among other initiatives, the Labor Ministry has created an online platform called Rebrain Greece to help match professionals willing to return home with potential employers.
But here’s the thing: Given that the younger generations at work tend to value work-life balance, how do you think they’re going to like the prospect of being forced to work 6 days a week’ Imagine you’re a young Greek working in Denmark where the official work week is 37 hours and moving back might mean working 48 instead? Or imagine you’re a young Greek currently working in Greece whose workplace is looking to go to a 6-day workweek. Might this not be exactly the thing that inspires you to find work in a different country?
If Greece is looking to reverse the brain drain, this is exactly the wrong thing to do.
6: Unproductive time
OK, one last problem with Greece’s new law: While people can be forced into the workplace for a longer time, that doesn’t mean they’ll be working productively all the time. Forced overwork leads to a ton of unproductive time where people are at work? but little real work is getting done. This is deeply frustrating for workers because not only is that time taken away from the rest of your life, that time is WASTED and YOU KNOW it’s wasted. Nobody likes to waste time.
Also, studies show that when the workplace mandates long working hours, people tend to lie about how many hours they work. And managers are easy to fool. One study found that managers couldn’t tell the difference between those of their employees who ACTUALLY worked 80 hours a week and those who just pretended to.
What should Greece have done instead?
So my prediction is that this is going to backfire spectacularly for all of these reasons. Companies will be less productive, employees will be more sick leading to higher healthcare costs for the country and more Greeks who are able to will flee the country or stay abroad in countries that have more reasonable working hours.
What should Greece (and any other country looking to boost the economy) do instead? Well first they could have looked at all the countries that have tested a 4-day work week and found it to work exceptionally well. Like Iceland, where it’s been called an “overwhelming success.”
They could also have chosen policies that maximize workers’ welfare. Any government has an interest in enacting public policies that strengthen the competitive advantage of companies in that country. However, this is often done by cutting corporate taxes, deregulation or attempts to increase working hours – none of which have much of a track record of success.
If a government is truly serious about giving companies a sustained, strong competitive advantage, they should really focus on policies that create happier workplaces. This would not only be good for the companies and the employees, it would also be good for the national economy, as it would boost national productivity and reduce absenteeism, stress and related healthcare costs.
I have an article on 11 policies that nations can implement to create a competitive advantage because happy workers are more productive.
Another thing Greece could have done that I also mention in that article is invest in training existing workers. The unemployment rate in Greece is over 10% so there are plenty of people without jobs. They may not currently have the skills and competencies that companies are looking for but that’s why you train them.
But most of all, Greece – and any other country that wants to boost the economy – could have focused on maximizing output and profitability, not hours worked, and realized that those are two very different things. If they had spent just a little time looking at the available research on overwork, they would have realized that a longer work week is actually going to hurt, not help.
If you want a really good overview on all the reasons long working hours are terrible for workplaces AND employees, I have a video on why that is and how we stop it.
The one redeeming quality of Greece’s new law
Just to be clear: I’m not saying that Greece’s new law is completely useless. You see, other countries are already looking at this law and asking if they could do the same. And I have every confidence that when this law inevitably backfires in Greece, that failure will warn any other countries or companies away from trying something similar.
So I guess we should all thank them for that at least.
Your take
What do you think? How much will this law boost the Greek economy? Should other countries follow their lead? What is the optimal length of a work week that will lead to the most output? Write a comment, I’d love to hear your take.
Video
If you’d prefer to watch this, I also have a video where I make all the same points:
A new law just went into effect in Greece that aims to boost the economy by moving workers to a 6-day work week. This law is going to backfire and hurt both the economy and of course the workers and in this video I present to present 6 reasons why.
