Could you get your work done in less time?

Long working hours affect our health, but many people feel they have to stay late just to be noticed - particularly in graduate roles. Scania in Sweden have reduced the working week to four days and found that productivity has increased. So could we spend our hours more productively, leaving us with more free time?

(Rex)

Last summer I was lucky enough to be given a month’s work experience at an advertising agency in London.

My role was scheduling all the social media posts and naturally, on day one, I made a few clanging errors. Day two however, just a couple, day three I had a comprehensive grasp of what I was doing and by day four I'd finished by lunch.

Of course, I was just interning and my workload was lower than the majority of my colleagues but, the longer I spent there, the more I realised that it really wasn’t that much lower.

While out at lunch, someone at the company admitted to me, essentially in these words: ‘To be honest, it’s not like anyone here is actually working for the whole time that they’re in the office. It’s just important to drag it out to make sure it looks like you’re busy all the time.’

She didn’t use the right phrase though. Instead of ‘whole time’, it should have been ‘overtime’.

The vast majority of the 300 or so employees, despite the official, contracted hours being 10-6, incarcerated themselves before 8am and rarely left before 7. It was seen as either lazy or arrogant to leave at any point before that.

This wasn’t because anyone particularly loved their jobs. This was a desperation to be noticed in the only way that they could. At the time I presumed that this was just a damaging idiosyncrasy that had crept into the framework of this institution but now I’ve graduated and spoken to numerous friends about first jobs, this company wasn’t an exception; binge working is the rule.

Essentially there seems to be a real increase in roles where the only real way to impress is by chaining yourself to your desk, the 21st century love children of Prometheus and Sisyphus.

(Rex)

The majority of graduates I know have gone into white-collar jobs which suck them into a corporate black hole that encompasses their lives rapidly. They go to work, go home, eat, watch an episode of something, sleep, go to work. Most don’t even leave their desks for lunch.

They don’t read books anymore, they don’t go the theatre or cinema, drinks on any week night are always a ‘Maybe’ that’s inevitably followed by a ‘Sorry pal, I’m working late again’. If you do happen to catch them, their eyes flick to the work phone sat on the table every ten seconds and ‘John from planning’ emails and the next ten minutes are spent in semi-conscious conversation as they type away.

It seems even more pertinent in the light of data suggesting that longer working hours lead to a significantly higher chance of premature mortality, have a particular effect on coronary disease, and have been linked to depression and alcoholism. These are all pretty heavy things to inflict on an employee to demand superficial dedication.

Back to working hours though, there’s the weekend warrior aspect to this; that the pact you sign in any graduate job these days is five days of banality in exchange for two days of debauchery.

But then, spending their weeks cooped up like greyhounds in starting traps, come Friday night my binge-working friends sprint out on a booze and narcotic fuelled megalash. They’re catatonic by midnight, spend the rest of the weekend ‘sleeping it off’, possibly venturing out for brunch once or twice, and then Monday rolls around again.

Any solution that I could offer to this would basically just be pithless. But, as a starting point, Scania in Sweden have reduced the working week to four days and found that productivity has actually increased. Which is unsurprising due to the range of studies that have suggested that fewer hours (to an extent) lead to a higher output. Germans work for an average of only 35 hours a week, compared to 48 in the UK.

Anyway, here are some quotes from (obviously anonymous) friends who graduated last summer and have been in jobs where dragging out working hours to appear busy and committed is routine:

‘Everyone is too afraid to leave on time in case of being labelled lazy. Everyone attempts to stay the longest in the office, even if it's just to secretly browse Buzzfeed or the Mail Online.’

‘Colleagues are definitely judging the merit of each others’ work, not on what they actually produce but the number of hours they are in the office.’

‘I'm missing out on seeing friends or in anyway developing outside of the corporate mould. It might sound histrionic, but I genuinely feel like the best years of my life are being stolen from me.’

‘There’s no doubt that I could get my work done in 2/3rd’s of the time. I think people get a kick out of being "the most busy" whether they are or not.’