SHORTER WORKING HOURS
The coronavirus has forced us into a massive social experiment. Millions of people have experienced the feeling of working without going to the office. It is generally accepted that it is possible to work in this way.
Important steps have started to come from companies in this regard. Working 4 days a week or allowing to work completely from home is accepted as the new normal of companies. I would like to share a few research results to support how correct these decisions are.
Working times:
Researches clearly shows us that; When we compare the time a person spends 3 or 4 hours a day by uninterruptedly focusing on his work and 8 hours spent going to the office and being exposed to interruptions, the first option provides very high productivity.
You can spend 8 hours in an office, but that doesn’t mean you work 8 hours. In a study conducted in England, it was revealed that employees work productively for 2 hours and 53 minutes during the day.
So, what happens in the remaining 5 hours? Many unproductive or time-consuming activities. Among these, there are many time traps such as employees dividing each other, examining news and social networks, interfering with unplanned work, and unnecessarily long meetings.
Source: http://www.strategy.rest/?p=3169
On the other hand, it is a fact that even if you increase your weekly working time, your productivity does not increase.
A statement like “I work day and night, I go about my business with very little sleep” cannot be sustained in the long term.
Physical exhaustion increases the possibility of making mistakes. This creates more costs than necessary for the correction of faulty production. This is called the cost of non-compliance of quality.
Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2015/01/26/working-more-than-50-hours-makes-you-less-productive.html
Our focus time is limited to a maximum of 90 minutes.
If your cell phone never rings, if someone never interrupts you, even if no new work comes in, your body and mind can focus on a task between 90 and 120 minutes at the most. Such a high focus is possible at most 2 times in a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon.
It should be underlined that this work pace requires a very high focus.
This is called the Basic Rest–Activity Cycle: 90–120 min. Then we have to take a break. Because physically, if you are looking at the computer, if you keep your neck muscles steady, fatigue will occur and this will cause headaches. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_rest%E2%80%93activity_cycle
If you think that you have such a deep focus power or you are proud of it, unfortunately, after a while, you will have irreversible pain in your neck muscles physically.
In short, it is ideal for an office worker to work by taking a break every 45–50 minutes.
Long-term high focus will lead to major health problems.
Flexibility in working hours:
Some people prefer to get up early in the morning and go to work with a bright mind, and I am one of them. To those who ask about my working hours, I say 6:00–11:00 in the morning.
But some people prefer to work in the quiet of the night. Sleeping during the day gives them great pleasure.
Now, in the new era, workplaces will have to accept even these preferences of people because the goal for a company is to allocate goals to team members in a way that achieves its strategic goals. It is unnecessary to deal with these goals in which environment and between which hours people work.
A healthier life is the most important gain.
The fact that there is no obligation to go to an office and the comfort of doing things from home will allow people to take time for themselves. A healthier diet and being able to spare a certain time of the day for sports will bring very important benefits to people’s health.
After all, while companies and employees around the world have had such an experience with the pandemic, it is time to put it into long-term practice.
The fact that companies offer workplace and working time flexibility to their employees will mean a reduction in office, transportation and meal costs for companies.
I’m sure that; Employees will start to prefer companies that offer the opportunity to work from home while looking for a job. Companies that offer this flexibility will be more advantageous than their competitors in finding qualified personnel.
Before the pandemic, companies that offered the opportunity to work from home were shown as exemplary companies. Companies that offer the opportunity to work from home on Fridays were proudly published in the Human Resources supplements of the newspapers. In an instant, things turned upside down. We now view companies that do not offer the ability to work from home as obsolete.
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