Insights
Why Working Longer Does Not Mean Achieving More
Understanding why longer working hours do not always improve productivity, and how better work design drives sustainable employee performance.
Human Resources
At 9 p.m., an office still looks busy. Messages continue, spreadsheets remain open and a manager praises the team’s commitment. Yet the organisation may know surprisingly little about what those additional hours have achieved. Were important problems resolved, or were avoidable delays absorbed? Did output rise, or did tomorrow’s capacity subsidise tonight’s appearance of progress?
Working time is easy to observe. Productive contribution is harder to define, particularly when work involves analysis, collaboration or judgment. The resulting temptation is to treat time as evidence of value. A serious examination of productivity begins by refusing that substitution, while recognising that some tasks genuinely require additional effort during a temporary surge.
Separate total output from output per hour
If a team produces more by working longer, total output has increased. That does not establish that each additional hour was equally productive. The distinction between average and marginal productivity matters: the final hours of an extended week may contribute less than the earlier ones, while still adding something to total production.
The relevant output also needs definition. Counting completed cases without accounting for errors can exaggerate performance. Measuring speed without considering customer resolution can reward repeated contact. For knowledge work, an apparently completed analysis may create substantial downstream rework if its assumptions were not examined carefully.
John Pencavel’s research on historical munitions workers found a nonlinear relationship between working hours and output. His later analysis examined the role of recovery between working periods (Pencavel, 2014; 2016). These are valuable findings about a mechanism and a particular setting. They do not establish a universal hour limit for every profession, organisation or individual.
The appropriate inference is therefore conditional: more time need not yield proportionately more useful output. Managers must examine the shape of that relationship in their own work rather than borrow a headline threshold from a different context.
Why the relationship can deteriorate
An additional hour has both an immediate effect and a possible effect on subsequent capacity. It may clear urgent work now while reducing the concentration available later. A manager considering only today’s completion count can miss this intertemporal trade-off: the benefits and costs appear in different reporting periods.
There are also coordination effects. Extending one person’s work may require others to remain available for approvals, clarification or handovers. Conversely, a carefully planned overlap between shifts can improve continuity. The same number of labour hours can therefore produce different results depending on when they occur and how dependencies are organised.
The ILO’s research synthesis on working time and firm performance provides a broader literature-based perspective on these relationships (Golden, 2012). Its relevance is the need to consider work arrangements and organisational conditions together. Working time is part of a production system; its contribution cannot be understood entirely through an employee’s willingness to stay late.
Long hours can be a symptom of poor design
Consider a hypothetical customer-service team that regularly extends its day. Management initially concludes that demand exceeds staffing. Closer examination shows that agents repeatedly seek permission for routine refunds, transfer incomplete case notes and manually re-enter customer information. Extra hours compensate for a process that makes useful work unnecessarily difficult.
The distinction changes the intervention. Additional staffing might still be required, but it should follow an understanding of demand, handling time and avoidable work. Otherwise, an organisation can expand its capacity to perform inefficient routines without improving the service customers receive.
Managers should therefore separate necessary work, enabling work and preventable work. Necessary work delivers the outcome. Enabling work supports quality, learning or coordination. Preventable work includes failures of information, unclear ownership and repeated correction. A crude campaign against all non-delivery activity can remove valuable learning while leaving the causes of rework intact.
The point is not to eliminate every meeting or interruption. It is to ask whether each dependency is designed deliberately and whether its cost is justified by the result.
The signalling problem
When contribution is difficult to observe, visible availability can become a signal of commitment. Employees may infer that late replies and long office hours influence advancement. Managers may interpret those behaviours as effort, even when workload, caregiving responsibilities and task structure differ substantially between people.
This creates a possible equilibrium in which everyone stays available because everyone expects availability to be rewarded. No participant needs to prefer the arrangement. Changing it requires more than advising employees to manage their time: the organisation must alter how work is allocated, recognised and evaluated.
Output-based assessment can help, but it introduces its own risks. Narrow targets may encourage employees to select easy cases, defer difficult work or neglect colleagues. A better system combines deliverables with quality, collaboration and the context in which performance was achieved. Replacing a crude hours target with a crude output target would preserve the underlying measurement problem.
For HR, the central issue is alignment. Do promotion decisions reward sustainable contribution, or do they quietly contradict the organisation’s stated expectations about reasonable availability?
Distinguish a surge from a business model
Temporary overtime can be rational when a deadline is genuinely exceptional, the benefits are substantial and additional effort is feasible. A seasonal demand peak, an operational incident and a repeatedly understaffed process should not be treated as equivalent situations.
A useful test is whether the surge has a defined cause, a credible endpoint and a recovery plan. If the same emergency recurs predictably, it belongs in capacity planning. If priority lists expand without work being removed, the problem may concern strategic choices rather than individual efficiency.
There are distributional questions too. Who carries the extra work? Who receives the recognition? Are some employees repeatedly absorbing uncertainty generated elsewhere? Sustainable performance depends partly on whether the organisation makes these burdens visible and responds fairly.
Managers should also avoid assuming that shorter schedules automatically improve outcomes. If workload remains unchanged and coordination deteriorates, nominally reduced hours may simply intensify work or move it beyond recorded time. The design of work and the actual experience of employees matter more than the label attached to a policy.
Investigate before prescribing
A practical inquiry can begin with a small set of measures: useful output, quality, rework, actual hours and completion delays. Trends across several periods are more informative than a single busy week. Employee accounts can explain why a measure changed, particularly when recorded time excludes informal evening work.
Causal interpretation still requires care. Teams working the longest hours may face the hardest assignments. A simple comparison could wrongly attribute low productivity to hours alone. Conversely, a high-performing team might receive more work, making long hours appear beneficial when prior capability explains both.
Where feasible, managers can test a specific change: simplify approvals, protect a period for concentrated work or adjust staffing during a predictable peak. Compare outcomes against a suitable baseline, examine unintended effects and avoid changing several major conditions simultaneously. The goal is organisational learning rather than proving a fashionable policy correct.
A better question for management education
Students can audit a hypothetical project by tracing where time went and which activities improved the result. They should examine discarded work, errors, waiting and coordination alongside the final deliverable. Faculty can ask them to defend both their output measures and their explanation of what caused the outcome.
This develops a more demanding idea of professionalism. Commitment includes effort, but also judgment about priorities, capacity and the conditions under which good work can continue. A manager’s responsibility is to organise those conditions rather than rely indefinitely on personal endurance.
Long hours may sometimes be necessary. They are never sufficient evidence of effective management. The deeper question is whether the organisation converts people’s time into worthwhile outcomes today while preserving the capability to do so tomorrow.
References
1\. Pencavel, J. (2014). The Productivity of Working Hours. IZA Discussion Paper No. 8129; subsequently published in The Economic Journal (2015). Historical production evidence; not a universal threshold.
https\://www\.iza.org/en/publications/dp/8129
2\. Pencavel, J. H. (2016). Recovery from Work and the Productivity of Working Hours. IZA Discussion Paper No. 10103\.
3\. Golden, L. (2012). The effects of working time on productivity and firm performance: a research synthesis paper. ILO, Conditions of Work and Employment Series No. 33\.
Sources verified online: 20 October 2026\.