It's Not the Hours You Work but the Work in the Hours

One of the most interesting news stories of the last few days was the fact that Ms. Sharon Au, a former celebrity in Singapore, had been reported to her bosses for sending her colleagues after hours work emails. This story illustrates one of most interesting areas of cross-cultural misunderstandings.

Ms. Au is Singaporean and grew up in a work culture where one is attuned to one’s communications device (mobile, laptop and tablet) because its almost normal to have bosses and customers calling you at any time of the day. The general idea is that you try and be at the customer’s beck and call no matter how inconvenient because if the customer can’t get you, they’ll move their business elsewhere.

The situation has become such that people functioning in the Asian and American (as anyone who has worked in an American bank can testify to), understand that working long hours is part and parcel of being in the work force. The ability to work the hours is a badge of pride. The ability to put in the hours is such that I remember telling a potential employer that “I can work long hours,” because I wanted him to know that I was worth hiring.

However, Ms. Au works in France, where there are laws against sending work communications after office hours. These laws are based on the premise that employees need their “private time,” particularly when they have families.

From the Asian and American perspective, the European focus on having laws that protect “private-time” can seem like self-indulgence. When you come from a culture where the ability to work long hours is seen as a badge of pride, the eagerness to protect “private time” can seem lazy.

However, there is another side to this issue. Americans and Asians may have the ability to work long hours but if you look at global productivity statistics, you’ll find that of the top most productive nations in the world, only four are not European (USA at number 6, Australia at number 7, Canada at 13 and Japan at number 15). A list of the most productive countries can be found at:

https://collectivehub.com/2018/02/15-of-the-worlds-most-productive-countries/

How is it such that the world’s most productive countries happen to be those in places where there are restrictions on your working hours?

The answer is precisely because there is because there is a scarcity of working hours in these countries. The human mind is a wonderfully adaptable thing and there is a case to show that scarcity produces efficiency. Many of the world’s most prosperous countries have become that way because they lacked resources and had to find ways of developing their economies through better education and clever trade policies. By contrast, Sub-Saharan Africa struggles with what development economist call a “natural resources curse.” Sub-Saharan Africa has an abundance of natural resources, which have only made despots and crooks (the despots being the crooks in many cases) fabulously wealthy. Why develop the people when all you need to do is to dig things from under the earth?

The same is true of labour productivity. China and India may be the fast-growing big economies but they don’t rank anywhere on the list of productive places. Both of these places have an abundance of labour. In the outsourcing business it is said that a company will pay for a tart from the East End of London more than a roomful of MBA graduates in India. When you have a thousand well educated people willing to pick up trash, there is utterly no need to invest in a robot to do the job.

I remember complaining about how shops shut early and on Sundays in Europe when compared to America and Asia. Mum’s defense of the European way was this – she shops very efficiently because she has to. She plans how much we’re going to need over the weekend when she goes to the shops on Friday because there’s no place for her to go to should she miss anything on a Sunday.

The common saying is that necessity is the mother of innovation. The European companies can’t work their employees more than a certain number of hours (overtime becomes prohibitively expensive) so they have to maximise what they can work from the workers within the set hours. Likewise, the European worker does not have the luxury of taking his or her time beyond office hours hence there is an incentive to finish task within the set hours.

Scarcity is good for the human mind and countries that are seeking to be more productive should look at limiting incentives to be inefficient.