[EN] Longer hours, more productivity

Longer hours, more productivity?

Written by Bart Blokker

If you were to ask a law student what working at a big law firm would look like they would give you all kinds of answers, however one thing that will keep popping up is the belief that at a big law firm people work lots of hours. Not only law students appear to think that in a big law firm you work loads of hours, the media also seems to think so.Thus we can say that a lot of people are quite convinced that at a big law firm you work a lot of hours. In regards to the response to the amount of hours worked there are mixed reactions, ranging from, “I want to have a personal life so I don’t want to work 80 hours a week” to “If you work so many hours you will get a lot more done”. The second reaction is one worth looking into. Because we often hear that working more hours leads to more productivity, but is that true?

If you were to ask a law student what working at a big law firm would look like they would give you all kinds of answers, however one thing that will keep popping up is the belief that at a big law firm people work lots of hours. Not only law students appear to think that in a big law firm you work loads of hours, the media also seems to think so¹. Thus we can say that a lot of people are quite convinced that at a big law firm you work a lot of hours. In regards to the response to the amount of hours worked there are mixed reactions, ranging from, “I want to have a personal life so I don’t want to work 80 hours a week” to “If you work so many hours you will get a lot more done”. The second reaction is one worth looking into. Because we often hear that working more hours leads to more productivity, but is that true?

To analyze this we are going to look at some research related to working hours and productivity. First of all, research shows that working more increases productivity by less than the increase in hours. In this first study on working hours and productivity an increase in time worked for part time workers of 1,1 percent lead to an increase in total productivity of 0,9 percent². However it is important to note, that this study doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t work more hours, as long as the cost of working more hours is lower than the profit from the hours it is worth it, at least from an employer’s perspective, to work more. Secondly, a study which compared 7 day workweeks to 6 day workweeks showed that the weeks without a day off had a 10 percent lower output than weeks without a day off. The study explains that when we are working a long time, be it in hours or days, that we suffer increased fatigue and stress, that in turn reduces productivity and makes employees more error and sickness prone³. To be specific, employees that worked 60 hours in a week had 23 percent higher injury rates. With employees working 12 or more hours on a single day having a 37 percent higher injury rate. In regards to being more error prone, this not only means errors at work. Research shows that in hospital staff, working longer than 12 hours an increase in car accidents happened after working⁴. Thirdly it has been shown that employees that work full time have more fatigue, which in turn causes a loss of productivity than part-time employees⁵.

So we can conclude that an increase in hours generally never leads to a bigger increase in productivity. Working too long or too many hours increases stress and fatigue, which in turn reduces productivity and makes employees more error and sickness prone. These are all good arguments to atleast have a discussion about the amount of hours worked in a workweek. So why do lawyers then work so many hours? The reason for that can be found not in productivity but in the business model of a law firm, firms mostly don’t get paid because of how much work they do, they get paid for the amount of time that they spend working for a client, the so called billable hours. Thus increasing your billable hours, even if you aren’t actually more productive is very profitable.

What can be done to change this? The easiest solution for law firms is to use flat fees more. This causes a shakeup in the way that law firms make a profit. Since the profit equation changes from making the employees work as many billable hours as possible without burning them out and failing to attract new employees to profit is the highest productivity, so you can take on more tasks for a flat fee. Which means that there no longer is the incentive to make employees work longer when productivity actually becomes a net negative for more billable hours. It has to be noted that using flat fees might or might not reduce profit compared to using billable hours, as such law firms might come to different conclusions on using flat fees either fully or partly.

1. K, Beioley, Junior lawyers work ever longer hours as demand keeps surging, Financial Times, october 2021, found on: https://www.ft.com/content/a2a8467e-6b7c-4376-a496-7019fd8e2e83
2. M. Collewet, J. Sauermann, Working hours and productivity, found on: https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/10722/working-hours-and-productivity.
3. J. Pencavel, The productivity of working hours, april 2014, found on: https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/8129/the-productivity-of-working-hours.
4. F.S. Lombardi, Modeling the impact of the components of long work hours on injuries and “accidents”, American Journal of Industrial Medicine, 2006, found on: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16570251/.
5. D.G.J. Beckers, et al, Working Overtime Hours: Relations with Fatigue, Work Motivation, and the quality of Work, december 2004, found on: https://www.rug.nl/staff/n.van.yperen/8_joem_2004_beckers_et_al.pdf.