Longer working hours seem to lead to higher premature mortality. (For stats nerds: the strength of the relationship is significant, with an r-squared of 0.2). The implication that over-work is bad for you chimes with lots of research (such as here, here and here) which links long working hours with poor health. Stress, for example, can contribute to range of problems like heart disease and depression. That was, indeed, what the philosopher Bertrand Russell argued back in the 1930s. Overwork, said Russell, led to "frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia".
The pattern is not completely clear. The outlying figures to the right are those for South Korea. The country is famed for its long working hours, but also its healthy food, which may lower the risk of things like heart attacks and thereby reduce premature death rates. On the other side, Hungarians seem to get really stressed out at work: despite working relatively short hours, their PYLL is high.
If there is such a relationship between working hours and health, then shorter work hours might actually raise a person's total lifetime work by allowing them to live and work for longer. You can use that as an excuse next time you want to slack off early.
working shorter hours might be good for your productivity. It may also be good for your health. The graph below shows the relationship between working hours and "potential years of life lost" (PYLL), both of which were taken from the OECD. PYLL is a measure of premature mortality, which estimates the average number of years a person would have lived if they had not died prematurely. It gives more weight to deaths among younger people and may therefore be a better measure of mortality. The higher the value of PYLL, the worse.
We display the results in the simplest possible way: as a scatter graph. Nonetheless the data, which go from 1970 to 2011, are a little alarming:
Work shouldn’t be all doom and gloom, and most companies offer flexible working because
they see it as an important part of your well-being and happiness at work.
“A flexible workforce is essential when delivering great service across a long trading window,
as we do at Marks & Spencer. In addition, we recognise the need for employees to strike a
good balance between work life and home life,” says Glover.
If you’re raising a family, flexible working can make things a lot easier, especially for new
mums. Hallett sees family commitments as one of the main reasons women are keen on
flexible working, “One of the motivations in setting up my own business 10 years ago was to
allow me flexibility to fulfil my role as a mother, whilst also having a challenging and
rewarding career.”
By giving the same flexibility to her staff Hallett she feels as though she reaps the benefits
for her business. She says: “Those who are able to have real flexibility in their roles pay me
back with amazing loyalty and hard work. I don’t lose their talent, experience and
knowledge, which ultimately affects my bottom line.”
And offering flexible work is clearly paying off for the businesses that offer it; Marks &
Spencer has one of the lowest employee turnover rates in UK retail at 23% for sales
assistants jobs and 12% for manager jobs.
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