Work should be good for you
Do you work to live? Or live to work?
There’s a lot of friction right now around different attitudes to work around the world. At the FT Future of the Car event I’m attending this week, the CEO of Volkswagen highlighted differences in productivity around the world, citing 40% higher rates in the US (he didn’t specify a source but it’s close to these figures), and workers in China doing six long days per week rather than five shorter ones.
This is challenging for global brands right now, a challenge only amplified by fluctuating tariffs and other costs and uncertainties. But should the long term goal for Europe be to match productivity levels in the US and China? And does that necessarily mean longer working hours and weeks?
Quality not Quantity
If you are working on a production line, doing a relatively simple task, then maybe there is scope to work longer. But perhaps not safely. And perhaps not forever. You’ll lose focus. The quality of your work might drop. Productivity isn’t just about total output, it’s about the quality of that output. Before you even consider quality of life.
Transpose this situation to the majority of modern jobs. Where in manufacturing you’re likely to be a skilled operator, working in collaboration with machines. Or in an office, doing jobs that rely on creativity and collaboration. Or in a customer service environment, trying to be patient and pleasant while solving people’s problems. Few of these things are easy to do for long periods of time. Arguably you will be much less productive - on a proper measure - if you try doing them for longer. This is largely borne out by experiments with shorter working weeks.
The Missing Talent Pool
For the majority of our growth industries, increasing our working hours seems an unlikely solution to our productivity challenges. Rather, we should perhaps be doing the opposite, and investing in the infrastructure, technology, and policies that allow us to work more effectively, and more of us to work.
As highlighted in my most recent piece for MHR and The Telegraph, this includes getting parents, and particularly mothers, into work rather than losing their skills and capacity from the workforce. Good public transport, affordable childcare, and sensible approaches to benefits and out of hours activities are all relatively simple ideas, if potentially expensive from a state or company perspective.
That expense has to be weighed against the alternative though. Do you want to tap the best talent pools? Create a happy, engaged working culture that is highly productive and future-focused? Or try to extract more from an approach that hasn’t worked yet?
We don’t have the same working culture as the US or China. Trying to recreate it here won’t work. And it arguably goes against the trend for the nature of work.
Smarter not harder
Longer hours is an unlikely explanation for all of the productivity differences between Europe, the US, and China. What else might be missing? For me it’s about investment inside the company as well as out.
I mentioned infrastructure above, but what about energy costs? There are lots of things we could do here that we don’t because of the cost of energy. Like making steel, for example. Or powering giant AI datacentres - something that costs a premium here versus other parts of the world. Industrial energy prices have been over 150% higher here than in the US.
With cheaper energy we can apply more computing power and other augmentations to our working day, focusing our best people more on the places they add the most value. And this, for me, points to the crux of our productivity problem.
Years of underinvestment, at both state and corporate level, in technology, infrastructure, and yes, in people, has left us lagging behind. Catching up won’t be achieved by adopting other people’s working culture. We have to evolve our own, and do so with investment.