c


c
 
 


A longer weekend is always something to look forward to. A 5 day work week could mean
longer weekends away from home which helps reduce stress. Having the extra day off is a
privilege that many would love to have.
This extra day off also means a worker can rest and recover fully before stepping back into the
office. In all respects, a less stressed, a fully recovered, and a refreshed worker should mean a
more productive and happy employee.

By having a 5 day work week it could mean less absenteeism. The long weekend could mean less
faux sick days on Mondays, it can also mean an extra day of rest if an employee is in fact falling
ill.

The overall pros for a 5 day work week reflect lower turnover, and a happier, less stressed work
force.

The 5 day work week, if offered at a workplace, should be an option versus a requirement. This
will lead to more freedom for a worker to make the choice that fits their lifestyle better. It will
lead to more productivity, less stress, and retention.

At face value, the 5 day work week seems like a very good idea to a lot of people. There is the
possibility of getting work done in a shorter period of time, which can result in more time off for
the busy person who can't seem to fit their household chores into the weekend or lunch breaks.

Another question with the 5 day work week is productivity. It is proved from studies and
behavioural patterns that people do not always spend their eight-hour work day actually
accomplishing things on a consistent basis. Sometimes people take a lot of breaks, spend a lot of
time "goofing" around, or just look for ways to get out of the office. If people worked 5 days
instead of 6, then between all the interruptions, web surfing, office politics, and personal business
that permeates typical work day would stop.

Fewer official working days help squeeze the fat out of the typical work week. Once everyone
has less time to get their stuff done, they respect that time even more. People become stingy with
their time and that·s a good thing. They don·t waste it on things that just don·t matter. When you
have fewer hours you usually spend them more wisely.

Longer days aren·t the goal. Think 5 days means a shorter week with `

   

 .
And that·s actually what employer wants. Since one has less time, one should reconsider the things
one spends time on. Is that extra meeting really necessary? Do we really need to take up another
hour today talking about this thing we talked about last week? Etc.

The shorter work week should encourage revaluating how you work, not just the number of hours
you are expected to put in.
In addition, one could count on a schedule that meant one could make plans with friends for an
hour after work ² and almost will never have to cancel because of something at work getting in
the way because one already know when one could expect to be at work, when one could expect
to be free, and how to re-energize oneself.

    !"# $%&   % $'



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(





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*
'
All IT Companies have gone for such working pattern because every second recruit entering the
$60-billion Indian IT industry is a woman. Ms Kumar recently quit her job as project manager at a
top-tier IT firm in Gurgaon where she had been working for the past 14 years. The issue was not
the firm, but the sector, said the 36-year-old mother of two school-going children. The job asked
for 6days working and it was not manageable because her choices ran down to the wire: job or
home.



Increasing the working days or working hours or reducing the lunch times, will not help even 1%.
The need is to calculate per hour performance and increase per hour/day per person
productivity.

c

Wipro joint CEO Suresh Vaswani said the male to female ratio is almost 50:50 at the fresher
level. But, the percentage of women employees drops to about 15-20% at middle management
levels and further about 5-10% at senior management level.

´It·s a loss for us when a trained and talented woman employee leaves us,µ said Mr Vaswani.
Wipro employs almost 28,000 women in its total headcount of 97,000 employees. Its Bangalore
rival Infosys has 33.4% women employees, though among 232 title holders (positions at assistant
vice- president and above), less than 2% are women. ´We have opened crèches at our large
campuses. We have also reduced our $% +$ and $% "#.Overburdening the employees
by asking them to keep more number of hours will only increase corporate turnover and therefore
increase costs. Plus increasing work hours only makes employees more tired and stressed; studies
show this actually decreases productivity.

(
´Increasing the number of working hours and working days is absolutely ridiculous, since more
than 90% of IT professionals are working for more than the stipulated 9 hoursµ So a policy to
work for 5days a week would help employees to relax and trade off extra work during other
days of week.





´Diversity is critical for us. We don·t think women need special policies to continue working. Men
too leave their jobs. But, we want to make it easier for women to continue working,µ said Nandita
Gurjar, SVP & group HR head at Infosys. She noted that the number of women opting for
engineering courses has gone up from 12-15% a few years back to almost 40% today And so it·s
essential to cut down to the working days.


 


Kellogg too reduced his workers' totals working days, he did not cram more hours into less days.
And he found an upswing in positive returns. Honestly I'm appalled at how many people are
defending their insane work hours, making it a status symbol to have the longer and crappier
shifts, as if working yourself into drone states is something to be proud of. So many people have
been brainwashed into this manner of thinking. I agree that a 5 day work week could be the
instigator of a large scale change in the nation's overall attitude.

Thus, it can be concluded that HR has to play a bigger role and leave behind the conventional
method of cost cutting. HR should be accountable for how effective are the procedure being
implemented and benefiting employees and employer. Service organizations are highly people
dependant and hence thinking similar to Manufacturing setup HR won·t be highly successful.

,+$# c$"+-#  $

A more realistic view of worker output would take into account the changes in hourly output that
result from a change in the length of the working day. Those changes result mainly from two
sources: simple physical and mental fatigue that occurs in the later hours of a long day, and
accumulated physical and mental fatigue that builds up over an extended period of long working
days.

This more complex view can be represented by the following equation:

. c/ 0 1  2 1  3 4  5

Where
is total output and c/5 represents the changes in hourly productivity that occur over
times  0 6   . In this equation c/5 is a function, not a constant. c/5 will vary by worker, because
some workers produce more than others. c/5 will also vary by hour, because humans are not
machines and do not do exactly the same amount of work in hour 14 of a job as they do in hour
1. Finally, c/5 will vary according to the recent history of the worker, because people don't work
as well the morning after a late night as they do the morning after a good night's sleep.
Depicting c, the ´long-period variations (with the length of the working day) of the marginal
value of a fixed quantity of labourµ
7 is increasing hours worked in a day and
 is increasing
value. If
 hours are worked, the total value produced is the area
" .Observe that the
height of the curve P represents worker productivity (output per unit time at a given number of
hours worked per day).

Astute readers will note that there is a point, 81 where working more hours doesn't create more
value. In fact, after 81 each additional hour worked produces  ` . How can this be?

Henry's diagram of the work curve assumes that a working day of a given length is maintained
over a considerable period of time. Thus it incorporates both simple and accumulated fatigue into
its model. At first the declines in output per hour simply reflect the effects of fatigue on both
quantity and quality of work performed toward the end of a given day. But eventually daily
fatigue is compounded by cumulative fatigue. That is, any additional output produced during
extended hours today will be more than offset by a decline in hourly productivity tomorrow and
subsequent days.

Even during a single ´dayµ of extreme duration, output may come to a standstill as an exhausted
employee becomes unable to function. Or output can turn negative as stupefied employees
commit catastrophic errors that destroy previously completed work or capital.

In factory terms, a worker's production rate decreases over time. A worker who is creating 10
widgets/hour at the beginning of a shift may be producing only 6/hour at the end of the shift,
having peaked at 12/hour a couple of hours in. Over time, the worker works more slowly, and
makes more mistakes. This combination of slowdown and errors eventually reaches a point of zero
productivity, where it takes a very long time to produce each widget, and every last one is
somehow spoiled. Assembly-line managers figured out long ago that when this level of fatigue is
reached, the stage is set for spectacular failure-events leading to large and costly losses ² an
expensive machine is damaged, inventory is destroyed, or a worker is seriously injured.

In terms of knowledge workers, a programmer produces more good code and fewer bugs when
well-rested. We take the first hour or so of the day getting into the groove. The next few hours
tend to be our best ones. Later in the day, as we get tired, we get less done per hour ³ it takes
a long time to fix a simple bug or add a simple feature that we would have handled in minutes
earlier in the day. Pushed just a little farther ³ and it seems that much of the computer
entertainment industry is working at this extreme most of the time ³ an overtired IT worker may
trash valuable files requiring extra work to restore backups or have an accident on the way home
that takes him/her offline for months.
In the 1920s, Henry Ford experimented for several years with work schedules and finally, in
1926, introduced a five day, 40 hour week for six days pay. Why did Ford do it? Because his
experiments showed that workers in his factories could produce more in five days than they could
in six. At every step along the way ³ in the 1840s, the 1890s and the 1920s ³ the consensus of
business opinion insisted that shorter hours would strangle output and spell economic ruin.

 8+ $6$
++9
If 40-hour weeks offer the most reasonable long-term arrangement for maximizing output, You
can get more work out of more hours for several days to a couple of months, depending upon
how much longer the workday is.

It is intuitively obvious that a worker who produces one widget per hour during an eight-hour day
can produce somewhere between eight and 16 widgets during a 16-hour day. But where a work
schedule of 60 or more hours per week is continued longer than about two months, the cumulative
effect of decreased productivity will cause a delay in the completion date beyond that which
could have been realized with the same crew size on a 40-hour week. The Business Roundtable
study states that construction productivity starts to drop very quickly upon the transition to 60-hour
weeks. The fall-off can be seen within days, is obvious within a week...and just keeps sliding from
there. In about two months, the cumulative productivity loss has declined to the point where the
project would actually be farther ahead if you'd just stuck to 40-hour weeks all along.

$ ,$# $" ,+$  8+$

The argument in the more technical parts of this address, concerned with the determination of the
length of the working day, may be conveniently summarized with the aid of the following
figure[s]. In order to avoid the complexities arising from the redistribution of labour between the
industries of a country, suppose that only one industry exists. The Measurement of units of time in
the working day along
7, and units of money along
 is done.

Consider first the unbroken lines which represent the influences governing employers. The curve c
expresses the long-period variations with the length of the working day of the marginal value of
a fixed quantity of labour: the opinion that these can be represented by a curve has been
defended in the body of this address. If
á hours are worked, this daily value of labour and the
wage will ultimately be
á
; if
K hours are worked, this value and wage rises to
K
; if
i
hours are worked, it falls to
K
Ki .
The meaning of the curve c will now be plain. The curve is supposed to rise in the first instance
because increasing the daily hours of labour would at first raise the level of efficiency, and if it
did not, the larger wage would. But c must begin to fall at some point, and eventually cross
7,
as is demonstrated in the body of the address. Actually, of course, c could not start at
,
because a man when engaged for only a fraction of his time daily could not live on the proceeds
of his work, but it has been so drawn in the figures to enable us to picture the value and wage of
labour by the area between the curve c and the co-ordinates.

The curve ð represents the immediate variations of the marginal value of a fixed quantity of
labour with the length of the working day on the assumption that the normal working day has
been
K. Hence the value of the normal product of the last minute of the working day
K is K
.
› 

K
ð must equal
K
. If the working day is lengthened to
i the product will at first
be augmented by Ki
, but finally by a gradual decline it will sink to
K
Ki .

The influences guiding the operatives are expressed in the dotted lines, the meaning of which must
now be explained. Draw any vertical line  to the left of K. Then á is the addition made in the
long run to the money income of the operative when the
á increment of time is added to the
working day. Let  be the long-period value to the operative, when his income is
á
, of the
leisure destroyed by the addition of the
áth increment of time to the working day. The curve  is
the locus of the point . Evidently, starting at
, it will lie throughout its length below c,
increasingly departing from c (because leisure is subject to the law of diminishing utility and the
value of leisure rises with income), and cut
7 to the left of K.

Apart from the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of working, therefore, the far-sighted operative who
took into account the value of leisure would choose a normal day
j, which is less than
K (the
choice of far-sighted employers in combination). When the normal day is
j the marginal value of
leisure to an operative with a wage
j
would be j , which equals the long-period marginal
earnings attributable to the
jth increment of time in the working day.
Now, let indicate the long-period values to the operative of the effects of different lengths of
working day on the absolute satisfaction or dissatisfaction involved in the labour itself, being
otherwise interpreted, when units of money are measured along
: as well as along
, and
the parts of the curve below
7 indicate the prices which would be paid to escape the
dissatisfaction involved in working, and the parts above
7 the money value of the satisfaction
involved in working. As some of the time devoted to production will probably be pleasant to the
operative when the length of the working day is most favorable to his enjoyment of work, we may
assume that need not lie throughout its length below
7. Then the working day which perfectly
wise operatives would choose would be
á, the point á being such that á . á, the attainment of
which equation is the condition under which the operative's satisfaction is maximized. If, as is
theoretically conceivable but practically impossible, lay further above
7 for the abscissa
K
than  lay below it, the length of day most advantageous to the operative would be greater than

K.

If normal hours are
á, the operative who lives for the day and is aware that more work,
measured by results, means proportionately more pay, will obviously desire hours longer than
á
for the following reasons. The product attributable to the
áth increment of working time is
greater than á, since á represents the gain resulting from the
áth. less the loss occasioned by
the reduction which will ultimately take place in the productivity of the operative's earlier hours in
consequence of the addition of the
áth increment of time to the working day. For similar reasons
the short-period or immediate value of leisure might be less than . Again, the money measure
of the disutility of the
áth increment of working time is less than á, because á measures the
results from the fact that the
áth increment of working time diminishes capacity in earlier hours to
enjoy labour or sustain fatigue.

It is evident, therefore, that a balance of gain accrues to the operative from the work of the
áth
unit of time, when everything, including wages is taken into account, but the effect of the work on
the
áth unit of time on the gain associated with the rest of the working day ignored; and,
further, that the balance of gain attributable to the
áth hours will not disappear, though it may
contract if the working day be slightly extended. Hence we must conclude that operatives who
are not alive to the reactions of long hours on efficiency and capacity to enjoy life and work will
tend to choose a longer working day than is wise from their point of view. However, to repeat,
they will not approve such long hours as employers who are equally blind to future reactions,
because the latter, if purely self-interested, make no allowance for the disutility of labour to the
operative or the utility to him of leisure.

In the event of progress in methods of production the new position of c would be such that the
area enclosed between it and the co-ordinate axes would be increased. c in its new position
might cut
7 at K, but in all probability the new intersection with
7 would be to the left ofK. It
is not likely to fall to the right of K, since improvements in the mechanical aids of labour seldom
mean that work is rendered less exhausting.

Even if the new curve c passed through K, the new position of  would practically mean its
intersection with
7 to the left of j because of the enhanced value of leisure. Further , though it
might rise higher than before, would probably descend sooner and at least as steeply. It is to be
observed in addition that but for interest, rent and heavy depreciation charges, industrial
progress would bring about movements of c involving more considerable augmentation of the
area contained between c and the co-ordinate axes.

Improved education, apart from its effect on efficiency, would bring about a subsidence of the
curve , so that in its new position it would cut
7 to the left of j. The effect wrought by progress
on short-period forces need not be worked out in detail. The general conclusion is manifest that
progress may be expected to be accompanied by a progressive curtailment of the working day.

The best-known case is probably Taylor's study of the pig-iron handlers of the Bethlehem Steel
Company. He found that the gang of 75 men was loading on the average about 12½ tons per
man per day. When he discussed with various managers the question of what output would be the
possible maximum, they agreed that under premium work, piecework, or any of the ordinary
plans for stimulating the men, an output of 18 to 25 tons would be the extreme possibility. Then
he proceeded to a systematic study of the fatigue in its relation to the burden and of the best
possible relation between working time and resting time. His first efforts to find formulas were
unsuccessful; because he calculated only the actual mechanical energy exerted and found that
some men were tired after exerting energy of 1/8 hp. while others seemed to be able to
produce the energy of ½ hp without greater fatigue. But soon he discovered the mistake in his
figures. He had considered only the actual movements, and had neglected the period in which the
laborer was not moving and was not exerting energy, but in which a weight was pulling his arms
and demanding a corresponding muscular effort. As soon as this muscular achievement was taken
into account, too, he found that for each particular weight a definite relation exists between the
time that a man is under a heavy load and the time of rest. For the usual loads of 90 pounds, he
found that a first-class laborer must not work more than 43 per cent of the working day and must
be entirely without load 57 per cent. If the load becomes lighter, the relation is changed. If the
workman is handling a half pig weighing 46 pounds, he can be under load 58 per cent of the
day and only has to rest during 42 per cent.

As soon as these figures were experimentally secured, Taylor selected fit men, and did not allow
them to lift and to carry the loads as they pleased, but every movement was exactly prescribed
by foremen who timed exactly the periods of work and rest. If he had simply promised his men a
high premium in case they should carry more than the usual tons a day, they would have
burdened themselves as heavily as possible and would have carried the load as quickly as
possible, thus completely exhausting themselves after three or four hours of labor. In spite of such
senseless exaggeration of effort in the first hours, the total output for the day would have been
relatively small. Now the foremen determined exactly when every individual should lift and move
the load and when he should sit quietly. The result was that the men, without greater fatigue, were
able to carry 47½ tons a day instead of the 12½ tons. Their wages were increased 60 per cent.
Such a trivial illustration demonstrates very clearly the extreme difference between an increase of
the economic achievement by scientific, experimental investigation and a mere enforcing of more
work by artificially whipping-up the mind with promises of extraordinary wages.

;+- +$#
According to Henry Ford, More than a century of studies show that long-term useful worker output
is maximized nears a five-day, 40-hour workweek. Productivity drops immediately upon starting
overtime and continues to drop until, at approximately at 60-hour weeks, the total work done is
the same as what would have been done in eight 40-hour weeks.

In the short term, working over 21 hours continuously is equivalent to being legally drunk. Longer
periods of continuous work drastically reduce cognitive function and increase the chance of
catastrophic error. In both the short- and long-term, reducing sleep hours as little as one hour
nightly can result in a severe decrease in cognitive ability.