Why Pakistan needs 40 hour Work Weeks

Why Pakistan needs 40 hour Work Weeks

After the division of United India, Pakistan and Hindustan were two countries that basically based all their principles and civil workings the way the British had created them to be. The only thing the people of the subcontinent failed to implement were,
proper working hours in the civil and private sectors, a decision that has cost us dearly now.

Currently, normal jobs in Pakistan have their employees working anywhere between 48 hours per week, all the way up to 56 hours and even more in many regions depending on the type of job.

We, the Desi people, have established our own working principles on the theory that the more and longer you make people work, the more that will get achieved, which is definitely wrong in every sense and it has been proven to be numerous times throughout
history.

It was Henry Ford back in the early 20^th century that discovered that by allowing his workers to perform shorter shifts and compensate nearly double what they were earning at that time, the results more than doubled in a matter of weeks. The pioneer
of modern cars received criticism from his competitors, who termed it to be useless and a waste of resources, but also closely followed behind in the following months and years due to its success.

Now, looking at the developed nations of the world, there is one common thing noticeable amongst their people working in any industry, private or public, is that 40 hour jobs have always been the way to go. And seeing their success compared to our situation
today, it is not hard to say that their way has been working far much better.

What our people do not understand is that a happy employee will benefit the company in any way possible due to the motivational factor involved and not just for the monetary compensation at the start of every month. People would actually want to work knowing
that they will be rested in due time and have enough time to actually live their life.

Numerous research, theories and experiments throughout history have gone to show only one thing and that is a well rested employee is far more productive in every sense of the word in comparison to the one who works even a few more hours per week.

All this surprisingly, just does not fit into the manual labour category as many would have thought since it seems just natural to rest those more who are physically working than those who have desk jobs. Research rather supports the claim that jobs that
involve higher working of the mind are more stressful in the end and making a worker perform past the eight hour a day mark would just kill any productivity for sure.

Amazingly, it goes all the way to say that only six hours a day, including the lunch break, is the only productive time that employees actually do anything beneficial for the company. The rest is gone to fooling around, chit chatting, killing time on anything
other than work, basically equalling to a loss of resources for the company.

Just imagine how much an organisation would save if they were to get the same productivity, if not more from their employees, if they were to give two days a week off along with reduce the normal work timings from 9-6, six days a week, to 9-5, five days
a week.

Even though a majority of the companies in Pakistan do not provide enough facilities for their employees like proper medical coverage, provident funds, health benefits and other recreational facilities, they should at least allow their people to feel like
working professionals instead of slaves waking up in the morning with the feeling of just wanting to go back to sleep and hating what they do for a living.

But with all this said, there is still very little hope that actually anyone would practically implement it due to the lack of proper ability to logically think and want to benefit from the experience of developed and first world nations.

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Posted by Syed Hassan Bokhari on Mar 15 2012. Filed under Business, Editorial, National, Opinion, Pakistan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry