工作时间越短，效率越高？_BEC初级作文

工作时间越短，效率越高？

The grand productivity experiment

Studies of past attempts by various countries to trim employees’ workdays have yielded conflicting results.

Last year, research from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reported in The Economist showed that the more people worked, the more their productivity tapered off.

But South Korean research detailed in the Journal of Happiness Studies last year found that employees appreciated shorter workdays in theory only. In practice, researchers found, the country’s 2004 workday reduction from 44 hours to 40 — and a declaration of Saturdays as an official day off — didn’t do much to improve workers’ job satisfaction or overall happiness. Instead, having less time to tackle the same workloadincreased their stress. The workload, it turned out, for these already-efficient employees was simply too high to get done in fewer hours.

And back in 2005, Sweden’s Kiruna district council ended a 16-year-run of mandated six-hour workdays for 250 employees, claiming the programme cost too much and was too unwieldy to manage. According to the council, managing two different sets of employee work schedules — the six-hour day and the eight-hour day — had grown too complicated. The European news site The Local also reported that at a similar experiment a hospital in Stockholm created resentment among employees whose schedules hadn’t been reduced.