Longer working hours are often seen as a response to economic pressure and a shortage of skilled workers. But sustainable productivity does not come from more working hours: overload, lack of focus time and inefficient structures can weaken performance and motivation in the long term. Professor Malte Martensen explains why HR and leadership need to fundamentally rethink productivity.
Executive Summary
Sustainable productivity instead of overtime
- The challenge: In view of economic pressure and a shortage of skilled workers, companies are relying on longer working hours to increase productivity. At the same time, studies and practical experience show: Overload, lack of focus time and inefficient structures impair concentration, motivation and performance.
- The solution: Sustainable productivity comes from suitable working conditions, clear priorities and results-oriented leadership – not through extended working hours across the board. What is crucial are productive framework conditions, reduced interruptions and a work organization that supports focus, personal responsibility and long-term performance.
- Your benefit: Professor Malte Martensen analyzes why simple extensions of working hours fall short in many areas of work and which levers HR and management should use instead. The article provides concrete impulses for modern work organization, productive working conditions and sustainable performance in the company.
- Focus: Sustainable productivity instead of overtime, working hours, management culture, work organization, performance, focus times, employee retention, HR strategy, productivity in the company
Overtime: short-term leverage, long-term risk
The current debate about working hours is often significantly reduced: In economically tense times, more work seems to be an obvious solution. More hours should produce more output and thus contribute to stabilization. However, the results of our current study paint a different picture. The majority of employees expect longer working hours not only to reduce their quality of life and health, but also to reduce concentration and increase the likelihood of errors.
This assessment is not trivial. She points to a central mechanism: productivity is not a purely technical output factor, but rather depends heavily on motivation, energy and cognitive performance. If these factors are impaired by overload, the effect of additional working time is reversed. In addition, expectations influence behavior. Anyone who assumes that longer working hours lead to stress reacts by working more cautiously, taking less initiative or withdrawing. Phenomena such as internal dismissal or increasing absenteeism are often not individual problems, but rather an expression of structural excessive demands.
The mistake in thinking: Productivity is not an hourly function
A central error in the current discussion is the assumption that productivity can be increased linearly with working hours. This logic comes from industrial contexts where output was tightly linked to time. However, in many of today’s activities this only applies to a limited extent. Knowledge work, creative activities or complex problem solving follow different rules. Focus, cognitive freshness and recovery phases are crucial here. At a certain point, longer working hours do not lead to better performance, but rather to fatigue, declining quality and increasing costs of errors.
At the same time, it is often overlooked that there is no such thing as one job. Different activities follow different productivity logics: Repetitive tasks benefit from standardization and clear processes, while creative and knowledge-intensive activities benefit from autonomy, freedom from interruptions and mental space. A uniform working time logic for this diversity inevitably falls short.
If you want to increase productivity, you have to differentiate – not generalize.
Three levers for sustainable productivity
If longer working hours are not a reliable driver of productivity, the question arises: What works instead? Three central levers can be derived from research and practice:
1. Design working hours appropriately instead of increasing them across the board
Productivity arises where working hours match tasks and the reality of life. Rigid or one-sidedly extended working hours increase the risk of overwork, especially for employees with care responsibilities or high cognitive demands.
Practical example: Teams define binding core times for coordination, but combine these with individual focus times without meetings. This creates both reliability and productive freedom.
2. Align leadership from presence to results
Leadership influences productivity more than working time models alone. In organizations where attendance is seen as a performance indicator, inefficient routines often arise: unnecessary meetings, long coordination loops or the feeling of having to be “visibly busy”.
Practical example: Leaders agree on clear outcome goals and measure progress in terms of results rather than hours. This creates orientation and at the same time reduces inefficient utilization.
3. Design the working environment and processes to promote productivity
A large part of the loss of productivity is not caused by too little time, but rather by unfavorable conditions: constant interruptions, unclear responsibilities or a lack of prioritization.
Practical example: HR initiates meeting-free time windows, reduces parallel projects or establishes clear decision-making rules. Even small structural adjustments can have big effects here.
Productivity is also a question of the reality of life
Another factor that is often underestimated is the reality of employees’ lives. Working hours should not be viewed in isolation – they are always in the context of family, care, relaxation and personal obligations.
Many people don’t work less because they don’t want to, but because there is hardly any other organizational option. Longer working hours often exacerbate these tensions rather than resolving them. At the same time, our data shows that precisely these aspects – health, social relationships and relaxation – are central to the perception of work quality. For organizations this means: Productivity does not arise despite these realities of life, but only in coordination with them.
The often underestimated factor: attitude and leadership culture
In addition to structures and processes, it is the inner attitude that determines whether these levers are effective. Productivity cannot be controlled through rules alone – it arises in an environment that enables trust, clarity and personal responsibility.
For HR and management, this means a change of perspective: away from the idea that more control automatically leads to better performance. Instead, it’s about accepting different ways of working, dealing with uncertainty constructively and creating spaces for independent work.
Particularly in complex and dynamic working environments, it is clear that organizations are particularly effective when they are not only efficient but also adaptable. Leadership thus becomes less of a control authority and more of an enabler of performance.
Rethink productivity
The results of our study make it clear: the future of work does not lie in longer working hours, but in better designed working conditions. This does not mean that working hours are irrelevant. On the contrary: it remains a central lever. What is crucial, however, is how it is designed, managed and embedded in the organizational context.
Or to put it another way:
It’s not more time that makes organizations more productive – it’s the conscious use of it.
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