The answer lies in the history of the workday. During the Industrial Revolution, companies were laser-focused on increasing labor as much as possible, which often led to incredibly long workdays of up to 16 hours a day.
Unsurprisingly, it turned out that hour workdays were not sustainable, and people began to protest these conditions.
A man called Robert Owen started a campaign to have people work no more than eight hours a day. He determined this number by the reasoning that people should have eight hours of labor, eight hours of recreation, and eight hours of rest. This formula, at the time, was thought to produce the best workers. The Ford Motor Company was the first to implement the eight-hour workday in , and it has been accepted as standard ever since. In recent years, the workforce has changed at a breakneck pace as more and more people, particularly millennials , walk away from the standard workday.
Human beings are not machines. We are unable to focus on a single task for prolonged periods of time without succumbing to distractions. Research shows that humans are unable to focus on things for more than minutes without needing a minute break. These breaks allow valuable time for recharging mental energy. In fact, without these breaks, performance lowers. The 9-to-5 workday does not allow for these breaks every hour and a half, and people often find themselves distracted because of it.
It goes without saying that some tasks are simply completed more quickly than others, regardless of what industry you work in. For some employees, they need an extended amount of time to work on a particular task.
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In fact, the concept of billable hours came about in the s in order to boost the salaries of lawyers, whose pay grade was failing to match those of doctors. In , an ABA article argued that , because attorneys were paid a fixed fee for their services, they weren't getting enough money in exchange for all the time they spent working with clients.
The concept of billable hours arose as a way of enabling lawyers to make money from every minute they spent working, and by the s, the approach had become the norm. Law firms quickly began to realize that they could make a lot more money by making their employees work longer hours. In , lawyers were expected to work around hours a year, which only translated to about 27 hours per week.
Today, many of the quotas are as high as hours a year, which translates to about 45 hours a week. This time-is-money approach quickly caught fire with other industries, which is why we still live in a world in which how we evaluate an employee largely on how much time they spend sitting at their desks. The problem, of course, is that in salaried positions, you're not actually paid for the amount of time you spend working.
So employees feel pressured to stay late just to show their bosses that they're committed to their jobs. In that sense, the irony of the modern workday is that it now contradicts its original purpose, which was to eradicate the exploitation of workers. Many of my friends come into the office at 9 am and don't leave until late into the evening because they want to impress their boss, and to answer any emails their employer sends regardless of whether or not it comes in during work hours, resulting in a new generation of people who feel somewhat disgruntled, overworked, and underpaid.
There are actions that states are taking in order to limit this concerning trend. Back in March, New York City introduced a bill that would actually make it illegal for businesses to contact employees outside of office hours.
Additionally, other countries are experimenting with encouraging their employees to get their work done faster in order to have more free time.
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