by Margaret Heffernan - Thursday, 6th September 2007 -

Eisner repeats this as if it were some claim to fame. In fact, it may be a cause for blame.

In an economy where innovation, creativity and originality are the drivers of growth, why on earth should the accumulation of hours be a measure of anything?

The Disney chief falls prey to the same foolishness that beleaguers so many companies, both British and American: the belief that the more hours you put in, the more you produce.

But we should know better. Over a hundred years ago, Dr Ernst Abbe studied working time at the Zeiss Optical Works in Germany – and found that reducing hours by more than ten per cent actually increased output.

Following that lead, Henry Ford appalled his peers by moving production from a six day to a five day week. Every study ever since has just confirmed those early findings.

This is so counter-intuitive; why is it true? To start with, productivity isn’t constant. Both quantity and quality decline as you get tired.

Industrial accidents, software bugs, flawed decision- marking: all of these expensive mistakes demolish the value your extra hours may have bought.

And if you bring sleep deprivation into the equation, you move from productivity losses to catastrophes like the Exxon Valdez.

British workers now put in more hours than ever. And while more of us work from home, this “flexibility” seems to create longer days rather than richer lives.

No one was surprised when HP published a study showing that the use of “always on” technologies actually lowered IQ. It just confirmed what we knew: being busy is not at all the same as being productive.

And yet being busy is what we seem to value.

Across Britain, we hear complaints about hours, on the grounds that, well, if the French don’t work so hard, why should we?

But it’s a sloppy argument, given lame support by the state of the French economy. Instead we should focus on the business case.

Take a software company like SAS Institute, which lets its developers work only 35 hours per week – so remarkable in that sector that they experience very little staff churn: three per cent compared with an industry norm of 20 per cent.

On a revenue base of $800m, it’s calculated that this saves them $100m a year. Not only that.

The fact that their developers aren’t burned out writing code through the night means they don’t have to follow the Microsoft model of having three testers to check on every one programmer.

Moreover, there’s mounting evidence that commitment to activities outside work contributes to managerial excellence.

Far from detracting from business, it is our whole lives that make us better able to see solutions, communicate effectively and orchestrate collaboration. It’s obvious when you think about – but from the hours everyone’s clocking, no one has time to think about it.

So why do companies persist with such a faulty yardstick? In part, it’s the counter-intuitive data.

If you can make 10 widgets in an hour, you’d think you could make 100 widgets in 10 hours. Moreover, creativity is very hard to schedule.

How it happens, where it happens, what the immediate value of that great idea is – these are hard to quantify. So we treasure what we can measure. And when we’re exhausted, we take comfort in being able to feel just how hard we’ve worked.

But mostly I think an emphasis on hours is about dominance: are you one of those bosses who feel powerful when they keep staff from home, from loved ones, from life?

In the jealous battle that some firms wage for loyalty, the MD who’s determined to outwork everyone ultimately cares more about protecting his crown than his creativity – or the company’s productivity.

We are just beginning to appreciate that business must, as a priority, consider the sustainability of the planet.

But it’s high time that we started looking at the sustainability of the work force too. If we’re proud of our smart, educated, creative workforce, and if we recognise that its brainpower is our most effective economic engine, then we’d better start taking care of it.

Instead of the “if you eat lunch, you are lunch” cultures that still persist today (best expressed in Gordon Gecko’s “lunch is for wimps” back in the eighties) perhaps it’s time we called in the caterers.