Fewer work hours don’t hit productivity

“Flexibility is key—team building exercises, meetings and brainstorming workshops can take place around Iftar and other social events, while less essential tasks can be done remotely from home. Breaking the monotony of routine helps formulate new ideas within an organisation and also builds stronger bonds between employees,” the report added.

“Employees must be encouraged to work hard and keep up productivity during Ramadan,” Ahmed Al Hooti, a member of OCCI said. “The reason for the drop in productivity is not because they are fasting; it is a cultural thing. People in all sectors feel tired and want to work less. They prefer wanting to go back to their family sooner.”

Work hard

“It completely depends on the management. If you encourage your employees to work hard towards a reasonable target with good incentives, they will be productive in any month. For us, Ramadan is the best time of the year even though we are open until late at night,” an official at a vehicle dealership said.

According to the research, shorter working hours do not translate into decreased productivity. “The Japanese, for example, have consistently reduced working hours since the early 1970s but their productivity continued to rise over this period.

“The United Kingdom was forced to work a three-day week due to a miners’ strike in the 1970s; however, experts were baffled to find that production fell by only 6 per cent.

“Most studies indicate a significant fall-off in productivity after eight hours of working, and the majority of productivity tends to occur between the second and sixth hour of work. Office workers were found to be especially susceptible to deterioration in performance after six useful hours of work per day, compared with eight hours for more manual jobs,” the report explained.