Do you want your employees to work more?
…then give them time off! This seemingly contradictory statement is the result of a study by Timo Vogelsang of the University of Cologne. He studied in a laboratory experiment how workers reacted to different incentives. Participants were invited into a laboratory where they had to work on tasks on a computer with access to the internet. In the baseline condition, they were paid a specified amount for the half-hour. Then, they were asked to do another half hour of work and offered a salary that was more than twice the original payment. The salary increase was not conditional on the performance of their work. In an alternative condition, the participants were paid the same but allowed to leave the lab early. And guess what? The participants that were offered the additional leisure time increased their productivity by 25%. With the additional salary, there was no increase in productivity. What’s more, the productivity of the participants with the additional leisure time increased so much that in 30 minutes they completed 8 to 9 tasks more than those participants that had no additional incentive or were given a salary raise.
Completed tasks in 30 minutes
Source: Vogelsang (2019).
This isn’t too surprising since it is well-known that employees value spare time and vacations more than salary increases. In Germany, railway employees could choose in 2016 whether they wanted more time off or a salary raise as part of their union-negotiated contracts. More than half the employees chose the additional spare time. And the harder the job, the bigger the preference for leisure time. In 2018, German union IG Metall asked their members if they wanted more paid vacation or a salary increase in the next round of negotiations. Amongst shift workers, 70% to 80% preferred more paid vacation.
But what I find fascinating is that Timo Vogelsang not only looked at the reaction of test participants to different incentives but also the drivers of these different behaviours. And he found that the additional leisure time did not lead to more hasty work or lower quality work. Instead, participants simply cut out their internet surfing. Participants could surf the internet during the tasks as much as they wanted, and they did so quite a bit. However, those participants who could leave the lab sooner cut their internet surfing roughly in half. And this despite the fact that they were not incentivised to do so. They could have surfed the net during the tasks just as much as everyone else and they would still be allowed to leave the lab early. Yet, they didn’t feel the need to spend leisure time on the internet because they knew they would get to spend that leisure time after their workday anyway.
In a sense, what Vogelsang shows is that employers pay their employees for leisure time either way. If they make them work longer hours, the employees just spend that leisure time surfing the web or having a chat at the water cooler. Better to let them go home and spend their leisure time with their family and friends. They will thank you for it with higher productivity and more output.
And before you write to me that these are just laboratory studies that have no relation to the real world, consider that Microsoft in Japan closed its offices every Friday throughout August 2019 and gave each employee an additional day off. The result of this 20% cut in work time: A 40% increase in productivity measured as sales/employee.
Surfing the internet during work
Source: Vogelsang (2019).