Jack Ma is the Jeff Bezos of Asia with his company Alibaba.
A very successful company.
He recently revealed a reason for his success.
He drives his team to work from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm, 6 days a week for a total of 72 hours.
How stupid.
I realize I am making that value judgment not having achieved anything close to the success of Jack Ma.
However, the data is clear that working employees 72 hours a week is not the most effective.
For reference, I point you to Harvard Business Review with their article on the work week. Click here to read it for yourself Extreme Jobs: The Dangerous Allure of the 70-Hour Workweek.
Study after study has shown that any work done past 50 hours per week has negative productivity.
As a worker bee, I have worked as much as 110 hours per week for a very short time. It was brutal. It was a killer and took some time to recover from.
Maybe Alibaba would be doing even better if the employees weren’t so exhausted!
There is good evidence that knowledge workers cannot even put in 40 hours a week of quality work. That is too much.
If you are tempted to work your employees ungodly hours, you may want to rethink it.