I’m planning to have someone from Australia do some work and was computing the amount paid per hour etc and the numbers didn’t add up. “This is too small.” Then I got a reminder their workweek is 38 hours (basically 8 hour shifts with unpaid 24 minutes’ of breaks). In America we tend to have 8.5 or 9 hour shifts with 30-50 minutes of lunch break.
Now with RTO, employers want the same productivity they had with WFH (basically more people on call, available outside of regular hours, and a standard workday almost an hour longer).
For a lot of tasks, productivity does not scale linearly with the amount of hours worked. When your shift is an hour longer, that doesn't necessarily mean that you get an hour more work done.
Almost no tasks!
There’s some fascinating data from factories producing munitions during WWII (a highly motivated workforce doing skilled work) showing that total productivity plateaus at about 45 hours per week.