In today’s world, the discussion about work-life balance has never been more critical. According to a study made by the World Health Organization(WHO), shows that long working hours led to approximately 745,000 deaths from stroke and ischemic heart desease. The study explains that working 55 or more hours per week is is associated to a 35% more risk to suffer from this kind of strokes. This is one of the many reasons why some countries are starting to introduce laws to limit the working hours for employess,which we’ll discuss the impact in the following paragraphs.
As we’ve seen with the study introduced, many health concerns are associated with excessive working hours, and besides health, it can affect the families of the workers and also the overall state of the company and the job. Due to this concern, introducing limiting hours can have a very positive impacte on the work-life balance and also improve relationships and overall personal well being. Also, it is well known that well-rested employees can increase productivity and reduce workplace accidents by a huge amount.
On the other hands, we should assess the potential drawbacks of having this kind of laws. Although in in the most cases it leads to a better employee satisfaction, it could increase the labor cost for the business, and the possible reductions of overall wages, since they are going to be working less hours, besides this, it could lead to a decline in the company, since a lot of companies require longer hours than other, especially engineering or technical-focused industries.
In conclusion, have been seen the 2 sides of the implementations of this kind of laws, we could conclude that most of the companies will benefit from this kind of system, since it will lead to a better well-being of the employees, but each company will have different limits.