Reduced working hours and more flexible working time arrangements such as those used during the Covid-19 crisis, can benefit economies, enterprises and workers.
Such arrangements can lay the ground for a better and healthier work-life balance, according to a new ILO report.
The report styled 'Working Time and Work-Life Balance around the World' was published on Friday.
It looked at the two main aspects of working time-working hours and time arrangements (also called work schedule) and effects of both on business performance and workers' work-life balance.
It included a range of new statistics covering hours of work, both before and during the Covid-19 crisis.
The study, the first to focus on work-life balance, shows a substantial portion of the global workforce works either long or short hours than a standard eight-hour day/40-hour workweek.
More than one-third of all workers regularly work more than 48 hours per week. A fifth of the global workforce works short (part-time) hours of less than 35 per week.
Informal economy workers are more likely to have long or short hours.
The ILO study analyses different working-time arrangements and their effects on work-life balance, including shift work, on-call work, compressed hours and hours-averaging schemes.
It cautions that the benefits of some of these flexible arrangements, for example better family life, may be accompanied by costs, including greater gender imbalances and health risks.
It also looks at crisis-response measures governments and businesses used during Covid-19 pandemic to help keep organisations functioning and workers employed.
The report found that the increased proportion of workers on reduced hours helped to prevent job losses.
"The large-scale implementation of teleworking nearly everywhere in the world that it was feasible to do so… the nature of employment, most likely for the foreseeable future," it said.
Covid-19 measures also yielded powerful new evidence that giving workers more flexibility in how, where and when they work can be positive both for them and for business, for example by improving productivity.
Conversely, restricting flexibility brings substantial costs, including increased staff turnover.
"There is a substantial amount of evidence that work-life balance policies provide significant benefits to enterprises, supporting the argument that such policies are a "win-win" for both employers and employees."
"The so-called 'Great Resignation' phenomenon has placed work-life balance at the forefront of social and labour market issues in the post-pandemic world," said Jon Messenger, the lead author of the report.
"This report shows that if we apply some of the lessons of the Covid-19 crisis and look very carefully at the way working hours are structured, as well as their overall length, we can create a win-win, improving both business performance and work-life balance."
The report made a set of recommendations, including working-time laws and regulations on maximum daily hours of work and statutory rest periods, for the long-term health and wellbeing of society.
Longer hours of work are generally associated with lower unit labour productivity, while shorter hours of work are linked with higher productivity.
Countries should make use of the experiences they developed with working-time reduction and flexibility during Covid-19 crisis, it said.
It suggested that inclusive short-time work schemes with highest possible allowances not only maintain employment, but also sustain purchasing power and create possibility of cushioning effects of economic crises.
The report also suggested public policy responses that are needed to promote reductions in hours of work in many countries, to promote both a healthy work-life balance and improved productivity.
Teleworking helps maintain employment and creates new scope for employee autonomy, according to the ILO.
However, such flexible working arrangements need regulating, to contain their potential negative effects, through policies such as what is often called a "right to disconnect" from work.
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