Germany’s debate about working hours is often surprisingly one-dimensional. Employees are being asked to work longer, reduce part-time employment, and contribute additional hours. But a recent survey suggests that many people are willing to work more — provided there are meaningful incentives. For businesses, however, there is an even more important question: before asking employees to work additional hours, do we actually know how the hours they already work are being used?
Germany is debating work once again.
The 35-hour workweek, part-time employment, overtime, labor shortages, and the question of whether an aging society needs people to work more are all back on the agenda.
The discussion is legitimate. If fewer people are participating in the workforce while prosperity, social security systems, and public services still need to be financed, total labor input cannot simply be ignored.
But the debate becomes too narrow when it focuses primarily on the number of hours people work.
A recent survey conducted by market research institute Appinio on behalf of job platform Indeed paints a more nuanced picture. More than half of the 1,000 employees surveyed said they were generally willing to work overtime. Almost 20% could even imagine working additional hours on a permanent basis. At the same time, nearly three-quarters already work more than the hours specified in their employment contracts at least occasionally.
That challenges the idea that society is simply becoming unwilling to work.
The more important question is:
Under what conditions are people willing to contribute more?
More Effort Requires a Clear Return
The answers from employees are hardly surprising.
Higher salaries, tax incentives, flexible working hours, and bonuses were among the incentives mentioned. In other words, if employers expect additional effort, employees also expect additional value in return.
That may sound obvious, but it is frequently overlooked in the political debate.
Additional work needs to provide a tangible benefit for the individual employee. And this is not solely an employer issue. Taxation and social security contributions also influence how attractive an additional hour of work actually is.
If an additional euro of gross income results in only a small increase in disposable income after taxes, social contributions, or the loss of other benefits, the economic incentive to work more becomes weaker.
The question, therefore, is not simply whether Germany has enough workers.
It is also whether the economic system provides sufficient incentives for people to make greater use of the labor capacity they already have.
The Indeed survey offers an important indication here. Lack of financial incentives, alongside private life, health, and family responsibilities, is among the reasons employees give for not wanting to increase their working hours further.
But for business leaders, there is another question that may be even more important.
The More Interesting Question: What Happens During the Hours We Already Have?
Imagine an employee who works 35 hours per week.
Increasing that to 40 hours would theoretically increase available working capacity by more than 14%.
That sounds significant.
But what if 10% or 15% of the employee’s existing working time is already being lost to avoidable coordination, poorly organized processes, duplicate data entry, unnecessary meetings, missing information, outdated systems, or manual routine tasks?
In that case, a company could achieve a comparable increase in productive capacity without extending contractual working hours by a single minute.
This is where the Indeed survey becomes particularly relevant.
Employees identify staff shortages, unnecessary bureaucracy, slow processes, unclear objectives, management problems, excessive meetings, and outdated technology as factors preventing them from accomplishing more during their existing working hours.
For managers, this may be one of the most important findings of the entire survey.
Because it changes the question.
Instead of asking:
How can we get five additional working hours?
companies should also ask:
How can we generate more productive output from the hours we already have?
Working Time Is a Resource — Not a Performance Metric
Many organizations still implicitly equate working time with performance.
But 40 hours of presence do not equal 40 hours of value creation.
A software developer can spend an entire day dealing with problems that could have been avoided with a better development environment.
A sales employee can spend hours manually maintaining data instead of speaking with customers.
A project manager can move from one meeting to another without a single meaningful decision being made.
On a timesheet, all of these days may look identical.
For the business, they are not.
That is why managers should distinguish between three dimensions:
Time. Activity. Outcome.
Only when these three dimensions are connected can productivity be evaluated meaningfully.
The relevant management question is not:
How many hours did someone work?
It is:
What did our organization actually use those hours for?
This perspective is becoming even more important as artificial intelligence changes the workplace.
If AI takes over routine tasks, analyzes documents, prepares content, structures information, or automates administrative processes, productivity gains should not simply mean that employees perform the same processes faster.
Organizations need to deliberately redirect the time they save toward higher-value activities.
Companies Know Their Costs Better Than They Know Their Activities
There is an interesting contradiction in many organizations.
Management teams often analyze financial metrics in extraordinary detail. They know personnel costs, revenue, contribution margins, budgets, and investments down to the smallest figures.
But ask:
How many hours does our software development team actually spend creating new features?
How much time is consumed by internal coordination?
Which projects consistently require more capacity than planned?
How much time do managers spend dealing with operational problems?
Which recurring activities could be automated?
The answers are often surprisingly imprecise.
That represents a significant productivity opportunity.
Modern activity and time tracking should therefore not exist solely for billing or payroll purposes. It can also become a management instrument.
At TimeSpin, this principle is central to the approach. The recorded hour is not the ultimate objective. The valuable information is understanding which activity consumed that hour.
When employees can record activities with minimal effort and the resulting data can be analyzed systematically, organizations can build a much clearer picture of how work is actually being performed over weeks and months.
Patterns begin to emerge.
Which projects consistently consume more capacity than expected?
Which customers require particularly intensive support?
How much time is spent in meetings?
Which supposedly minor administrative tasks accumulate into significant costs across an entire organization?
That visibility can change management decisions.
Productivity Starts With Transparency
Anyone who wants to improve productivity first needs transparency.
This does not mean monitoring individual employees.
Such an approach can damage trust and, more importantly, miss the real purpose of the data.
The more useful perspective is to identify aggregated patterns.
Suppose a developer spends five hours every week dealing with a particular administrative process.
The management question should not be:
Why does this employee take so long?
A better question is:
Why does this workload exist in the first place?
Perhaps an integration is missing.
Perhaps information is being entered twice.
Perhaps an approval process is unnecessarily complicated.
Perhaps software could automate the task.
This is where activity analysis connects directly with digital transformation and artificial intelligence.
Before companies can automate something, they need to know what should be automated.
More Work and More Productivity Are Not Opposites
Germany’s working-hours debate often presents two ideas as if they were mutually exclusive.
One side calls for more working hours.
The other calls for greater productivity.
A competitive economy may need both.
If people voluntarily want to work additional hours and those additional hours are economically attractive, the system should not unnecessarily discourage them.
At the same time, it would make little economic sense for companies to demand additional working hours while existing capacity is being wasted through inefficient processes.
Businesses have considerable control over this.
They can simplify processes, accelerate decision-making, clarify responsibilities, reduce unnecessary meetings, adopt better software, and use AI to automate routine activities.
Most importantly, they can start treating working time not merely as something to record, but as something to understand.
The Better Productivity Formula
The debate about the future of work should therefore not begin with the length of the working week.
The more important equation is:
Working time × productive use of working time = economic output
Increasing only the first variable leaves a significant part of the potential untapped.
The Indeed survey provides an interesting indication of this. Many employees appear willing to contribute additional effort if there is a meaningful benefit for them. At the same time, those employees identify bureaucracy, slow processes, inadequate technology, and unclear structures as obstacles to productivity.
Businesses and policymakers should take both observations seriously.
Germany needs an environment in which additional work and performance can provide meaningful economic benefits.
But companies also need to ensure that additional effort does not disappear into inefficient processes and organizational structures.
The defining productivity question of the coming years may therefore not be whether we work 35, 38, or 40 hours.
It may be:
What do we actually get from every hour we work?
