Worker Efficiency vs Number of Hours Worked

[MDG_r]

With my science fair project this year, I would like to do a study how worker efficiency changes based on number of hours worked per week. I've done a little bit of reading to get hooked on the idea. My only problem is I have no idea how to make this into an experiment and not just a research project. I could hypothesize 40 hours is the perfect work week, but how would I test it? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Couple of the articles I read:
http://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/why ... eless.html
http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/bring_b ... work_week/
http://20somethingfinance.com/american- ... -vacation/
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... der-charts

[sunmoonstars]

Hello,

That's a very interesting topic! Sounds like your hypothesis is that 40 hours is the optimal number of working hours a week for best worker productivity. Could you expand this to include shorter weeks, too?

To test this, you could reach out to a manufacturing company in your area and get the data you need. For example, I once worked in a shipping facility where I had a stack orders that needed me to go to the shelves and get the tiems, pack into correct boxes and prepare the shipping labels. In this example, you could request the data for the employees: number of hours worked for the week, number of orders packed for the week. You would want this data over a series of weeks, where the hours worked varies. Then you can work on your analysis of the data.

If you need to actually measure the results yourself, you may have to modify the hypothesis and test in order to complete it in a reasonable time. Perhaps you would look at something similar, such as efficency of answering math questions over a period of time. I would expect, if you gave a math test of hundreds of simple problems, the first 1-2 minutes the test taker would work quickly and be efficient, but over time they get tired and answer more slowly.

I encourage other experts to weigh in if you can think of another way to get the data suggested.

Let me know if further questions!
Tonya

[deleted-132180]

Hi there,

I agree with Tonya that this is a very interesting topic! To really answer this question though, you would probably have to find workers that do the same duty but work different numbers of hours, and then compare the efficiency of the group of workers that worked less vs. the group that worked more. Alternatively, you can find a group of workers that work different hours from day to day or week to week, and compare their efficiency on days/weeks where they worked less compared to when they worked more. How you define "efficiency" will also depend on the duty you choose.

Let us know if you have more questions.

Connie