Working in Spain

Eurostat has recently published some statistics concerning working hours in the European Union. As expected but against the typical prejudice, Spain is the second country where most hours are worked per day, after Greece. Beyond some neutral causes (such as part-time work and similar ones), here lays an important aspect of Spanish life that I would like to comment.

Spain is, as stated in the former paragraph, one of the countries where more hours are spent at work, but on the other side it is also one of the least productive countries in the European Union. This fact leads to the conclusion that Spaniards are at work but do not work very much indeed. In my opinion some cultural features have a strong influence. For example, our lunch break takes often two hours (and no, it does not include a siesta) and that means that we must stay a bit longer in the evening, and then we arrive home late and we stay a bit longer in bed the next morning, and so on...

Besides, there is the belief that promotion in companies is based on time spent at work, not on the results of the work. Unfortunately this is true, sometimes. Accordingly, many workers stay in the office until the boss leaves, time when they can leave the office, satisfied after a hard work's day. Of course, in the meantime they are waiting for the boss to leave they do not work properly, but devote themselves to personal matters.

In my short work experience, I was asked once by a boss why I was the only one leaving the office at scheduled time. I was just the exception in the office and therefore I was the "different one". I explained my boss that I left because I had finished my work and he seemed satisfied with the answer.

I truly pity those staying longer at work in the search of a promotion just because the boss expects that. This may mean that outside work their life is empty and that is something hard to swallow. Why do not they open a blog as I did? In this group, needless to say, I am not including those working because they have just too much work (because some manager disguised in management genious has assigned him the work of two or three workers, for example).

I hope that in the future civil serveants will not be affected by this trend and that we copy the way Germans deal with the problem: at a certain time in the evening, they turned lights off and everybody must go home.