In today’s highly-industrialized society, we often find ourselves engrossed in a fast-paced, hectic city life; busy work hours, heavy traffic, deadlines, bosses etc. People say that regardless of where you live, work is work and it’s all the same. But that’s not entirely true. Working days last a few more hours in some countries, and whether you find this a relief or a disadvantage is up to where you live and how much you love your job.  Here, TribeHR tries to uncover which country has the longest average working day by drawing out data from OECD. They also analyzed how much of the working hours are paid and how much aren’t.

As the early 19th socialist movement led by Welshman Robert Owen protests, a day should be divided accordingly to labor, recreation and rest. That being said, each division should get 8 hours each, and so the average global working hours is 8. However, in line with the data analyzed by TribeHR, Mexicans work the longest days in the OECD countries, allocating 10 hours in total, as well as hold the highest average hours of unpaid work. Belgians work the least, with only 7 hours a day, while Japan holds the title of most number of hours paid with 6.3 hours out of 9.  Korea, meanwhile, has the least number of unpaid hours (only 1.3), while its paid hours tail closely behind Japan at 5.8.

Women allocate more unpaid work hours than men.  They spend it on cooking and food cleanup the most, and then cleaning and childcare.  Men, on the other hand, spend most of theirs on cooking and food cleanup, and then shopping.

It is important to keep the balance between work and personal life.  See, working too much will incur more expenses to business owners and will stress employees out. There’s even a set of laws in each country explaining how workers should be compensated if they decide to work overtime, while some countries don’t even allow overtime.

Businesses these days, especially SMBs, are trying to evade the costs of overtime pay, office space, insurances and the like by outsourcing, or turning to freelancers and per-contract employees instead of hiring office employees.  Working from home is indubitably a lot more economical and time-efficient than going to an office. Even IBM is resorting to outsource for its IT management.  Moreover, with today’s technology, people can work anytime, anywhere, as long as they are connected to the internet. Technology also improves a person’s performance and increases productivity at a lesser expense.