Cyprus’ big W.F.H. dilemma

Here’s one for the bosses of Cyprus!

Did you know that, in an eight-hour office workday, your staff are accomplishing just 2 hours 53 minutes of actual work?!

This being the Mediterranean, lunch can take hours out of the day. Coffee breaks are practically written into the contract. You get smoke breaks disguised as meetings; chats cloaked as ‘catch-ups’; phone calls that are ‘follow ups’. And TikTok simply becomes ‘answering my emails’.

Even the bosses themselves contribute to the problem! There’s the director whose random oversights create more work than they save; the executive who manufactures tasks for to justify a role that adds little measurable output; and the manager who can’t trust underlings to do their job – thus creating more work for themselves, and everyone else, in the process.

Ultimately, you end up with a productivity rate of around 30 per cent. With just one-third of the office day spent on actual work!

But wait! This isn’t a tale of lazy, layabout staff. (If you’re an employee, keep reading – the stats are ever in your favour.) It’s a story about how our office environments are structured…

Over the past decade, all the research has proved the same thing: long office days do not translate into sustained productivity.

Frequent interruptions force the brain into ‘context switching’, which compounds mental load. Office work is uniquely bad for focus: it can take nearly 30 minutes to regain concentration after disruption to the workflow. And in-house meetings (which can take up to one-third of the work week – especially when they’re not regular, planned events) are vastly more inefficient than online gatherings.

So what’s the answer?

Well, with the exception of the obvious (you can’t perform an operation from your living room, nor could you fix the plumbing via Zoom!) it’s pretty simple. And it’s something our island seems to have got very wrong.

In 2024, Cyprus recorded the lowest rate of remote working in Europe – just 22 per cent of workers reporting remote or hybrid options. (Though our public service has recently allowed more remote and hybrid work in an effort to “improve staff utilisation and productivity, and reduce operating costs over time.”)

And guess what? While productivity per hour in Cyprus sits well below the EU-15 average, the Netherlands enjoys one of the highest rates on the continent!

Okay, we can’t draw an exact comparison here; the figures are shaped by various factors: local industries, levels of investment and technology, capital intensity, and how working hours are measured.

And yet, the contrast is telling. Especially when you learn that controlled studies repeatedly verify that remote and hybrid workers are far more productive than their office-based colleagues.

A major Stanford-led experiment found a 13 per cent performance increase among home workers. Later research has proven that hybrid workers are significantly less likely to quit their job.

In fact, work actually improves when people have uninterrupted time to concentrate, autonomy over how they structure tasks, fewer unnecessary interruptions. And, most importantly, when they’re trusted to do their job without constant pressure, they actually perform far better!

In other words, we need to stop equating long hours and physical presence with value. Especially in Cyprus, where so many of us are forced into an office environment every day.

Presence is not the same as productivity. In fact, it seems to be the opposite!