The obsession with worker productivity—often due to the hope of extracting every last penny from employees and consumers—can be accompanied by the belief that more hours will entail more productivity. However, concentration or personal investment in work can wane as the hours stretch on, which might result in fewer tasks being accomplished or tasks being completed, but only with the bare minimum level of attention (or perhaps not even enough to ensure quality). This is not necessarily because of employee laziness or intentional sabotage of the end goal. No, simply having workers act, especially with mentally or physically demanding jobs, for long periods of time can have a draining impact that greatly increases the likelihood of lesser work or less polished work being done. Employers or managers might think very fallacious things about this issue in their emotionalism.
They might think that more hours of labor means the same level of output will come out of each hour from each person, or that adding more hours of labor is the default/best approach to maximizing human output across industries and roles. It is not a social study or any other such secondary or hearsay evidence that points to the alternative, but it is true by logical necessity, and thus true independent of fluctuating social trends (as well as independent of what is observed in a given case), that decreases in human productivity become more probable with longer hours. Where that line is depends on the individual worker and not an extrapolated average of other workers' productivity or some other such irrelevant thing.
Replacing people with machines to boost productivity, as well as perhaps begrudgingly extending hours or hiring more staff members, seems to be quite popular when applicable as a means of achieving greater output. Cutting hours to make the most of heightened employee concentration is not, and certainly not cutting hours while keeping the same amount of pay to ensure the workers' financial stability and incentivize them to actually care about their work. Even with jobs that literally depend on an employee being on standby (as with customer service), meaning that the tasks will not be constant or necessarily predictable, one might see employers cut hours without keeping the same overall pay, but expect the same total level of productivity for other fallacious reasons when the very nature of the job's output fluctuates.
Productivity of a professional kind is not the ultimate thing it is regarded as by a certain kind of stupid, classist, or socially conditioned person [1], but it also is not facilitated by longer hours alone. Reducing hours to intensify the window of peak attention and increasing pay (and especially both together!) are the best ways to promote and reward greater productivity. It is just that these are the very things that the typical employer or manager is unwilling to do because of irrationalistic allegiance to tradition, or maybe because they would have fewer ways to hold a sense of power over financially desperate employees. Whatever manipulation or threats they might be accustomed to relying on would not have the same potency when a worker does not need them quite as desperately.
Human productivity, though it could very greatly from person to reason and is not monolithic or deterministic in any way, is made far more probable with these two conditions met independently or together. It is not ever likely on its own to be enhanced by any superficial employee appreciation events or free but cheap company merchandise when there is no livable (or better) compensation or, as long as it does not come at the expense of livable income, fewer hours. Corporate/professional productivity is a utilitarian thing at best, having no inherent significance except as a means to an end. Making it successful as a means to the employee end of working to live without being swallowed up or suffocated by it is always a more pragmatic option as it is.
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