By Ian J. Cook, CHRP

British Columbians are looking forward to the new Family Day holiday, but the February day off highlights an interesting dilemma for Human Resources professionals.

Many of us will get to enjoy the day off, but a large number of people will still be working. Employees at hospitals, care homes, fire stations and retail outlets will stay at work, for example. An increasing number of employees will put in extra hours to complete their workload even though they’re not officially “at work”.

HR professionals routinely debate who wins and who loses when a new holiday is introduced. We concern ourselves with striking a balance, but the changing nature of work presents a difficult moving target.

The way we work, when we work and how employers ensure our contribution matches our compensation has changed dramatically over the past 20 years.

Today, more and more people are working with their minds. Ideas are fast becoming the service that is bought and sold. This makes people’s performance far more integral to the overall results of the organization than it was back in the time of Henry Ford.

There’s a growing difference between the number of hours worked and the kind of contribution an employee makes. For example there can be a wide range of difference between computer programmers writing code, both in the speed and the quality of the code written. There can also be a difference between the speed and quality with which a coffee barista creates your beverage (think tepid latte).

Despite this, most organizations still compensate people based on the number of hours worked. Employment standards focus on setting the acceptable parameters for hours worked.

In this kind of environment, giving employees a new statutory holiday and time they do not have to work may or may not impact their overall contribution to the organization.

However, there is another important factor to consider in the idea-driven workplace:  additional extra time off provides employees more time to rest. As any top class athlete knows, rest is as crucial to peak performance as a tough training regime.

People who work are not immune from the requirement to rest. Two different research studies have shown that the quality of human performance levels at work drop off sharply in a range of between 42 hours and 48 hours worked in a week. One study looked at the error rate in computer code based on hours worked. After 42- 48 hours the error rate increased to the point that it was going to take longer overall to finish the code than to write it cleanly in the first place.

The second study followed forestry workers and noted the rate and severity of accidents increased after they had passed this 42-48 hour time window.

In both cases, it made better business sense to stop and rest than to deal with the serious personnel and time costs of the accidents.

The general conclusion from these two studies is that while it’s possible to work more than 48 hours in a week, the level of high quality, timely work drops significantly. A period of rest might lead to an overall quicker, better or safer completion time. In both of these instances, striking the correct balance between work and rest made a significant difference to the overall outcome.

As British Columbia’s first Family Day holiday approaches, businesses will make plans to deal with new commitments to paying overtime and balancing schedules while meeting deadlines and targets. British Columbia Human Resources Management Association wants to remind employers that optimum employee contribution comes from a balance of performance and sufficient rest.

A global citizen, Ian J. Cook, MA, MBA, CHRP (ijcook@bchrma.org) has chosen to make his home in Vancouver where he heads the growth of BC HRMA’s research and learning services.