Reminds me when I moved from the UK to Germany (and later Switzerland) and was blown away, in the German office I worked in, how they worked less hours (most people strictly 8am to 4pm) and were at least a factor of 5 times more productive than anything I'd experienced in the UK.
The typical "average working day" I witnessed in a number of UK companies in London (I was an IT freelancer back in the mid-to-late 90's) went like...
- Arrive 9am-ish (depending on the Tube)
- Drink coffee, talk about football, what was on TV last night and whatever funny thing happened at the pub last night and basically almost no work until...
- 12 noon... time to get something done for an hour before lunch
- Lunch for 1 - 1.5 hours... some people already drinking their first beer
- Get back from lunch, pretend to work while being half asleep from a large lunch
- 4pm something's on fire... big crisis! Gotta be fixed NOW
- 8-9pm... fire now extinguished. Leave to the pub with colleagues
That's slanted toward an IT department but from what was basically 12 hours of being at work in some work, there was probably only 4-5 hours of productivity.
The key difference I witnessed in Germany was people went to work to work, not to socialise, and were actually getting more done in less time. There was also a bias towards being pro-active over being re-active, which meant less fire-fighting, which in turn meant time could be better managed.