Should Spain replace the siesta with flexible work?

People no longer nap in the middle of the day, but Spain still needs to fix its long lunch problem, one expert says.

A couple of hours spent lingering over lunch when the sun is out sounds idyllic to those of us who rarely get the opportunity. For many Spaniards, it’s baked in to working life. But in a country where productivity is low, one expert is calling for siesta culture to be replaced by one that celebrates flexible hours, saying it would improve productivity and family life, and help Spanish firms retain sought-after talent.

“In Spain, we have long working hours, sometimes from nine to nine, and we waste two to three hours for lunch. This is nonsense,” says Chinchilla, who leads the university’s International Center on Work and Family and has represented Spain at the United Nations.

The origins of the siesta in Spain date from the civil war in the 1930s. Workers often held two jobs because of the poor economic conditions in the country under Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. The nap was needed to recover between starting shifts. Since democracy returned in the 1970s, and the economic conditions in Spain have improved, the need for a siesta has diminished; perhaps as few as 18% of Spanish workers nap in the middle of the day.

But the time is now largely used to take long lunches and see friends, pushing back the working day so that it often ends late in the evening, says Chinchilla. It is a culture that extends to other Latin countries, too, and Chinchilla has studied the effects of long working days on productivity in more than 20 nations.

“The time structure of the working day has not taken into account that humans are not machines or islands in an ocean, but they have family needs. Working such long hours means that we can’t prioritise other things that are important, like our families and wellbeing,” says Chinchilla.

‘Flexibility means less stress’

Moving away from long, in-office working days and towards flexible hours would go a long way toward addressing these issues, Chinchilla says.

After their first win, in 2014, Chinchilla wanted to find out what they were doing that was so effective.

“In terms of flexible time we decided to have no schedule at the office,” says Cyberclick’s co-founder David Tomas. “You can work as much as you want. The measure was not hours but the goals we set.”

Cyberclick has no maximum number of paid days off either – something more common in the tech world, but very rare in Spain. Being a start-up, introducing flexible working at Cyberclick was much more possible than at many traditional firms; even in its early days, the company had had relaxed working hours. However, it was not always the case that they offered formal flexible working. “Flexible time had been implemented before but from 2012 we started to have no schedule – we made it super explicit,” says Tomas. “We were inspired by the model at Netflix, actually.”

Gone is the culture of presenteeism that keeps people at their desks late into the evening to make up for long lunches. Now, teams decide between themselves how much holiday they will take each year and when to be in the office. Tomas says it was important to make flexibility formal to make sure that as the company grew everyone felt comfortable taking advantage of the system. It had the added benefit of making them an attractive employer for new, young talent, too.

Sol González has been with the company since before the formalised flexibility policies, and says she’s unlikely to quit – things like working from home let her spend more time with her daughter without stressing about schedules all the time. “To me teleworking has multiple advantages, such as… taking care of my little daughter when she gets ill, or having lunch with her occasionally.”

“The flexibility not to be at work at a certain time takes the stress away,” says Tomas. “Then I don’t know why but you have more productivity. When you say you trust your team 100%, people respond with more responsibility. They say: ‘This company treats me well, so I want it to succeed’.”

Tomas says that Spanish companies have ignored employee satisfaction in the past. Job security has traditionally been the key factor in a country where unemployment is high, meaning companies could demand more of their employees and be less flexible.

Yet the companies that Chinchilla has researched and who have adopted more sociable hours by moving away from siesta culture see 19% greater productivity, 30% less absenteeism and healthier workers. “The results of the research are good. Where they have flexible arrangements, they can fit with the reality of their lives. This is important not just in Spain, but in the Philippines, Latin America, Africa, Europe. This is something that is universal,” she says.

The tide may be beginning to turn. Unemployment rates might still be high in Spain compared to elsewhere in Europe, but there is a lot of competition for highly qualified employees. More companies are offering flexible working so that good candidates do not go overseas. “Particularly millennials value this flexibility and autonomy,” says Tomas.

Chinchilla advocates educating managers in the benefits of being flexible – breaking the habit of measuring input in terms of hours spent at work will require a culture change from the top. “More and more the thing that we are training is for bosses to become coaches,” says Chinchilla. “You can change procedures, but if the leaders don’t know what is going on it is useless.

“People get home and are really crushed,” she says. “We waste so much time that we should be spending at home or on ourselves. No wonder people feel burnout when they are being made to work for so long.”