Long Working Hours and Health

How do long working hours affect health, productivity and safety? Read the research findings, the legal framework and steps employers can take.

When orders surge, the first solution that comes to mind is usually overtime. A week, then two, and long hours become routine; twelve-hour days, lost weekends and postponed leave become fixtures of the calendar. In the short term production is saved, but the price is often paid quietly and later. Long working hours are an important psychosocial risk factor affecting an employee's physical and mental health, family life, attention and safety at work. In this article I look at the effects of long hours on health, their relationship with productivity and accident risk, the responsibilities the legislation places on the employer, and concrete steps that employers, factory managers, HR and occupational health and safety (OHS) specialists can apply.

How Common Are Long Working Hours?

Long hours are not a feature of only certain sectors but a widespread characteristic of working life today. According to the ILO report "Psychosocial Working Environment: Global Developments and the Way Forward", published in April 2026, 35% of workers worldwide work more than 48 hours a week (ILO, 2026). The same report estimates that psychosocial risk factors cause more than 840,000 deaths a year, through related cardiovascular diseases and mental disorders, and a loss of around 45 million disability-adjusted life years. The economic impact of this loss is equivalent to 1.37% of global GDP a year (ILO, 2026).

In the OSH Pulse 2022 survey in Europe, with more than 27,000 workers, 46% of employees reported serious time pressure or excessive workload; among health problems caused or made worse by work, general fatigue came first, at 37% (EU-OSHA, 2022). In Turkey, according to Gallup's 2026 report, 66% of employees say they experienced stress during a large part of the previous day, against a global average of 40% (Gallup, 2026; 2025 data).

This picture shows that long hours are less an individual choice than a structural matter shaped by work organisation, economic conditions and organisational culture.

Why Is Long Overtime So Common?

Behind long working hours there are often several causes together:

• Insufficient staffing: When no one is hired to replace people who leave, the workload is spread across those who remain.
• Order fluctuations: In sectors where demand cannot be predicted, busy periods are met with overtime.
• Economic need: In a time of high living costs, many employees see overtime pay as part of their livelihood and volunteer for long hours.
• Organisational culture: In organisations where staying late is seen as a sign of commitment, employees hesitate to leave early even when their work is finished.
• Digital availability: E-mails and messages arriving in the evening and at weekends mean work continues even after official working hours end.
• Lack of planning: When capacity planning, maintenance schedules and workflow are not well done, delays are made up by extending hours.
• Individual tendencies: Some employees work long hours of their own accord because of perfectionism or difficulty switching off from work. I cover this subject separately in the article on workaholism.

How Do Long Working Hours Affect Health?

The human body and mind need recovery after intense effort. Long hours shorten this recovery time and over time create accumulated fatigue.

Sleep and fatigue

Long hours are often sustained with hours stolen from sleep. An employee who gets home late both sleeps less and, because their mind cannot disconnect from work, may find it hard to fall asleep. Insufficient sleep directly affects attention, reaction time, decision-making and emotion regulation. For individual suggestions on sleep problems, you can look at the article on how to overcome insomnia.

Stress, anxiety and burnout

A constant feeling of not keeping up, being unable to rest, and a shrinking life outside work create a state of chronic stress. The World Health Organization defines the syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed as burnout, and classifies it not as a disease but as an "occupational phenomenon" (WHO, 2019). A systematic review of 36 prospective studies found that burnout predicts later outcomes such as insomnia, depressive symptoms, coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, musculoskeletal pain and serious injuries (Salvagioni et al., 2017).

Physical health

Prolonged intense work can occur together with irregular eating, inactivity, musculoskeletal complaints and a turn to unhealthy coping methods (smoking, excess caffeine, irregular meals). It is also notable in this respect that cardiovascular disease stands out among the serious health consequences of psychosocial risks in the ILO's 2026 report (ILO, 2026).

Family life and social relationships

Parents who cannot spend time with their children, employees who meet their partner only in tired moments, and those who drift away from friends and social events also lose their sources of support outside work. This further reduces their capacity to cope with stress. Tension at home is carried to work the next day, and tiredness at work returns home in the evening; the two areas thus enter a vicious circle that feeds both. For women employees in particular, and for employees with young children or a relative needing care, long hours combined with responsibilities at home can become a far heavier burden.

The hours gained through overtime are often hours borrowed from sleep, family and attention; sooner or later that debt is repaid.

Long Hours in Terms of Productivity and Safety

The most common justification for long hours is to increase production. But it is a reality that everyone working on the floor knows that not every extra hour worked is equally productive. As fatigue grows, work slows, errors increase, and rework and scrap rates rise.

In terms of safety, the picture is even more critical. According to Folkard and Tucker's 2003 review, safety deteriorates with increasing working hours and as the time between breaks grows longer. According to data cited from that review, the risk of an accident in the 12th hour of a shift is more than double the average of the first 8 hours (Folkard and Tucker, 2003). In Turkey in 2025, 766,039 work accidents and 1,931 deaths from work accidents were recorded; around 41% of accidents occurred in the manufacturing sector (SGK, 2025). Every accident has many causes; but fatigue is one of the factors most often overlooked on the floor.

Imagine a plastics injection moulding factory working twelve hours a day for a month because of a large export order. In the first week production really does rise. By the third week the rate of defective parts begins to climb, mould changes take longer, there are two minor hand injuries and several near misses. In the fourth week three experienced operators go on sick leave. Looking back at the end of the month, a significant part of the production gained through overtime has been lost again through scrap, rework and a depleted workforce. This example is fictional, but it describes a cycle that many businesses will find familiar.

Long hours can also increase presenteeism, that is, the employee being at work but unable to work at full capacity. In Deloitte's 2024 study in the UK, presenteeism was calculated as the largest item, at around £24 billion, of poor mental health's annual cost to employers of £51 billion (Deloitte, 2024). This figure is specific to the UK, but it shows what a large hidden loss being at work without really being there can create. I covered this subject in detail in the article on presenteeism.

Legal and Standards Framework

Article 4 of Law No. 6331 on Occupational Health and Safety places on the employer the obligation to ensure the work-related health and safety of employees. Article 5 of the Law lists, among the principles of protection from risks, preventing the negative effects of monotonous work and production pace on health and safety or, if they cannot be prevented, minimising them, and developing a coherent prevention policy covering work organisation and working conditions. Article 15 of the Law requires health surveillance to be provided according to the risks employees are exposed to.

Article 8 of the Occupational Health and Safety Risk Assessment Regulation requires psychosocial sources of hazard to be identified and recorded as well. In the Ministry of Labour and Social Security's 2024 Psychosocial Factors Information Guide, "workload and work pace", "work schedules" and "work and non-work life interaction" are among the categories of psychosocial hazard (ÇSGB, 2024). The ISO 45003:2021 guideline also treats how work is organised as a separate group among psychosocial hazards. For the legal limits on working hours, overtime and rest periods, it is advisable to get up-to-date information from your employment law adviser.

What Can Employers and Managers Do?

1. Monitor overtime regularly. Report overtime hours monthly by unit, shift and person. Identify employees and units that constantly work high overtime; this is an early sign of a capacity or planning problem.
2. Plan capacity realistically. Anticipate busy periods in advance and consider options such as temporary staff, flexible shifts or redistributing work. Keep overtime as an exception; do not use it as a permanent solution.
3. Set per-person limits. Alongside the legal limits, set internal limits on the number of consecutive days an employee may work long hours and on total weekly hours. Keep these limits tighter for risky tasks.
4. Protect breaks and rest periods. Make sure regular short breaks are really taken on long-hours days. Leave sufficient rest between two consecutive working days.
5. Assess fatigue in high-risk work. In risky tasks such as forklifts, presses, cranes, working at height and chemicals, rotate tasks or apply additional checks in the last hours of long shifts. Create a culture in which employees can report their fatigue and will not be penalised for it.
6. Limit out-of-hours communication. Define in writing in which situations contact can be made in the evening and at weekends. Encourage managers not to send messages outside working hours on non-urgent matters.
7. Don't reward long hours. In performance evaluations, base the assessment on results and quality, not on time spent at the workplace. Avoid presenting staying late as a sign of commitment.
8. Train managers. Noticing the signs of fatigue and stress, talking openly with the team about workload and supporting a struggling employee are learnable skills. In the World Health Organization's guidelines on mental health at work, the recommendation with the strongest evidence is to train managers in mental health (WHO, 2022).
9. Use health surveillance effectively. Together with the workplace physician, regularly assess sleep, fatigue and stress complaints among employees who work long hours.

How Do You Start in Your Organisation?

1. Needs analysis: Examine the overtime, absence, work accident and near-miss records of the last six to twelve months together. Look at what times, which shifts and which day of long hours the accidents and errors cluster on. Use an anonymous employee survey to measure perceptions of workload, fatigue, sleep and work-life balance.
2. Programme: Based on the findings, prepare a plan made up of adjustments to capacity and shift planning, workload management and mental health awareness training for managers, sleep and stress management workshops for employees and, where necessary, individual psychological support. Remember that individual training does not replace changes in work organisation.
3. Measurement: After six months, compare overtime, accident, near-miss and absence indicators with the previous period; repeat the survey. Share the change with employees.

You can find how this process can be planned with the support of a psychologist on the corporate services page.

Frequently Asked Questions

Don't long working hours increase productivity?

In short-term and exceptional situations they can increase production. But when long hours become continuous, fatigue accumulates, error and rework rates rise, and the risk of work accidents increases. For this reason not every additional hour worked is equally productive; in the long run the gain is often lower than assumed.

What should we do if the employee wants the overtime themselves?

There may be employees who volunteer for overtime out of economic need. Even then, it remains the employer's responsibility to set per-person internal limits, assess fatigue in risky tasks and protect rest periods. Reviewing pay policy can also be a long-term solution.

What are the most important warning signs of excessive hours?

Constant tiredness, sleep problems, irritability, distraction, an increase in small errors, frequent headaches and stomach complaints, withdrawal from social life and constantly postponed leave are signs to watch for. If these signs are seen together and over a long time, the workload needs to be reviewed.

Are long hours also a safety problem for white-collar employees?

Yes, in different forms. For office workers, long hours are linked less to accident risk than to risks such as burnout, decision errors, musculoskeletal complaints and fatigue in traffic when commuting. Psychosocial risk assessment should cover office units as well as the production floor.

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• #occupational health
• #fatigue

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Eda Erkan Alapala

Klinik Psikolog. İstanbul Kent Üniversitesi Klinik Psikoloji Tezli Yüksek Lisans mezunu; bilişsel davranışçı terapi, çocuk merkezli oyun terapisi ve çocuk-ergen psikoterapisi alanlarında eğitimlerini tamamlamıştır.

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