Matt Heath: OE really means Kiwis' over-eager work habits

Brit workers can down five pints at lunch, followed by an afternoon snooze on their desks. Photo / Getty Images

We rate hard work but maybe other cultures have a better idea.

One of the first things Kiwis notice when they get a job in the UK is the slackness. We New Zealanders pride ourselves on working hard. Putting in long hours, staying late, taking fewer holidays than others. We are very impressed by people who work 60-hour weeks.

The English aren't so much.

Maybe it's because we're a young nation. In our hearts we feel like we are still building our country. The work isn't finished yet. Britain is done. It's cooked and they're celebrating with five pints at lunch and an afternoon snooze on their desks.

A few years back I was working on a TV show in London. The boss was a man from Birmingham who reminded me of a good-looking Nazi prison guard. He came up to me on the first day and said "you Kiwi ***** can't handle your lagers". I told him that he was wrong and that we have a proud history of heavy drinking in New Zealand and that some people back home even think we drink too much. He laughed long and loud right in my face and over the next six months set about proving me wrong. He had his assistant draw up two calendars, one outlining the work that needed to be done (this was the smaller of the two). The other was the number of pints I had to get through in a day. Four "jars" at lunchtime and six at the pub after work each day.

It sounds like a dream come true but the routine soon turned into a full punisher and a slight humiliator.

Pints are the proper size over there, and by week three I was failing to hit my drinking targets. Pints started backing up into the next day.

One Saturday he forced the whole crew to get together at The Dove in Hammersmith at 10am so I could get through my left-over pints from the week. I missed my KPIs by a long way that day, eventually falling asleep in a Thames-side park.

This earned me a two-pint penalty, which I had to make up at Monday lunch. It was hard yakka but jeez it was a good job, and what a great boss. I loved that guy.

However, being a New Zealander I found myself sneaking into the office behind his back to do extra work. I had to get the jobs on the little calendar done even if the boss didn't care. What a nerd.

Those six happy months in London taught me two things. The English have a different work ethic to us and I can't handle my piss like a Brummie can.

What do you remember more fondly about a job like that? The hours at your desk by yourself in the office while everyone parties, or the people and the good times? Obviously it's the latter.

Maybe we Kiwis have got it wrong with our intense work ethic. Maybe we should take our cues from England and slack off a bit.

The Swedish have recently cut down to six-hour work days and have not only increased the happiness of employees but the productivity too.

Turns out you can only do so many hours in a day before you're useless to everyone. You can stay as long as you want but at some point around the five-hour mark you zone out and stop doing anything worthwhile.

So what's the deal with those 60-hours-a-week people we admire so much? Half-an-hour a day on the toilet, a half-hour making and drinking coffees, two hours engaged in unproductive office politics, one hour on social media, an hour sending messages to mates, another on YouTube and two hours staring into space doing nothing.

There's your eight-hour day. The other 20 hours to make up the 60-hour week is spent catching up on the work that they haven't been doing in the first 40.

Just because someone is at work doesn't mean they are doing anything. A concentrated six-hour day would be more than enough to get any job done.

Of course some will claim they do so much they need more time than that. Generally the person who complains the most about how much work they do is the person doing the least.

You don't want that person.

Employers should be looking for the person who rocks in late, goes hard for three hours, slams four pints at the pub, comes back, blasts out a couple of emails, nods off for half an hour at their desk then pisses off home to his family.

That's the guy getting things done. He/she is a pro-active go-getter, there to make a difference. A door-kicker, a game-changer, a leader.

New Zealanders are the greatest workers in the world. We are conscientious, good, honest people. Right now I am in my 52nd hour of work for the week.

We Kiwis care, we respect hard work and the people who work hard.

We are massive suckers.