Why do Singapore, Tokyo and Kuala Lumpur work so hard?

• Workers in the three Asian cities spend longer in the office, take fewer holidays and have some of the worst work-life balance in the world
• This workaholic culture sits in stark contrast to cities in Northern Europe, where vacations are long and the average working week is much shorter

A typical working day for Singaporean office worker Shamir Osman lasts about nine and a half hours, so packed full of meetings and calls that he sometimes does not even get a chance to eat.

The 39-year-old public relations manager’s hectic schedule is far from unusual in the city state, where the average working week lasts just shy of 45 hours – the second longest in the Asia-Pacific, according to a study of 40 cities done by office access control systems provider Kisi.

The report, released in August, looked at the length of workers’ commutes, their arrival time at work, the number of hours they worked per week and the amount of leave taken to determine the hardest-working cities in the world – with three of the top five being in Asia.Japanese megacity Tokyo took the top spot, with Singapore coming in second, followed by the US capital of Washington, Malaysia’s Kuala Lumpur – which had the longest average working week at 46 hours – and then Houston in Texas.

At the other end of the scale, the cities judged to have the best work-life balance were all in Northern Europe: Helsinki in Finland first, followed by Germany’s Munich, Norway’s Oslo – which had the shortest working week at just under 39 hours on average – then Hamburg in Germany and Sweden’s Stockholm.For Osman, who has not been on holiday since a weeklong trip to Yogyakarta in October, the almost 30 days of leave that an average worker in Munich takes each year might seem excessive, especially as the Singaporean average is just 14 days – but even this amount of time is a luxury compared to the fewer than 10 days per year that the average employee in Tokyo takes off work.

This workaholic culture is something to which merchandiser Betty Ho – a former employee of a Japanese firm in Singapore – can fully attest.
“You cannot be late, there are a lot of meetings, your desk has to be neat and organised, the boss is always right and you cannot leave the office before him,” said the 41-year-old.
Earlier this year, the excessive hours some tech companies in China expect their employees to work hit the headlines, after a post on global code-sharing and collaboration platform Github triggered a wider backlash against the so-called 996 system – which stands for working from 9am to 9pm, six days a week.
The complaints spiralled into a broader debate on productivity and work-life balance in the country, with tech tycoon Jack Ma, founder of South China Morning Post owner Alibaba, saying that he saw the 996 schedule as a “huge blessing that many companies and employees do not have the opportunity to have”.
“If you do not do 996 when you are young, when will you? Do you think never having to work 996 in your life is an honour to boast about?” he said at an internal Alibaba event in April, according to a transcript published on the company’s official WeChat account.