A man-hour or human-hour is the amount of

work Work may refer to: * Work (human activity), intentional activity people perform to support themselves, others, or the community ** Manual labour, physical work done by humans ** House work, housework, or homemaking ** Working animal, an ani ...

performed by the average worker in one

hour An hour (symbol: h; also abbreviated hr) is a unit of time historically reckoned as of a day and defined contemporarily as exactly 3,600 seconds ( SI). There are 60 minutes in an hour, and 24 hours in a day. The hour was initially establis ...

. It is used for estimation of the total amount of uninterrupted labor required to perform a task. For example, researching and writing a college paper might require eighty man-hours, while preparing a family banquet from scratch might require ten man-hours. Man-hours exclude the breaks that people generally require from work, e.g. for rest, eating, and other bodily functions. They count only pure labor. Managers count the man-hours and add break time to estimate the amount of time a task will actually take to complete. Thus, while one college course's written paper might require twenty man-hours to carry out, it almost certainly will not get done in twenty consecutive hours. Its progress will be interrupted by work for other courses, meals, sleep, and other human necessities.

Real-world applications

The advantage of the man-hour concept is that it can be used to estimate the impact of staff changes on the amount of time required for a task, which can done by dividing the number of man-hours by the number of workers available. For example, if a task takes 20 man-hours to complete then a team of 2 people will complete it in 10 hours of work, while a team of 5 people will complete it in 4 hours. This is, of course, only appropriate to certain types of activities. It is of most use when considering 'piece-work', where the activity being managed consists of discrete activities having simple dependencies, and where other factors can be neglected. Therefore, adding another person to a packaging team will increase the output of that team in a predictable manner. In transport industry, this concept is superseded by

passenger-mile The units of measurement in transportation describes the unit of measurement used to express various transportation quantity, quantities, as used in statistics, planning, and their related applications. Transportation quantity The currently popu ...

and tonne-mile for better costing accuracy. In reality, other factors intervene to complicate this model. If some elements of the task have a natural timespan, adding more staff will have a reduced effect: although having two chefs will double the speed of some elements of food preparation, they roast a chicken no faster than one chef. Some tasks also have a natural number of staff associated with them: the time to chop the vegetables will be halved with the addition of the second chef, but the time to carve the chicken will remain the same.

Economies of scale In microeconomics, economies of scale are the cost advantages that enterprises obtain due to their scale of operation, and are typically measured by the amount of Productivity, output produced per unit of cost (production cost). A decrease in ...

and

diseconomies of scale In microeconomics, diseconomies of scale are the cost disadvantages that economic actors accrue due to an increase in organizational size or in output, resulting in production of Product (business), goods and Service (economics), services at incre ...

further lead to a

non-linear In mathematics and science, a nonlinear system (or a non-linear system) is a system in which the change of the output is not proportional to the change of the input. Nonlinear problems are of interest to engineers, biologists, physicists, mathe ...

relationship between the number of workers doing a given task and the amount of time it takes them to complete it. Some tasks cannot be done by less than a required minimum number of workers (e.g. lifting heavy loads) or they will be done with drastically better efficiency if the workforce exceeds a

minimum efficient scale In industrial organization, the minimum efficient scale (MES) or efficient scale of production is the lowest point where the plant (or firm) can produce such that its long run average costs are minimized with production remaining effective. It is al ...

. In other cases an excessive number of workers might get in each other's way, reducing efficiency and the per person

productivity Productivity is the efficiency of production of goods or services expressed by some measure. Measurements of productivity are often expressed as a ratio of an aggregate output to a single input or an aggregate input used in a production proce ...

of the individual worker. Another example is the adage, "Just because a woman can make a baby in nine months, it does not follow that nine women can make a baby in one month." This adage is often cited in systems development to justify the belief that adding more staff to a project does not guarantee it will get done quicker. Another problem with this model, as

Fred Brooks Frederick Phillips Brooks Jr. (April 19, 1931 – November 17, 2022) was an American computer architect, software engineer, and computer scientist, best known for managing development of IBM's System/360 family of mainframe computers and the ...

noted, is that organization, training, and co-ordination activities could more than outweigh the potential benefits of adding extra staff to work on a task, especially if considered only over a shorter time period.

Similar units

The similar concept of a man-day, man-week, man-month, or man-year is used on large

project A project is a type of assignment, typically involving research or design, that is carefully planned to achieve a specific objective. An alternative view sees a project managerially as a sequence of events: a "set of interrelated tasks to be ...

s. It is the amount of work performed by an average worker during one day, week, month, or year, respectively. The number of hours worked by an individual during a year varies greatly according to

cultural norms A social norm is a shared standard of acceptable behavior by a group. Social norms can both be informal understandings that govern the behavior of members of a society, as well as be codified into rules and laws. Social normative influences or so ...

and

economics Economics () is a behavioral science that studies the Production (economics), production, distribution (economics), distribution, and Consumption (economics), consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and interac ...

. The average annual hours actually worked per person in employment as reported by

OECD The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD; , OCDE) is an international organization, intergovernmental organization with 38 member countries, founded in 1961 to stimulate economic progress and international trade, wor ...

countries in 2007, for example, ranged from a minimum of 1,389 hours (in the

Netherlands , Terminology of the Low Countries, informally Holland, is a country in Northwestern Europe, with Caribbean Netherlands, overseas territories in the Caribbean. It is the largest of the four constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Nether ...

) to a maximum of 2,316 hours (in

South Korea South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), is a country in East Asia. It constitutes the southern half of the Korea, Korean Peninsula and borders North Korea along the Korean Demilitarized Zone, with the Yellow Sea to the west and t ...

Productive system hours

The concept of productive system hours (PSH) has been used in forestry in Austria and by extension to other work. It includes time for breaks and can be used to calculate how long it may take to complete a task, including required recovery times from physically strenuous work, as well as legally required breaks or other human interactions. If it includes 15-minute breaks, it is written as (PSH15). A related concept is productive machine hours (PMH). More details in the paper "Influence of Terrain Conditions and Thinning Regimes on Productivity of a Track-Based Steep Slope Harvester".

References

Sources

''The Principles of Scientific Management''
F.W.Taylor, 1911, online
''Shop Management''
F.W.Taylor, 1911, online

online {{refend

External links