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The discussion surrounding the 40-hour workweek reform is often framed as a reduction in weekly working hours. However, for many companies, the real challenge will not just be working fewer hours. The primary hurdle will be maintaining operational continuity without shifting the cost of the adjustment to improvised overtime schemes, staff overload, or disorganized shift management.
In sectors such as manufacturing, hospitality, logistics, retail, food service, private security, industrial services, and continuous-operation environments, the workday cannot be analyzed in isolation. Every hour is part of a broader operational chain: production, customer service, maintenance, supervision, delivery, security, cleaning, quality control, and incident management. When a company reduces working hours without redesigning that chain, the problem does not disappear; it simply shifts to another part of the operation.
For this reason, the implementation of the 40-hour workweek must be understood as an exercise in organizational restructuring. It is not just about modifying schedules in a payroll system or updating internal policies. It is about reviewing how the operation is built, how work is distributed, which positions are critical, which shifts depend on continuous coverage, and how prepared the company is to prove, with evidence, that its new model complies with applicable regulations.
A company operating under a traditional administrative model may have some room to adjust start and end times. But a plant, a hotel, a distribution center, or an operation with rotating shifts faces a different reality. In these environments, each worker's shift is connected to the shifts of others. If one person finishes early, someone else must cover the remaining time. If a shift is reduced, it may be necessary to create another. If coverage is not redesigned, the operation may start to rely on recurring overtime.
That is one of the main risks. The reform may lead some companies to think that it is enough to reduce hours on paper and compensate for the difference with overtime. From a business perspective, this solution may seem practical in the short term, but it is fragile as a permanent model. Overtime must be exceptional, controlled, authorized, and properly documented. When it becomes the structural mechanism for sustaining operations, labor risk increases.
Furthermore, a reduction in working hours can narrow the margin for error. A deviation that previously seemed minor can quickly turn into an overtime claim, a documentation inconsistency, or a compliance issue. In labor-intensive operations, every poorly recorded minute can have an accumulated impact if it is repeated across hundreds or thousands of workers.
The problem is not just legal; it is also operational and financial. If a company does not accurately calculate the actual hours needed to sustain each process, it may end up overstaffing, paying unnecessary overtime, or affecting productivity due to a lack of coverage. In any of these scenarios, the reform ceases to be a compliance issue and becomes a direct factor in competitiveness.
One of the most common mistakes will be attempting to implement the reform from Human Resources without involving Operations, Finance, Labor Law, Labor Relations, and Technology. The workday does not live solely in the individual employment contract. It lives on the production floor, in shift rosters, during breaks, in attendance reports, in control systems, with supervisors, and in the actual way each workplace is organized.
Before modifying schedules, the company needs to understand how it works today. This involves identifying the contractual workday, the actual workday, frequent overtime, peak demand points, periods of low activity, critical positions, and areas where there is a high reliance on informal flexibility.
This diagnosis should not be limited to reviewing documents. It must contrast what contracts, regulations, and internal policies say with what actually happens in daily operations. In many organizations, there is a significant gap between the formal structure and daily practice. The 40-hour reform can make that gap visible.
For example, a company may have contracts that establish a clear workday, but in practice, it may operate with undocumented shift changes, informally compensated breaks, or supervisors who authorize additional time without uniform recording. It may also happen that some areas depend on workers who remain connected after hours, respond to messages, or handle incidents without that time being properly recognized or controlled.
In the context of a reduction in working hours, these practices must be reviewed. Not necessarily because they are all irregular, but because they can become difficult to defend if they are not aligned with a clear system of documentation and authorization.
Operations with continuous shifts are likely one of the most sensitive scenarios. When a company works 24/7 or requires extended coverage throughout the week, every reduction in working hours forces a rethink of staff distribution.
The first step is to identify whether current shifts were designed under the logic of a longer workweek. If the operating model depends on blocks of time that will no longer be sustainable under the new limit, the company must review alternatives. This may include adjustments to shift duration, the creation of intermediate shifts, the redistribution of breaks, additional hiring, the automation of certain processes, or the modification of workloads.
However, none of these decisions should be made in isolation. A shift is not just a schedule. It is an operational unit that involves supervision, the handover of responsibilities, quality control, process continuity, industrial safety, meals, transportation, cleaning, and coordination with other areas.
Modifying a shift without considering these factors can create new risks for the company. This may lead to unnecessary overlaps, supervision gaps, downtime, shift handover errors, or undue pressure on middle management. Internal dissatisfaction may also arise if certain employees perceive that the new schedule distributes workloads, breaks, or overtime opportunities unfairly.
For this reason, shift redesign must be approached through scenario planning. The company needs to simulate the impact of reducing daily hours, redistributing weekly rest days, creating an additional shift, modifying coverage roles, or concentrating specific processes on certain days. Each scenario should be evaluated based on three criteria: labor compliance, operational continuity, and economic cost.
A work schedule reform cannot be implemented by management alone. To a large extent, it is executed by supervisors, shift leads, and middle managers. They are the ones who authorize changes, resolve absences, cover incidents, request additional time, and communicate adjustments to staff.
If the company fails to train these managers, implementation may fail even if the legal design is sound. A supervisor who continues to operate under the old logic may generate unauthorized overtime, allow informal extensions of the workday, or incorrectly record staff clock-outs. They may also exert undue pressure on employees to meet operational needs without following the proper channels.
Training should not be limited to explaining the reform. It must be translated into practical rules: who can authorize overtime, how shift changes are documented, what to do in case of absences, how to record breaks, what behaviors must be avoided, and what information must be escalated to the labor department.
In large companies, this point is critical. The policy may be well-written, but if execution depends on hundreds of supervisors with different criteria, the risk multiplies. Operational consistency becomes just as important as the legal content of the policy.
The reduction of working hours also requires a closer look at time-tracking systems. In many companies, attendance recording has been treated as an administrative tool for payroll. Under the new scenario, it must become a source of labor evidence.
The system must allow for a clear reconstruction of the actual workday: start time, end time, breaks, overtime, authorizations, shift changes, and potential incidents. It is not enough to have a time clock if the system does not reflect how the company actually operates. Likewise, a digital platform is insufficient if supervisors use it inconsistently.
The risk lies not only in failing to record time but also in recording it incorrectly. A system that marks automatic schedules without reflecting the actual workday can be just as problematic as having no record at all. The same applies if the company manually modifies records, fails to keep evidence of authorizations, or cannot explain why certain employees consistently exceed their regular working hours.
In this sense, technology must support labor design. The company must review whether its current system can manage different types of workdays, rotating shifts, variable breaks, leave, incidents, and overtime. It must also define who can edit records, with what authorization, and under what traceability.
Although the reform presents a challenge, it can also be an opportunity to correct structural problems that many companies have postponed. Reviewing work schedules can help identify areas with overloads, inefficient processes, excessive reliance on overtime, poorly designed positions, or unclear supervision schemes.
A company that implements the reform strategically can emerge with a more orderly operation. It can gain better data on hours worked, clearer rules for middle management, lower exposure to overtime claims, and a shift structure more aligned with business realities.
But to achieve this, the transition should not be treated as a mere administrative update. It must be approached as a labor implementation project with clear stages: diagnosis, simulation, redesign, documentation, training, execution, and monitoring.
The key question is not just how to reduce working hours. The question is how to build a model that can hold up against three scenarios: daily operations, an authority inspection, and a potential labor dispute.
At DM Abogados, our Labor Engineering department assists companies with personnel-intensive operations in the diagnosis, redesign, and implementation of work schedules, shifts, breaks, and time tracking, integrating labor compliance with operational continuity.
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