The transition to a 40-hour workweek in Mexico It represents much more than a reduction in the number of hours worked. For companies with complex operations, multiple shifts and large workforces, the real challenge will be having sufficiently accurate information to manage shifts, overtime, and incidents without losing operational control.

For Tomás Kachadourian, Director of Business Intelligence at InfoBlock, This change also opens up an opportunity: to stop measuring work solely by the length of time spent on it and start using reliable data to understand how working time is actually distributed within an organization.

“Productivity ceases to be a perception when there is accurate information about how an organization operates.”.

The reduction of working hours changes the conversation about productivity

The constitutional reform regarding the reduction of the working hours was published in the Official Journal of the Federation on March 3, 2026. The scheme establishes a gradual reduction in the maximum weekly working hours: 48 hours in 2026, 46 in 2027, 44 in 2028, 42 in 2029 and 40 hours from 2030 onwards. Official Journal of the Federation

For organizations, gradualism allows them to prepare their processes. However, reducing hours without knowing exactly what happens during the workday can transfer existing inefficiencies into a new work schedule.

The starting point is to change the way of measuring.

Instead of associating productivity solely with physical presence, companies need to identify unproductive times, bottlenecks, recurring incidents, and activities that consume hours without generating operational value.

To achieve this, the quality of the data becomes fundamental.

Precision and traceability: the real operational challenge

In organizations with thousands of employees, managing work time is considerably more complex than recording an entry and exit.

Sudden changes in shifts, variable workdays, hybrid schedules, absences, leave, overtime, and different labor rules can create inconsistencies when processes depend on spreadsheets, manual calculations, or systems that are not integrated.

From Kachadourian's perspective, the challenge of reform lies not only in reducing the working day, but in having the traceability necessary to know what really happened during each workday.

A reliable record allows identifying, for example:

• regular and extraordinary hours;
• shift changes and coverages;
• incidents of assistance;
• unplanned periods;
• deviations from labor regulations;
• distribution of time between different operations.

With this information, Human Resources stops working solely with administrative data and begins to generate information that can also be used by Operations, Finance, and other business departments.

From assistance control to operational intelligence

When the time and attendance information is accurate, it can be related to operational indicators to understand how much a process actually costs, where deviations exist, and what part of the operation needs adjustments.

This is a significant difference.

The attendance registration It ceases to be solely a tool for calculating payroll and becomes a source of information for making decisions.

For companies with plants, distribution centers, stores, routes, or different locations, this visibility allows them to analyze patterns that would be difficult to detect using manual processes.

The technology also allows rules to be configured according to the reality of each organization: different shifts, collective contracts, work schedules, internal policies, and specific conditions in sectors such as manufacturing, food and beverage, retail, or healthcare.

In this way, companies can detect overwork, failures in shift scheduling, and incidents before they become payroll, operational, or compliance issues.

Electronic registration is becoming increasingly important

The reform to the Federal Labor Law, The law, published on May 1, 2026, introduced the obligation to electronically record the working hours of each employee, including their start and end times.

The legislation also stipulates that the Secretariat of Labor and Social Security must issue general provisions regarding the scope of application and the corresponding exceptions; these provisions will come into force as of January 1, 2027. Official Journal of the Federation

This increases the importance of having systems capable of providing consistent, verifiable, and available information when required.

For organizations with distributed operations, the challenge is not simply to digitize a record that was previously manual. The goal is to ensure that the information correctly represents what is happening in the operation.

The opportunity behind 40 hours

The transition to 40-hour work weeks forces organizations to review processes that may have remained unchanged for years.

How much time is lost due to poor shift scheduling? How much extra time is generated by incidents that could have been anticipated? Where are workloads misaligned? What processes continue to depend on manual information?

Answering these questions requires data.

For InfoBlock, the transformation begins when the weather record It ceases to be an isolated process and becomes integrated with the company’s operations.

The gradual reduction of the working day It offers a window to review those processes before reaching the 40-hour mark in 2030.

Preparing does not only mean complying with a new work arrangement. It also involves building an operation capable of better utilizing time, reducing inconsistencies, and making decisions based on reliable information.

Because operating better starts with knowing exactly what is happening.

Publication note

Content developed from the participation of Tomás Kachadourian, Director of Business Intelligence at InfoBlock, originally published in the September 2026 edition of Expansion.