Get ready to start hearing a lot more about the four-day work week.
Activists are embarking on a months-long lobbying effort around the world, including in the U.S., to convince bosses to experiment with authorizing employees to do the same amount of work, over the course of fewer hours.
The movement is spurred in large part by the coronavirus pandemic, which provided evidence that the global workforce can dramatically shift to new methods of work without noticeable losses of productivity on a macro-scale. It’s not just that employees are used to the option of remote work — burnout, growing unhappiness with performative workaholism and an ongoing reassessment of lifestyle priorities is fueling the notion that employers shouldn’t require the usual 9 to 5 every Monday through Friday.
“There’s still a lot of skepticism, but a lot of the same skeptics would have said you can’t run an international corporation from your kitchen table during a pandemic,” says Andrew Barnes, CEO of a New Zealand-based financial firm and the author of The 4 Day Week. “The problem is our new world of working from home doesn’t stop the issues around overwork, and the re-balancing that we need in the modern workplace.”
The average workday is now 48.5 minutes longer than it was in 2019, as more people allow emails, Zoom meetings and other corporate responsibilities to bleed into their personal lives, according to a Harvard Business Review study. Meanwhile, the supposed flexibility of working from home is driving a deep-seeded fatigue throughout the workforce, particularly in professional environments that fail to give workers the flexibility they need.
Working five days a week only adds to the stress, and usually doesn’t offer the productivity benefits that might seem inherent, Barnes says. U.S. offices only adopted the five-day week in the 1920s and 1930s, when Henry Ford shut down factories on Saturdays and Sundays to ensure that assembly line employees could rest, thus remaining productive again on Monday.
Now, much of the workforce operates on brain power, rather than carrying out repetitive manual labor. Initial studies suggest that students and teachers who attend school on Tuesdays through Fridays report higher test scores, information retention and happiness, thanks to the new time for friends and family as well as a diversity of experience in their lives.
Now, the public consumer products company Unilever is trying it out, and German automotive manufacturers are adopting the idea in lieu of pay increases.
Ireland is launching a test program, Spain is running a government-sponsored pilot initiative in August, Japanese lawmakers are debating legislative changes for smarter work and organizers are trying to recruit American companies interested in testing a four-day week, then reporting their results for future consideration.
More time at work means less productivity, the logic goes, because with more time to put off tasks, people spend hours a day shopping online, killing time with colleagues or quietly dealing with personal responsibilities while on the clock. By thinking about how to measure productivity, rather than judging employees based on whether they’re present for a birthday party, for instance, employers can more creatively consider whether success is based on profits, turnover, customer happiness or another metric.
The point is that time is not a surrogate for success.
“I came into this not because I wanted a better work-life balance,” said Barnes, whose company, Perpetual Guardian, has operated on a four-day schedule for years. “I wanted to improve productivity in my business, and the byproduct was a happier workforce.”
Companies that have adopted a four day week plan have experienced a productivity increase of some 25%, Barnes says, and increased employee retention rates in places where salaries have remained the same.
All of which is to say nothing of the environmental benefits, as Barnes explained in an editorial for the Guardian. Fewer people in the office means less cars on the road, and thus shorter commutes and lower pollution rates.
If the four-day week catches on in Auckland, for example, and organisations across the city cut down on their daily in-office head count by 20%, the number of cars on the road each day drops by at least a fifth, and by up to 40% if parents are routinely permitted to work five shorter days in order to do school drop-offs and pick-ups.
Or, as he put it during a recent phone call, “What was a completely mad idea three years ago is no longer mad.”
recommended reading
The Stealth Sticker Campaign to Expose New York’s History of Slavery: Peter Stuyvesant, John van Nostrand, the Boerum family and other prominent names still plastered throughout New York belonged to folks who enslaved Black people. An ambitious project is keeping them accountable. [@JulianneMcShane]
How to hike for four months without your life falling apart: "The bright side: Once you’re on trail, your life will get a lot simpler." [@backpackermag]
The Lion, the Polygamist, and the Biofuel Scam: How a hard-partying Armenian man with experience in the trucking world teamed up with a member of an offshoot Mormon group to exploit a U.S. government program aimed at improving America’s clean energy shortage. [@VinceBeiser]
The Secrets John Le Carré Revealed: "The Cold War had no storming of the Bastille, no Gettysburg, no Omaha Beach. The grand struggle to control the future of humanity was fought by bureaucrats, spies, and proxies, in secret, deniably, off-screen." [@brianphillips]
one more thing
Swedish ice skaters are seeking out the thinnest black ice they can find because of the noise it makes. Headphones recommended.
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