4-day workweek: A modern or an archaic concept?
This is the only news employees worldwide seem to care about. Tech giant Microsoft celebrated a 40% boost in productivity after implementing a 4-day workweek for the whole month of August, in one of its Japan’s subsidiary as part of its “Work-Life Choice Challenge”. Proponents of the shortened workweek find examples in similar successes witnessed at US Law Firm Walter Benanti which kick started 2019 by shortening the workweek to 4 days, as well as in the promises of the UK Labor party to implement a 4-day workweek of 32 hours across the nation if it gets elected. It might seem that the traction for a shortened workweek is contemporary phenomenon, but it is actually an idea that businesses worldwide have toyed with for decades. Back in 1928, economist John Maynard went as far as to predict a 15-hour workweek by 2030. In 1965, a Senate subcommittee predicted a 14-hour workweek by 2000, with seven weeks of vacation. Support for the idea of a 30-hour workweek became popular in the early 20th century but waned after the Great Depression. Now, it has taken life once again in professional landscapes. The compressed workweek finds support in personalities such as Google cofounder Larry Page and has been successfully adopted by companies worldwide, from the likes of Monograph, a software company in San Francisco, to Perpetual Guardian, a trust management company in New Zealand.
Wrapping up the pros
Employers do not get more work out of their employees who clock more hours. This is a reality. Experimentally proven and globally accepted.
International Labor Organization at UN states: “In fact, longer hours of work are generally associated with lower unit labor productivity, while shorter hours of work are linked with higher productivity”.
In all the examples cited above, a shortened workweek saw an enhance in the productivity as well as in the happiness of employees especially. This is especially true for regions such as Japan and US where workers are infamously overworked and undercompensated for their extra hours. These individuals, facing burn out on a regular basis, feel short-changed by the promise that technology is supposed to help improve our lives rather than chain us to our desks and glued to our phones at the expense of our mental health. A shortened workweek will help alleviate some of their mental stress by giving them a longer recovery time from their work routine.
Moreover, in economies where unemployment is on the rise, the 4-day workweek can also help to redistribute work hours to those who are currently unemployed while those who are overworked can enjoy a break.
Furthermore, work itself is changing as the new generations stepping into work-life strive to work smarter rather than harder. The 4-day work week promises a step towards creating a more flexible work environment which caters to a diverse group of employees. This flexibility, especially coveted by Millennials and Gen Z entering the job market, can also benefit the older generations who wish to strike a better work-life balance. Discussions with employees where they can select their own 4 days schedule come in the same spirit of flexibility to suit a wide variety of needs.
While the benefits to the employer and employees are the ones that get the most coverage, there are other benefits in the reduced resource consumption (power and paper used for example) of implementing the practice.
Is it really that simple?
If the 4-day workweek is so great, then why is it not a global reality yet?
According to psychologists, there are many reasons why the 4-day workweek hasn’t taken hold. US employees come from a culture where they place great value in their work and pursue work as an end in itself. It’s a culture that has travelled across the pond as employees worldwide generally feel more accomplished by working more hours. The age of industrialization has transcended into an age of consumerism where a luxurious lifestyle comes at an expense of a longer and more rigorous work regime.
One of the major reasons for the reluctance by employers to implement a shorter work schedule is their incredulity of the success storied cited. Many argue that there have been no standardized efforts to incorporate a shorter workweek. They assert that the examples used to glorify the shortened work week are inconsistent and are in fact just examples. In some scenarios, the average 40-hour workweek is merely redistributed over four days. In other cases, a workday is taken out, resulting in a total of 32 hours worked per week. Sometimes pay is compromised, and in some cases, it remains the same. The results are hence unconvincing for many who are still apprehensive of the effectiveness of this so-called radical change. Some employers also lack faith in their employees to get the same if not more amount of work done in a shortened workweek and are not as accepting of the benefits the shortened week can offer their organizations.
Experts such as Adam Grant of Wharton School of Business do not see the abbreviated week becoming a reality anytime soon. They are also unsure of how easy it is to implement such a practice in large organizations as compared to start-ups. Questions remain about whether the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs of implementation. Experts also point out that recent examples of successes only refer to corporate environments and that flexibility means different things in different professions. They say that not everyone would opt for flexible working hours for example working parents are tied to schedules of day cares who only run on a 9-7 shifts. For these individuals a 9-5 shift seems convenient.
When considering other aspects, things get even more complicated.
The stigma attached to taking time off especially in professions such as medicine and law prevents many of the workers in such professions to even utilize the current flexibility they enjoy. Workers in demanding social roles do not utilize their vacation time, flexible work hours and parental leaves and instead opt to size up their workload in attempts to ‘out-work’ their colleagues who are not even on the same schedule. These professions do not fit into the corporate debate of reduced working days and instead demand their own analysis.
These sorts of workers will benefit the most from having a uniform day schedule and a standardized abridged week. This will eradicate comparisons with their coworkers and weaken the stigma as everyone has the same schedule and nobody will be perceived as less committed for not participating. The shorter workweek in these professions will however mean employing extra labor or incorporating other practices such as job sharing where two individuals are up-to-speed on the same matters and fill in for each other, allowing employees to enjoy free time without any remorse, free from the distractions of work emails and calls and truly be off-duty.
Much of the conversation for a compressed work week has centered around corporate environments. But not all workforce is employed in white collar jobs with regular salaries. Low wage workers who are paid by the hour and those in blue-collar professions would not benefit from the 4-day workweek. as their pay is dependent on the number of hours they work, these workers actually prefer working more hours to earn a decent wage. Professions such as nursing, teaching, construction work, nannying etc. will benefit from other changes that improve working conditions. Employees in these professions face higher burnout than white collar employees due to the quality of their work. For example, nurses or teachers can suffer as a result of dealing with too many patients or students at a given time. This ultimately impacts the quality of the service provided.
To improve the work-life balance of such workers, it is important to include them in the conversation and customize solutions that work specifically for them. These include higher pay, better staffing and more fixed schedules. These tailored solutions will not work for corporate employees since they already enjoy a fixed higher salary as well as somewhat of a fixed working schedule.
Alternative approaches to consider
In light of such complications to implement the 4-day workweek, we then ask if there are any other ways to get the work done and still enjoy more time off. We find investing in efficient technologies and practices to help employees to wrap up their work in a shorter amount of time.
The approach by entrepreneur Lasse Rheingans takes this idea further. Rheingans runs a 16-person tech startup with a 5-hour workday. He attributes the success of this arrangement on the realization of the distinction between time spent in office and the time spent working together. In our modern age where work seemingly pervades into every aspect of our lives, we tend to find productivity in the frantic and haphazard online communication outside of work. If we take out such distractions and limit the unproductive conversations about our jobs while we are at our jobs, we can achieve whatever needs to be done in a 5-hour frame. He has done this by incorporating practices such as reduced time in meetings, leaving phones in their bags at the office, checking emails only twice in a day etc.
These practices seem inane but in the work climate of today they can do wonders. The reason for this is that the work most of the individuals do today is one based on cognition. This knowledge work in the current network age is different from the cognitive work done in previous centuries which lacked the connectivity we enjoy today. In order to gain the most out of this kind of work, we need to find an arrangement that suits the current work climate best and results in the most productivity.
The strategy to work maximum hours to gain maximum productivity is ancient and does not hold work best for this sort of mind work. Organizations who rely on the convenient to and fro email or direct messaging cycle create an unstructured and unofficial conversation that might be simple and convenient, but it is not the most efficient. Rheingans notes “If I can’t simply reach you with a quick email at any time, my work is going to require more forethought; some things might even get missed, some clients occasionally made upset”. We however need to realize that this new phase of digital knowledge work requires its own set of more productive and less draining rules different from the conventional ones used across the board. This exploratory mindset may seem radical to conventionalists, but it addresses modern concerns in modern businesses and holds the key to a work life balance that we all yearn for.
