Once a workers’ pipe dream, the four-day, 32-hour workweek is gaining ground as hundreds of employers try the schedules and businesses rethink the conventional ways of work.
The United Auto Workers made the shorter week a demand in its contract talks with Detroit automakers. Lawmakers in California, Massachusetts and other states have introduced bills aimed at pushing more businesses to adopt a four-day schedule.
Most proposals are long shots but signify the appeal in policy circles.
Organizations that have dipped a toe into shortened workweeks say it has resulted in happier, healthier staff, less turnover and a wave of interest from job applicants—usually with little to no loss in productivity.
Yet working smarter, not harder, isn’t as easy as it sounds.
Henry Ford cut the standard workweek to five days from six in the 1920s on the premise that a more compressed schedule, along with assembly-line innovations, would make work more efficient.
Since then, predictions that technological and economic advances would result in our working less haven’t borne out.
As far back as 1956, then-Vice President Richard Nixon declared a four-day workweek would be reality for most Americans in the “not-too-distant future.”
One reason shorter weeks remain out of reach, skeptics say, is that it is tough for large companies with customers and staff across time zones and countries to find a shortened schedule that works for all.
A handful of big brand names such as Unilever and Samsung have experimented with a shorter week on a limited basis, but most adoptees are much smaller firms.
Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford University, says it is doubtful most businesses can shed a fifth of the workweek and maintain productivity.
“Whenever I talk to managers, they find the topic pretty insulting—they argue it implies they are completely wasting a day a week,” he said.
A more viable approach for giving people more leisure time, he says, is to offer the option of four-day schedules, at four days’ pay.
“But that’s not a new idea,” he added. “It’s called part-time work.”
Dean, School of Management, Simmons University, Boston, MA; Fulbright Scholar, CRP--Certified Reinvention Practitioner
10moBring it on!