59. The Four-Day Workweek

Intro: Duration: (02:42)

Opening music jingle & sound effects

Jeff Hunt:

Welcome to the Human Capital Podcast. I'm your host, Jeff Hunt. Do you long for more time off from your job on a regular basis? What would you do with an extra day off each week? The concept of the four-day workweek is getting a lot of attention right now, in part because another new study was just released with very positive results.

It's long been a dream for most workers to have more time off, especially in the midst of rising burnout rates over the past few years. The American Workweek is a manufactured construct, and it looks like it may now be on the precipice of one of the most profound changes in nearly a hundred years. Well-known companies in this four-day work week study have chosen to make the change permanent.

These are companies like Kickstarter, Shopify, and Shake Shack. So clearly there are good reasons for doing this. My guest today is an expert on this topic, Juliet Shore is Professor of Sociology at Boston University, and she's on the board of Four Day Week Global, which is a research nonprofit studying this concept.

Juliet has also served as Professor of Economics at Harvard University, and she has recently been seen on most major media outlets touting the benefits that were revealed in her study about the four-day workweek. Welcome, Juliet!

Juliet Schor:

Thank you. Great pleasure to be here.

Jeff Hunt:

It's wonderful to have you on the podcast, and this topic of the four-day workweek is the buzz right now. Not only in the US but internationally. And so, it must be exciting for you, is it?

Juliet Schor:

Yes, it's been a great couple of weeks. We released results from what is the largest trial to date of companies who are instituting four-day weeks with no reduction in pay, and we had phenomenal results. So, we've been doing the rounds on the media and it's very gratifying to see how much interest there is in this just today.

Mark Takano, a representative from California reintroduced his 32-hour workweek bill in the US Congress.

Topic 1. Juliet's career journey (02:42)

Jeff Hunt:

Wow, that is amazing. And I actually wanna bookmark that and come back to it cuz I have some questions for you about the legislative aspects of this versus organic change in businesses. So, Juliet, before we get into this meaty topic, tell us a little bit about your career journey as a sociologist, as a professor, as a researcher, what really led you to this point?

Juliet Schor:

So, I started my life career as an economist and focusing mostly on labor, a little bit on macroeconomics. And I spent the large part of my early career at Harvard University in the Department of Economics. And I got interested sort of through the back door in issues of working time.

And sort of why was it that in a country like the US which was experiencing very good productivity growth, did it seem that working hours had stopped, declined? Beginning about the 1970s, although in some measures, in some ways they sort of stalled out in the fifties. But that led me to write a book called The Overworked American, the Unexpected Decline of Leisure.

And I was very interested at the time the book came out, which was 1992, in finding some companies who might be wanting to try shorter hours of work. And there were a few that I talked to and there was some interest, but it never panned out. I moved on to other things in my research, although I always kept one foot in the work time research, particularly looking at the relationship between working hours and carbon emissions, and they tracked me closely together.

During the pandemic, I was approached by someone who was working for an Irish trade union that was interested in a four-day. and I was, uh, invited to begin researching trials, and those trials ended up being organized by a group called Four Day Week Global, which is a nonprofit started by Andrew Barnes, a New Zealand entrepreneur, and his partner Charlotte Lockhart, building on the experience they had at their company.

Of a successful shift to a four-day week with no reduction in pay. And since then, I've been the lead researcher on trials that have been going on around the world. We started our seventh group of companies yesterday, and they are a group of South African companies that are instituting four-day weeks.

So in between I've worked on gig labor and consumer culture and a lot of other things.

Topic 2. Defining the 4-day work week, an antidote for burnout (05:37)

Jeff Hunt:

Well, one of the things I love about what you are working on is this has the potential of transforming the way we work globally, and so it's very meaningful. Now as we get into this conversation, first of all, let's just define the four-day workweek, because some people may be listening to this podcast thinking, okay, are you talking about 4 10-hour days? Say specifically what you mean and how your research defined that?

Juliet Schor:

So, in these trials the companies agree to do two things. One is to keep pay at a hundred percent. So, if they're five-day week companies, they're not reducing anyone's pay and to meaningfully reducing working hours. So, a few of them have not gone all the way to 32, or maybe they're companies that have much higher than 40 hours.

So, we had a restaurant chain in one of our trials, and they started this with their managers. And their average working hours were 55 hours a week, so they were not gonna go all the way to 32 in the first step. The vast majority of them are going to a 32-hour week. They're giving a full day off.

And it's very different than a compressed so-called compressed work week, which is the four tens, which I know some people, like other people hate, it has some benefits. Nowhere near the kind of benefits that a four-day, 32-hour week has in which people are actually reclaiming a good bit of time.

Jeff Hunt:

Now, thinking about the four-day week, this feels like it could be the antidote to burnout.

And lately, on the podcast, a lot of my guests have brought up the concept of burnout. The pandemic underscored the burnout factor, and many people ended up literally pulling out of the workforce as a result, they just stopped working. So, talk a little bit about what you have found when people have implemented when companies have implemented this and its impact on burnout.

Juliet Schor:

So, we've had a big reduction in burnout that we've seen in our studies in the first two trials. They're the ones that are sort of top of mind for me in terms of results. More than two-thirds of people had reduced burnout. We also looked at stress, and fatigue, and you know, we can talk physical and mental health.

We can talk about some of those kinds of outcomes, but the burnout really stands out in the results that we have from the first three trials altogether, on a scale of one to five on a sort of well-established burnout scale. There's a half-a-point reduction, so that's a very, very significant reduction.

So, the results are really showing that this helps tremendously with burnout and related kinds of things. If you look at Gallup's, state of the global state of the workplace, the last one that came out in the US, 44% of people experienced stress a lot of the day, the previous day, I mean, that's an extraordinarily high number.

Almost half of people yesterday felt stressed a lot of their day. That's an unacceptable level of pressure that people are feeling. And the four-day week is a very potent kind of antidote to stress, burnout, fatigue and all of those problems that the pandemic has really intensified for people.

Topic 3. Does a 4-day work week reduce productivity? (09:27)

Jeff Hunt:

Now for leaders and managers, it often comes down to productivity. I've heard in discussion groups, executives having concerns about, if I were to make this shift, will my employees actually be as productive as they were before? What can you share about that?

Juliet Schor:

So, it's such an interesting part of this whole story.

And in a way, probably the piece of it that is most unexpected. Andrew Barnes, the founder of a four-day week global. The origin story for him switching to a four-day week at his company is that he was reading an article in a business magazine that said the average employee is only working two hours a day, or maybe it was three hours a day.

It was some preposterous number, but it had an insight that really struck him, which is there's probably a lot of wasted time in what my employees are doing. I mean, his firm is a sort of financial services firm, all white collar. So what he thought was, well if we can get rid of all that wasted time and tell people.

Look if you can get as much work as you're doing now done in four days rather than five, you can have that fifth day, no reduction in pay. I think a really important insight was it's not gonna be me, the owner CEO, telling you how to reorganize work, give it to the employees, give it to the teams, let them figure out how to do this.

The fifth day off is a gift that they really would value. So, figure out what you're doing that doesn't make sense. And his employees did it and he was very pleased with the results. So, the key is work reorganization. And in our trials, the companies go through two months of coaching and mentoring and peer support to figure out.

How to reorganize what they're doing so that they can get all that work done in four days that they're doing in five. Now we can get into the details of what they're doing. And you know, there's some things which are pretty consistent across many companies. Other companies are doing sort of individualized things, but that's the key.

And one key point about that is that it's less an individual productivity change, although that has to happen. That's a part of it but these companies are doing it in teams, or if they're small companies, they're doing it together and figuring out what are they doing that's not adding value because there's a lot of wasted time in many workplaces.

Now, let's put an asterisk on that. We should come back to the companies and the organizations where there isn't much to squeeze out, and what about them and so forth. And I'm not sitting here saying that every company tomorrow, could reorganize its work and find 20% of wasted time, but you'd be surprised at there are multiple ways that that 20% can be made up, both in terms of work reorganization, but also in terms of costs.

Because in some cases you might not necessarily get a hundred percent of the productivity, but you're gonna get cost savings, which are gonna outweigh it. So we can get into that too.

Jeff Hunt:

I love what you're saying, and I'm reflecting that one of the reasons why it feels so meaningful is it is prompting organizations to take inventory on several things, which they really should be doing anyway.

And I'm gonna make a stretch here, Juliet, so you tell me if this is not correct, but if an organization is entering into this process, they will ideally define and redefine what is most important. And so, it's really a matter of taking inventory at a corporate level. What is most important? Maybe that starts with vision, mission, values, but then taking it down to the team level.

Which is fantastic because you're actually stimulating engagement with teams and people. You're bringing people together around a common objective, and then all the way down to the individual level where let's take a look at like peripheral activities that are just not adding value, and let's strip those away.

So even if an organization decided not to move to a four-day work week, all these exercises are helpful. But what you're saying is that for many organizations, not all organizations, they would have the ability to actually take this 40-hour work week, move it into 32, and they're gonna be as productive and probably more engaged with each other.

Juliet Schor:

Yes, absolutely. And quite a few of them are telling us they're more productive than they were. So, there are a couple of things that you've said that are really important. One is that process of kind of looking at what they're doing, taking stock, making those changes, etcetera. One of the people who has been very active in the, we call it that onboarding process.

Those two months of coaching, mentoring, workshops, etcetera, is someone who did this at his organization and it prompted a whole reimagining of what they were doing that was valuable and what they were doing that they shouldn't do anymore and so forth. And so that process, it was key to the success of the four-day week.

Now, can companies do that without making a four-day week change? Some can, for sure, and then you have to ask, well, why haven't they? But one of the things is that in many organizations, it's hard for top management to get employees to do all that unless they're gonna get something out of it. And you may be asking them to do things to lose things that they, like.

Economists would call it on the job leisure. If you're in a job that allows you to do a little internet shopping or see what's going on Facebook, or play a video game on and off throughout the day, and suddenly you've got some workplace reorganization that's taking that away from you, you may not like it.

But if that reorganization is taking that away from you and what you're getting is a whole day off, you may be thrilled and in fact, most of them are thrilled. So it's not as easy to just re-engineer the workplace in ways that work for everybody. A as you might think it is, or I know you don't think it is, but as one might imagine, certainly my economists, colleagues, and you know, I am trained as an economist, you know, have this idea.

The model says they're always gonna be at their productivity best, and we know in reality that's not true. So, that's kind of a puzzle for standard economic theory, but I think that's a big part of it now, what some of the companies do is less that wholesale re-engineering or, I know that's not, that's a term from an earlier era, but kind of re-imagining, let's call it that.

Some of them are really just more focused on, okay, how do we get rid of the wasted time and there, there are certain culprits in corporate culture and also in nonprofit culture. We have quite a few nonprofits in our trials. There are a number of familiar culprits that come up and that companies make changes in that people are actually happy about and that they make their lives easier and better but that get rid of a lot of wasted time.

And you know, I'm happy to talk about what those are.

Topic 4. Getting rid of the wasted time (17:29)

Jeff Hunt:

Well, let me hazard a guess that one of those elements are meetings because there are too many meetings and organizations. In fact, I did an episode last year with Stephen Rogelberg who wrote a book called The Surprising Science of Meetings, and he has some methodologies for improving the quality of meetings, but is that one of them?

Juliet Schor:

Absolutely number one. As I said, you probably know what it is. So, a number of dimensions to these. There's a statistic I saw by one of the scholars who works on meetings that estimated the professionals spend a third of their time in meetings. I think it depends if you're a doctor or a lawyer.

But the corporate world, and a lot of the white collar corporate world is very meeting heavy. So the company's typically they reduce the length of meetings, they increase their efficiency. They figure out, there's that famous thing about that meeting could have been an email.

They turn those, or a slack, they turn those into fewer people get invited to the meetings. People are freer to say no to meetings. They drastically shrink the footprint of meetings. The second common strategy has to do with distractions. So, people are distracted in the workplace these days, and they're two main categories.

One is the internal, like, oh, I keep checking my email, or I keep going to Facebook, or, but the other is distractions from other people in the workplace. So, there are different ways that companies in our trials are dealing with this. One is they create focus time when people are not supposed to be distracting each other.

So, you can just get into your work. The one company in Britain did a nice, a traffic light system. I don't know if you're, you know that one? Like if you have a red light on your computer or your desk, it says, you know, do not bother me, you know, unless you had a heart attack and I need to call the ambulance under any, you know, leave me alone.

Yellow light is, you can approach, but it better be important. And green light is, I'm open for business. And so, they're able to manage that distraction frontier on their own time rather than everybody's forced into 10 to one. Nobody's. Distracting. The other big thing is people do more personal errands, doctor's appointments, etcetera, on the off day.

And I think for more privileged workers who do not lose income when they leave the office to do something like this, and that's a reasonable number of employees in our society, by moving them out to that off day, you're not actually gaining productivity, but the company is because they were losing those hours previously and now they're coming out of people's own time.

So, those are three of the big things. I mean, there're, there're lots of other things that that companies do, but those are three that we see pretty commonly.

Jeff Hunt:

That makes sense. Now, just thinking about this day off, did you find in your study that employees had to be trained explicitly not to do work on that day, cuz I could actually see some employees being sort of sucked back in, whether it's through email or other aspects.

Juliet Schor:

On average, we found a little bit of work on the off day. So, one hour of work. It's a combination of things. There are some people some of these firms they left a little bit of an open window for that last day. So, I'll give you an example of, it was actually the first company who joined one of our trials. It's the one I talked about in my Ted Talk, it's health wise, and I talked to a woman, I think she was the head of customer service, but anyway, she's pretty high up in with a customer facing job.

And when she told her customers, that she was going to a four-day week, one thing I should say that was interesting. Their client, I guess, I don't know if they're customers or clients, they're healthcare organizations. She said her biggest client when she told them their reaction was “good for you”, which I thought was very telling and shows the shift in attitudes post pandemic, and I just think that it's that inversion of the common sense around whether this makes sense and whether we can do this.

So, what she told them all is they had their personal cell phone number and if it's an emergency, let me know. Some people may choose to just finish up some things that they didn't get done on Thursday afternoon or whatever. But so, there's some of that and, and it does vary a bit by individual.

Nobody is stopping these folks from working on Fridays if they want to, but the idea is that the work reorganization creates a situation in which they shouldn't have to, in which it is feasible for them to get everything done Monday through Thursday and it's mostly what we found.

Topic 5. The four-day week as part of Corporate ESG initiatives (22:37)

Jeff Hunt:

Now I'm wondering if you think that with all of the ESG that is going on, and for our listeners, that's environmental, social, and governance aspects that are getting so much attention in organizations.

Do you see the four-day work week as being a, a sort of a measurement or a, something that companies will start to proclaim as part of their ESG initiatives?

Juliet Schor:

I hope they do. I mean there's certainly a big social benefit to it. Our research shows, I talked to you about the wellbeing benefits, which are social, but there are many other dimensions to the social benefits.

We did a lot of being about relationships between work and family and work and community. And are you spending able to spend more time with your family and do you have less conflict between work and family and more balance all of those things. The answer is yes, much better. More time to care for children and elderly.

Yes, more time to volunteer. All of those kinds of things. And then the e environmental, very important. We've only reported on a little bit of our findings because some of these calculations are a little bit messy, but we asked a number of questions about people's driving habits. Commuting so we found in the US the verse two trials.

People commuting by car less, people spending less time commuting. We also asked, is there a, what we would call a rebound effect, like well, are there things that the four-day week does that would cause people to use more energy and emit more carbon? Like, do they take plane trips on those three-day weekends?

Or do they travel more? And it is a little bit complicated with the seasonality of our trials. One started in the winter, one started in the summer, and they flip to the other, you know, so that's gonna affect it. But basically we are not finding much of a travel rebound at all.

And what people are doing on that off day is mostly around the house. So, they're doing hobbies and leisure housework and childcare and personal grooming. So, some of that might be a little bit, maybe they went to get a manicure or haircut or something, but it's not kind of big, extravagant, far flung things.

The amount of time they're spending traveling on that off day looks really small.

Jeff Hunt:

Has there been any company in all of these studies, cuz you've done a number of them now, that has made the decision to switch back to the five-day work week?

Juliet Schor:

In the first two trials, none of them told us that. There were a couple that never responded, but we didn't get no reports of any in the third trial, the UK trial, I think there were a couple of them.

I don't know the full story on exactly why. What I have learned is that there was one in the trial, the very first one, it was the biggest company. They had a phenomenal experience with the four-day week, and they did, they were doing publicity around it and so forth. And then I got back in touch with them sometime later.

Because we wanted to survey people six months after, so we have a whole year of experience with this. They've been taken over by a private equity firm that ended the trial. There's another big company in the United States, a software company Bolt, that made a big splash going to a four-day week, and almost a few days later, their CEO was canned.

And the new CEO took away the four-day week, is what I've heard. And there was one other case of a new CEO coming in a UK company, also one of the big ones. That we had a thousand-person company. They hadn't started the trial yet, but that new CEO came in and scotched it. So that seems to be the biggest, from what I've heard, it's less that the trial doesn't work out and more that somebody comes in and it's not their vision and it's really unfortunate because I have to say, taking away a four day week from people is not a great business decision.

And I can tell you one reason why we asked people how much the trial is worth to them. And the way we did it was by asking them if they were thinking about going to a new job, what would it take in terms of salary if it was a five-day, week job? And let me just find that for you. What we found was 42% of them would require between 26 and 50% more pay.

I mean, it's a huge amount of money that would require. 13% said they'd need more than a 50% increase and another 13% said no amount of money could ever induce them to go back to a five-day week.

Jeff Hunt:

That is truly some of the best evidence you have right there about the benefits to employees and how much they value and appreciate this benefit, and I'm just reflecting Juliet on how helpful this could be from a competitive advantage standpoint, both in terms of recruitment and retention.

If I'm thinking of making a move and my job is creating burnout, it's stressful. There's more work than I can ever do, and I'm looking at a company that has a four-day work week, that's a huge attractant to me in looking at that business and then staying there, isn’t that right?

Juliet Schor:

Absolutely. So, my sense, and this is anecdotal but it's as the trial has gone on, so we started this a year ago, February 2022, and now we're a year later. It seems that more and more, my sense is that attracting workers and keeping workers is at the forefront of many companies thinking. I think earlier it may have been a little bit more, they're so stressed and burned out.

Now those are obviously related, but the other thing that's happening, I just looked at the US numbers it's not just the great resignation, which of course has happened. You've got a lot of people quitting and that was the impetus for that very first company in our trial health-wise, they had a lot of quits in June of 2021.

And in April they just said, let's just do this. And people stopped leaving and we've seen that in a lot of companies. And we have a dip in resignation, a little bit of a dip in resignation in the first couple of trials and I think actually in the UK trial as well. But it's kind of amazing cuz this is during the great resignation so.

The fact that people are not leaving at a time when they're leaving other companies. But the other key thing, as you say, is the attracting. And so, there's so many companies sitting with unfilled positions and that data has really soared in the US, I haven't seen the UK data lately, but yes.

It's a very big workplace attractor. They're starting to be more that Surveys that are done. I think there was a LinkedIn study that four Day Week Global was part of that looked at how much would you value the four-day, week and so forth, and very valuable to workers.

Jeff Hunt:

So, it's an opportunity for companies to look at that as a strategic advantage.

And yet also I've heard that there are a number of states that are looking at legislation to benefit companies that do migrate to something like the four-day work week, whether it's through tax credits. And so, you have this organic method of internal marketplace competition happening among businesses.

And then you have this legislative thing. Comment about these two and what you see the trend is shaping up to be if you can.

Juliet Schor:

Yeah, it's very exciting. So, the state of Maryland recently held hearings on a bill for a four day week proposal, which would give tax breaks to companies and also have a research component.

And, we've been talking with them. I literally today got news on two other states. One is New York, and the other is that a bill has been filed in Massachusetts for a four day week, and I believe today, although it's possible, it happened yesterday and I only heard about it today. Representative Mark Takano from California reintroduced his 32 hours work week bill.

And that would change the statutory work week in the US from 40 to 32. So, workers would get overtime pay above 32 hours. And that has been in the last Congress, I believe it was endorsed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which is of growing importance in the Congress. So there's activity happening.

Topic 6. Lightning round questions (31:44)

Jeff Hunt:

A lot of activity around this. Very exciting. Let's shift into some lightning-round questions before we wrap up. The first one is, Juliette, what are you most grateful for?

Juliet Schor:

I'm grateful for the opportunity to study this phenomenon. I had wanted to do this, you know, 30 years ago, so yeah, it's great.

Jeff Hunt:

What's the most difficult leadership lesson you've learned over your career?

Juliet Schor:

How important it is to be nice to people.

Jeff Hunt:

I love that. Who's one person you would interview if you could living or not?

Juliet Schor:

Pierre Bourdieu. French sociologist.

Jeff Hunt:

Do you have a top book recommendation for our listeners?

Juliet Schor:

I love his dis board Jew's distinction. I'm not sure it's, you know, it's a little bit dense. It's probably my favorite book. Oh. I'm a big fan. I read a lot of British 19th century, you know, I love Austin. Anthony Trollop, the way we were now. That might be a good one for today.

Jeff Hunt:

If you had to distill this incredible topic in our conversation into a few takeaways for our listeners, being of course, employees, leaders, executives in all types of organizations, whether they're considering the four day work week or not, what would you share?

Juliet Schor:

Well, I think a really important thing about the four-day work week is that it is truly one of those innovations that can be a win-win, win. And the third win is society, and maybe the fourth is the environment. We sometimes call it a triple dividend, but it's. What we're seeing is that it's not just employees who can benefit from it, that that's the sort of easy part, but the company's society, the climate, it feels like something that we really can't afford to miss out on.

Jeff Hunt:

Well, Julia, thank you so much for doing all this great research and for coming on the show today and for what looks like is having a role in changing the world.

Juliet Schor:

Thank you so much. It's been a great pleasure.

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Outro(34:04)

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Jeff Hunt:

Thanks for listening to Human Capital, if you like this show please tell your friends and also take the time to go rate and review us. Human Capital is a production of GoalSpan, your integrated source for performance management. Now go out and be the inspiration to other humans, and thank you for being human kind.