The Quest For The 4-Day Workweek
It’s not easy though…
The 4-day workweek has been introduced as one of the most innovative ideas in the 20th century workforce. Alongside modern, open offices, the 4-day workweek seems to be bridging the gap on employee productivity and satisfaction.
As companies navigate their way through the balance of retention and acquisition, the 4-day workweek seems to become the solution for attracting employees in. At the same time, the idea of a 4-day workweek is overwhelmingly positive for workers who are seeking a work-life balance.
However, the 4-day workweek is more than the “visions of spending more time at the beach.” It tackles multiple aspects of the company as well as the employees with regard to costs, efficiency and health.
So far, the narrative on the 4-day workweek is still divided. There are others who support this because this will “facilitate” more hours for family and caregiving for the elderly. At the same time, it would reportedly solve health problems like “ obesity, sleep problems, high blood pressure, heart problems,” and other stress-related problems caused by sitting too much.
UK Faculty President of Public Health Prof. John Ashton said the 5-day workweek is simply “ a maldistribution of work.” Since this has been introduced decades ago when the factory lines in Ford were popularized, these work concepts no longer apply in today’s modern workforce.
“When you look at the way we lead our lives, the stress that people are under, the pressure on time and sickness absence, [work-related] mental health is clearly a major issue. We should be moving towards a four-day week because the problem we have in the world of work is you’ve got a proportion of the population who are working too hard and a proportion that haven’t got jobs”, Ashton said.
“We’ve got a maldistribution of work. The lunch-hour has gone; people just have a sandwich at their desk and carry on working,” added the leader of the UK’s 3,300 public-health experts working in the NHS, local government and academia.
Aside from the illnesses that could be avoided by the 4-day workweek, 71% of Britons also think that this will make them happier.
“It would mean that people might smile more and be happier, and improve general health,” Ashton said.
Moreover, Ashton suggests that this could be a step towards community awareness. Since people are used to having a 5-day workweek, they could utilize the final day of the week to be a “giving back day” where people would join community causes and activities.
“This is how you operationalise the big society,” he said.
Ashton has good pointers about the 4-day workweek. In theory, this is a good starting point since there are multiple hours in the normal week that are not utilized very well for employees. Some were put into wasteful chatter while others on unproductive meetings.
This is also the case for the people who work at home. Since they have limited interaction with others in the workplace, they get to focus more on the work they’re doing instead of the unnecessary interaction with colleagues.
But, why is this idea such a challenge for businesses?
In Italy, the government is already thinking of adapting this idea throughout the country. When they first implemented a weekly cut down on work, it was reported that it opened up a million new jobs in the market, The Independent reported.
Italy’s working week was last cut down in 1977, when Saturday was abolished as a working day and hours were reduced from 48 to 40. Italian employers can be fined up to €1,500 if they break the rules, and it is believed the change led to one million new jobs being created across the country.
Piergiovanni Alleva, a regional councillor for the Emilia Romagna region of northern Italy, recommended for the work hours to be cut fromm 40 to 32. This means, following the trend of the 4-day workweek.
Japan, a nation whose known for having extreme, conservative views on work, is also trying to adapt to the 4-day workweek.
“Three days off per week were common mainly for large companies in the past, but in recent years, labor shortages have prompted more businesses outside big cities to adopt” the system, said Tetsu Washitani, an economics professor at Chuo University.
Because of this initiative, there has been a rise in the employment including the return of mothers who were on maternity leave.
Though there are multiple examples of the 4-day workweek in national governments as well as in the private sector, majority of the businesses worldwide find it hard to adapt.
The conflict lies in the uncertainty of the productivity conversion of the 4-day workweek.
In the U.S. some companies tried to adapt this style, but still maintained the 40-hour weekly requirement. This means that every employee would work 10 hours everyday, but would get 3 days off during the weekends.
This seems like a reasonable adjustment since they are simply adding 2 hours everyday, which the majority of workers take as overtime before the 4-day workweek was introduced.
At the same time, the concept of deep work (by Cal Newport) indicates that it would take about 4 hours to achieve. This means, if we’re going to take into account the 10 hours a day of the 4-day workweek structure, you get 2 streaks of deep work and they can use the final two hours for meetings, conferences and administrative work like email. If this is the ideal formula, employees can enjoy the 3 days of weekends to enjoy with their family and friends without having to think about the remaining tasks they left at work.
Deep work should be taken into consideration whenever we talk about 4-day workweek because if they are going to implement this with the same level of office approach they do with the 5-day workweek (where distractions are tantamout), then the result would just be counterproductive.
Just like what Allard Dembe said, it’s really about the value of the work one can accomplish in a set period of time.
The primary problem with the idea is that whatever work needs to be done, needs to get done in the same amount of total time. Despite wishes to the contrary, there are still only 24 hours in a day.
The math is simple: working five eight-hour shifts is equivalent to working four 10-hour shifts. That’s true. But the implications of these schedules are different. The danger is in disregarding the health effects that can occur as a result of fatigue and stress that accumulate over a longer-than-normal working day.
CONCLUSION
There are different factors to consider about the 4-day workweek. Though the samples are limited, there has been a positive response overall.
Since this is a new concept of work, the main thing to focus on is the testing and the results. Companies and employees both need to be able to adjust whenever needed and it would require diligence in finding the right aspects to focus on. At the end of the day, it’s a two-way street for companies and its employees to create the progress they are looking for.
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