How The Four-Day Workweek Could Change The Future Of Work

Well, Twitter staff is once again shrinking. Employees reportedly resigned on Musk. That means a bunch of them at the same time. After billionaire boss Elon Musk presented them with an ultimatum, he said, get hardcore or get out. Let's pause this video. Notice something? The wealthiest guy on the planet told his employees to work long hours and some of his employees said no, goodbye. Musk's hardcore ultimatum comes at a time when a four-day or shorter workweek is gaining momentum, thanks in part to the pandemic. The pandemic is a big part of why we're back on the path. The fact that people don't want to work so many hours and the fact that there are labor shortages in a lot of places. So that all pushes us in the direction of work time reduction. The idea of reducing work time has been around for quite some time. However, it is real now. Thousands of companies around the world are actually reducing work time in one way or another. We idolize Elon Musk because of his wealth, not because of his hustle. And the idea that hustle is connected to wealth hasn't necessarily been proven because everyone who is wealthy is not necessarily wealthy because of the work they put in. The great resignation or the great transition, quiet quitting, four-day workweeks, hybrid workweeks is all about how do I spend more of my time being efficient at work and doing what I want to do? And I think that's the big movement. It's the purpose movement, the passion movement. The four-day workweek that we're talking about is not for 10-hour days. So it's not a 40-hour workweek, but a 32-hour workweek done over four days. And the other crucial part of it is that workers are not being asked to give up pay. So they're getting five days of pay for four days of work. The five-day workweek is largely attributed to Henry Ford. Decades ago, Henry Ford experimented with it under the theory that if we reduce it to five days, people will have more energy in the five days that they're there and they'll be more productive and intended to work out. Well, lawmakers took Ford's experiment to notice. And in 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, limiting the workweek to 44 hours, which was amended the next year to shrink it to 40 hours. This is how a five-day workweek became a reality for us. Working five days a week is going to be consigned to the history books, just as the six-day workweek and the seven-day workweek were. 21st century, we see now that we will not work the amount of hours that we do now. We will have a better society. And so this is the future of work. A nonprofit group called Four Day Week Global recently concluded a six-month, four-day week pilot program in more than 30 companies with about 1,000 employees in countries including the U.S., Ireland and Australia. The study found that companies expressed extreme satisfaction with their overall productivity and performance. Company revenue also rose by an compared to the same six-month period in 2021. Similarly, the midpoint survey of their UK experiment, which began in June, found an overall increase in productivity. The final results from that trial, which includes more than 70 companies with 3,000 employees, are due in February. Pilot program for the four-day workweek that we implemented in June last year, and it continues to go today. And we are seeing very positive results in terms of our employee health from it. The one thing I think is important to note is that productivity is relative. And so for us, productivity aligns directly with the positivity, the happiness and the health of our employees. 82% of our employees reported that they were experiencing more health and well-being as a result of a four-day workweek. It's important to understand that the four-day week is relevant, not just for white-collar workers, but for blue-collar workers too, and pink-collar workers. Many of the firms that we see doing it today are white-collar firms. So the tech firms have been leading on this, but we're also seeing it in finance, marketing, design, etc. It's not only those firms. We have healthcare firms in our trials. We have restaurants. We have retailers. It's rooted in flexibility. It's rooted in your ability to have your employees work a certain amount of hours and then have them be more productive and have them have more belonging. That's important regardless of where you work, whether it be a warehouse or a shop or at a home office. Some organizations ditched this concept because it didn't work out for them. Alter Agents, a market research company based in Los Angeles, California, is one of those. I had been reading about the four-day workweek and thought we should try to give it a go. And we told everybody at the company we were going to run this program for 10 weeks. And at the end of the 10 weeks, we would survey them again and look at other metrics and decide if this was something that we could actually sustainably do. Everybody got to pick the day of the week that they were off. That's how we sustained it over the course of the 10 weeks. What happened after 10 weeks was that our most valuable metrics, which were employee health, mental health, had declined in our pre-post survey. There are a lot of reasons for that, but ultimately the goal was to make our employees' lives easier and we were making them more complicated. I think the risk of the four-day workweek is around coordination. You've got to be very attentive to coordination of when people are working and when they aren't so you can get customer needs met. If you just implement a four-day workweek and it damages customer relationships, that's pretty bad. If we look at overall across all employees, those who work four days a week, 28% are engaged, five days a week, 32% are engaged, a little bit higher level of engagement for people who are on site or work five days per week and 30% engagement for those who work six days per week. The big difference though is when you look at people who are actively disengaged, so people who are really working against their organization or they really hate, you can just say they hate their jobs, there 15% of those who have a four-day workweek are actively disengaged compared to 17% with five days and 21% the highest for those with six days. So the four days seem to result in less people hating their jobs, but it doesn't necessarily result in people being highly engaged in their work. Chick-fil-a in Florida, Miami, Florida, I believe, and the owner operator, the franchisee, has given employees the option of working a three-day workweek. Justin Lindsey is the brain behind this. He compressed 40 hours into three days. I came up with the three-day workweek concept through really just trying to look for ways to lead with generosity for my team, trying to find ways to care for my team and using scheduling as one of those, taking out the guesswork and schedules so they would know their schedules in perpetuity. The biggest thing that we saw was a really big boost in morale and positivity in the workplace just because of the fact that they were coming in a lot more refreshed than what they had been previously when they were working, you know, a long five-day week. Weekends in particular were something that really started to notice a large increase in productivity because previously they worked every single Saturday. I think it's one anecdote of what a manager listening to his or her employees and thinking about the business at the same time and meeting both objectives at the same time. So if productivity isn't hampered, if customer needs aren't hampered and it results in higher well-being for those employees, then I think it's a creative solution. There are people who prefer that. I won't deny that. And people have long commutes or people who have to share child care with a partner and so forth. Those kinds of schedules can be very appealing, but I think they're not healthy for people. Several countries are touting the idea of implementing a four-day workweek. In 2021, Japan proposed a four-day workweek in its annual economic policy guidelines. This week, the United Arab Emirates announced a plan to transition to a four-and-a-half-day work week starting in January. In 2021, the United Arab Emirates became the first country to nationalize a workweek shorter than five days, setting a cap at four-and-a-half days. The four-day workweek is not a foreign concept even in the work-obsessed United States. In the 1950s, Richard Nixon, then vice president, predicted a four-day workweek and fuller family life for Americans in the, quote, not-too-distant future. Nixon's prediction has yet to come true. A Southern California congressman has introduced legislation that would change the workweek for most Americans from 40 hours down to 32 hours. Mark Takano, a Democratic congressman representing California, made headlines when he introduced legislation to reduce the standard workweek from 40 to 32 hours. There's a lot of evidence that people are interested in a greater work-life balance. They're interested in spending more time with their families. They're interested in being able to contribute more to their communities. They're interested in, I think, greater mental health, better health outcomes for people who are not overly stressed with their work obligations. I think this is a conversation that could gain currency and could gain momentum very quickly. He's planting a flag, and he's saying this is where we need to go. I think there are many lawmakers who understand, yes, this is where we need to go. People are built differently. And some people want to work 40 hours. Some people want to work 50 hours. Some people want to work a little bit on weekends. So if you put one policy in place that limits people, it could cause more stress because people feel that they can't get the work done that they want to get done because they're limited in terms of how long they can work. So that's where I think it can become problematic. I am a proponent of flexible work. I am a proponent of four-day workweek. I believe that you don't have to tell someone how many hours they need to work in the day to do their job properly. The future of work is one in which employees are going to demand and that workforces will have to deliver more flexible work. And more flexible work will ultimately mean five-day workweeks become obsolete and that companies, states, federal and local governments will have to change their systems and will have to change the way they look at how long employees work and what productivity actually means.