Whos Afraid of the Four Day Work Week?
This is the weekend edition of Culture Study  the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen, which you can read about here. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing. If youre a full-time employee, your work week is likely five days (if not more), and spans 40 hours (if not more). You might be paid by the hour, or you might be on salary, but you probably have two days officially off every week (although work might slide into those days) and they probably land on Saturday and Sunday. Now imagine that your salary and benefits stayed the same, your responsibilities at work stayed the same, but everyone at your company only worked four days a week. Think about your current life, and the current make-up of your week, and what you usually have to smush into the weekend. Id plan all the hobbies I am normally too exhausted to plan, Danielle, who works in the insurance industry in Pennsylvania, told me. Id send the baby to daycare for half the day so I could volunteer, and then spend the rest of the day having adventures with him and the dogs, Amelia, who works as an executive secretary, said. Id do more of what I do I do any time I have free time: build something, make something, organize something, Maggie, an administrator in Virginia, explained. Or go for a walk or have a good conversation with someone I love. One woman said shed finally work on that cool article idea thats a little outside my research area, so I shouldnt spend my research days on it, but I cant stop thinking about it. Another person told me hed spend more time doing nothing.  Some thought theyd sleep, and sleep some more, and clean. But many also believed that after a catch-up period, the possibilities for that time would begin to expand: Initially, Id lay on the couch and recover, said Rickie, who lives in a small Wisconsin town. Over time, I would do more activities, and maybe even pursue a hobby. Id love to have the energy to get into photography in a serious way, or to go out and discover new music, or just frivolously explore the larger area where I have lived for the last four years. Maybe I would have the energy to cook not only for myself, but for friends. I would love to have the time to connect with new people, and to meaningfully date. I need to be out in the world to meet people more organically. I want to feel connected.  Others struggle to even conceptualize what an extra day could feel like  or how they could prevent themselves from simply filling it with more work. God I hope I wouldnt work, Gina, who works in operations at a media company, said. I first started talking to people about the four day work week before the pandemic, when a slew of high-profile experiments made it broadly imaginable for the first time. The specifics of implementation vary from company to company, but the basics are the same: you get paid the same amount as you did before, only you work less. And this isnt some start-up, millennial-focused startup fringe benefit: pre-pandemic, one of the most public implementations of the four-day week is at Perpetual Guardian, a very staid, very old-fashioned company that manages trusts in New Zealand. Some Perpetual Guardian workers took off Mondays, some Fridays, others loved a day off in the middle of the work week, but everyone took it, from the newest hires to the most senior managers. The effect was startling: at the end of a two-month trial, productivity had risen 20%  and work-life balance scores rose from 54% to 78%. After making the change permanent, overall revenue went up 6%  and profitability went up 12.5%. Other experiments have yielded similarly astounding results: at Microsoft Japan, productivity went up 40%. A 2019 study of 250 British companies with four-day weeks found that companies had saved an estimated 92 million  and 62% of companies reported that employees took fewer sick and personal days. In April 2020, a month into the pandemic, the social media marketing company Buffer surveyed their employees about their most significant barriers to family or self-care and how the company could eliminate or ease those barriers. Twelve percent wanted more paid time off, 24 percent preferred reduced work hours, and 40 percent wanted to try a four-day workweek. So they launched a four-week pilot program. This 4day workweek period is about well-being, mental health, and placing us as humans and our families first, Buffers CEO, Joel Gascoigne, explained. Its about being able to pick a good time to go and do the groceries, now that its a significantly larger task. Its about parents having more time with kids now that theyre having to take on their education. This isnt about us trying to get the same productivity in fewer days.  And yet productivity did go up: employees felt as productive as during the five-day schedule, if not more so, and employee stress levels improved. And this included developers and engineers: actual coding days went down (3.4 to 2.7 for product; 3.2 to 2.9 for mobile and infrastructure), but productive impact, a.k.a. how much they were actually getting done, increased significantly  and, in the case of infrastructure and mobile, doubled. Buffer opted to extend the trial another six months to see if it was sustainable; in February 2021 the company decided to officially adopt the schedule moving forward. And then theres the very good news coming out of Iceland, which just released the results of a sprawling four year study of more than 2500 employees in different fields whose work weeks were reduced from 40 hours to 35-36. I strongly recommend reading the report in full, because it lays out why this scenario is not a case of socialistic European nation does something that the United States never would. But if you dont have time for an 82-page report, the highlights are as follows: Iceland has a strong social safety net, with low income inequality, significant parental leave, and a robust universal health care. But the country lags far behind other Nordic countries in productivity  even though Icelanders work significantly more hours a week. For its survey of hours devoted to leisure and personal care, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) ranked Iceland 34th out of 38 countries. Icelanders work-life balance was shit  and for seemingly no reason. As the report puts it:  Worn down by long hours spent at work, the Icelandic workforce is often fatigued, which takes a toll on its productivity. In a vicious circle, this lower productivity ends up necessitating longer working days to make up the lost output, lowering per-hour productivity even further. This is the principle at the heart of the four day week: working less can actually mean working better. That idea is particularly difficult for Americans, who fetishize long hours for many ideologically tangled reasons, to understand. Its true in knowledge work, its true in medical fields, its true in construction. Youre just a better worker  a safer worker, a more creative worker, a more astute and alert worker  when youre not exhausted. Employees understand this on a cellular level, even if they cant always articulate it. In Iceland, that understanding was argued through the power of the union representing governmental employees, which began pushing for a reduced week in the 2010s. In 2016, the government agreed to trials of a reduced week to 35-36 hours, starting first with employees in child protection services  who, as in many countries, experienced high levels of stress  and eventually expanded to include the Icelandic versions of daycare and preschool, maintenance crews, the mayors office, construction, and people providing in-home care. It moved from an original focus in Reykjavk to the whole of the country, including employees working irregular shift hours, like police officers. No ones salary was reduced. The results: no decline in services, but increases in worker happiness and well-being, and decreases in stress. Participants in the program reported finally having the time to have energy for hobbies, exercise, friends, and family. As one worker put it, This [reduction in hours] shows increased respect for the individual. That we are not just machines that just work  all day. Then sleep and get back to work. [But that] we are persons with desires and private lives, families and hobbies.  The success of the trial has led to widescale adoption across the country: when the study was published earlier this month, 86% of Icelands working population either had a reduced work week or the right to one. Thats a stunning stat, but I was also struck by the word that the authors of the report used to describe participants shift in work-life balance: they felt they were achieving something close to harmony. Its a better word, I think, than the phrase work-life balance, which has become so hollowed out of meaning as to feel farcical. (When a company tells you they care about work-life balance, it usually means that they talk about caring about work-life balance in order to rhetorically cover for the fact that those who succeed in the organization require very little of it). Harmony doesnt mean balance. It suggests each part of ones life supporting and complementing the other: youre a better person at work because of the person youre able to be when youre not working, and vice-versa. And that harmony is possible because youre able to nourish the area of life that so many of us have allowed, or been forced, to let wither. Harmony is a beautiful thing. Once found, you cant forget it. Other sounds and experiences feel meager and reedy in comparison. But it takes real work to achieve. When the pandemic hit, I had just finished a draft of a full-length feature on the four day week. Id followed Andrew Barnes, the head of Perpetual Guardian, as he preached the four day gospel to NYU business school grad students, at the annual meeting of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and professors at Harvard Business School. My editors and I decided to table the feature: in those first frantic, terrifying weeks of the pandemic, when millions were losing their jobs, it felt ridiculous to think about working less. I felt helpless. Working, at least for those first months, felt grounding. But that coping strategy could only endure for so long. For those who could still work, we worked and we worked and we worked and our worlds collapsed in on themselves and still, we worked. But something remarkable happened: we had a lot of time to think about why we were working. Some people made the decision to quit their jobs (or refused to take shitty ones); other people (myself included) joined in a veritable bloom of writing about the future and contours of work. For the first time in a long time, the status quo is up for deliberation. And its not just why do we need to be in the office all the time, its why do we need to work the hours we work?  There is nothing natural, after all, about the forty hour work week. Before electricity, the work week would revolve around workable day hours  or, for agrarian workers, the seasons. Electricity extended workable hours, and over the course of the 19th and 20th century, union and guild pushback eventually led to the institution of what we now think of as a the standard 40 hour week. Underwood Archives/Getty Images  In 1937, for example, workers at Woolworths Department store went on strike for a 40 hour week, pictured above, sparking sit-downs in Woolworths across the nation. In 1952, New York sanitation workers alternated between weeks of six days, 48 hours, and seven days, 56 hours. In the picture below, they circle City Hall, advocating for the 40 hour work week  but also advocating, as their signs read, for their own health and longer lives. Again: there is nothing natural about the length of our work week. It has been  and should continue to be  malleable to the needs and health of workers, which is to say, to the needs and health of society at large. If your boss is afraid of the four day work week, what theyre really afraid of is change. Change in the rhythms of work, but also change in the long-held ethos that more work is always better. Theyll say theyre afraid of change in profits or productivity, despite evidence that neither decline. They might even say that they like the idea, but it would never work for them and their scenario. Oftentimes, that reticence is about public perception: working fewer hours is still equated with laziness in some way, or with some other vague notions of radicalism. Andrew Barnes told me, pre-pandemic, that he was aware of more than a dozen companies in America currently experimenting with the four- day week, but none, at least at that point, wanted to go public. (Thats changed somewhat since the pandemic hit, but the vast majority of companies publicly experimenting are small start-ups.) During the reporting for that profile of Barnes and the four day week, I was barred from observing a meeting between him and executive MBA students: no one wanted to be recorded listening to his ideas. At a small meeting of people interested in the four-day week at Harvard Business School, the owner of a small business regaled the room with how its improved his life and his coworkers  but approached me afterwards, deeply worried that Id name his business in print. Theres a largely unspoken shame that accumulates around the worker who, once theyve found their dream job, still feels miserable. But theres also stigma affixed to those who are curious about  or have found  a different way. When I first started researching this piece, my then-editor, whose job is sprawling and incredibly demanding, was enthusiastic. But when I suggested that we could easily implement the four- day work week for our own team, she shook her head and sighed. Theres so many meetings, she said. My editor did what most managers and business owners and workers do when faced with a radical change in the way they do work: the solution feels like it requires so much change, and were already so tired, that we remain paralyzed in the status quo. It may make us feel like shit, but its the shit we know. The authors of the Iceland study repeatedly emphasized that it took time, commitment, and ingenuity for workplaces to figure out how to make the new schedules work. Many strategies were similar to those in Perpetual Guardian and Microsoft Japan: they figured out how to do concentrated work during the hours they were at work, either by reconsidering how they approached meetings, or cutting down on the sort of breaks that had been inserted into the long weeks to make them bearable. Its hard work, reconsidering the status quo, but its not impossible work. And it feels more and more necessary: as much as we attempt to trick our bodies into believing otherwise, we all have a breaking point  as does our economy, and our communities, and the environment at large. All of the problems were facing as a society, were just sticking our heads in the sand and going Im not going to deal with it. Barnes told me. What Im arguing is that its actually less risky to try this than to do nothing.  As a society, weve repeatedly shifted our understanding of the standard work week. Weve shifted  through union force, through governmental edict, through business leadership  when its made sense. When the work could be done in fewer hours, when employees demanded it for their own health, when societies realized the way things are doesnt have to be the way things will be. And now is one of those times. As the managing director of Unilever New Zealand, one of dozens of companies embarking on a four day week, put it earlier this year, We believe the old ways of working are outdated and no longer fit our purpose.  For my next piece, Im writing about predatory or exploitative grad school programs that function as money-makers for their institutions  MAs, MFAs, and various certificates that load students with massive amounts of student debt and limited (if any) career prospects. I tweeted a bit about it here, but if were recruited by or participated in one of these programs, Id love to hear your story. Email me at annehelenpetersen@gmail.com with Grad school in the subject line. If you read this newsletter and value it, consider going to the paid version. From here on out, the weekly Things I Read and Loved, including the Just Trust Me, only go out to Paid Subscribers. One of the perks = weirdly fun/interesting/generative discussion threads, just for subscribers, every week. The other perk: Sidechannel, where theres dedicated space for everything from job searches to an anticipatory rewatch of Ted Lasso  and, of course, a dedicated space to discuss the latest newsletter. If you are a contingent worker or un- or under-employed, just email and Ill give you a free subscription, no questions asked. If youd like to underwrite one of those subscriptions, you can donate one here. If youre reading this in your inbox, you can find a shareable version online here. You can follow me on Twitter here, and Instagram here. Feel free to comment below  and you can always reach me at annehelenpetersen@gmail.com.