We worship overwork and its pervasiveness makes it seem inevitable. People who leave office early or use flexible timing options are termed slackers by their colleagues. So, working for only four days a week and being more productive and creative seems counter intuitive and challenges all our conventional notions of work and our workweek. In his book Shorter, Dr. Alex Soojung-Kim Pang makes an argument for a shorter workweek - a 4-day workweek.
2. Our worship of overwork creates problems of recruitment, retention, work-
life balance, career and financial stability and burnout. The limited success
of programs for workplace wellness and flexible work, added to the
economic and technological forces that drive overwork, the number of
voices that sing its praises and its sheer overwhelming pervasiveness all
contribute to the sense that long hours are natural and inevitable.
3. “the link between time and productivity was blurry. The company should not
try to maximize working hours but instead aim to promote more efficient
work, to remind workers of what kind of people we are and what kind of
work we are doing.”
4. Why do we take forty-hour week for granted?
The idea of ‘eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we
will” had been the rallying cry for unions since the nineteenth century.
The first labor laws establishing forty-hour workweek were passed in Europe
in the late 1800s.
But why couldn’t the workweek be different today?
5. Most companies that have a four-day week have these three qualities.
First they are mostly small – medium size businesses, where significant
cultural and management changes are easier to implement.
Second, almost all are still led by their founders – have power to make big
changes.
Third, many companies already trade on reputations for being creative and
innovative places and can sell experiments in shorter hours as yet another
expression of these qualities.
6. Moving to a shorter workweek requires that firms rethink everything about
how they operate, who they hire, how they incentivize, how they divide
labor and authority, how they measure performance and how they distribute
the benefits of new technology and higher productivity.
Shortening working hours isn’t about working less. Its about working better.
7. Experiments with shorter workweek hours begin at the top. Their decision is
informed by their own experiences with highly competitive cultures, long
hours and sometimes burnout.
They are recovering workaholics.
8. No one denies that for young workers, period of hard work can build
confidence and professional identity, strengthen group ties, and accelerate
learning, but chronic overwork carries health hazards, increases burnout
and eventually makes it harder to do good work.
9. In creative and knowledge intensive industries, work is never done, no
matter how many hours you put in. Overwork isn’t a sustainable source of
competitive advantage.
10. External pressures also push companies to experiment with four-day week.
For many, recruitment and retention is the big driver for adopting a four-day
workweek.
11. While they risk being overworked in the short-term by more conventional
companies, founders are betting that more-focused, limited hours will help
their companies be more productive and more innovative in the long-term.
12. Disbelief and skepticism are actually pretty common among employees
when they first hear the news that their companies are going to trial a four-
day workweek.
13. There are important differences between how flexible work and shorter
workweeks.
Flexible hours put the burden of scheduling and coordinating with
colleagues, who are working to different schedules, squarely on the
individual. Flexible work policies do little to counter presenteeism or the
perception amongst colleagues that people who leave early aren’t pulling
their weight.
Shorter hours, in contrast, succeed through company wide and normative
changes.
14. Companies may create formal part-time of flexible work tracks, only to find
that people don’t use them. That’s because of the ‘flexibility stigma’
Flexible workers risk being branded as less ambitious and unreliable during
crunch times, or are seen as creating extra work for others.
They are likely to get lower profile projects, get promoted more slowly, get
smaller raises and ultimately more likely to leave their jobs.
The flexibility stigma affects women more strongly than men. Women are
more likely to need flexibility.
15. Moving to a four-day workweek Ideate Stage
- Share the idea internally
- Decide on your time reductions. The choice of day comes down to what’s
your least productive day? what day off would have the biggest positive
impact?
- Develop an inclusive planning process
- Create scenarios and contingency plans
- Start a trial period and start date
- Set clear aims
- Recognize that the trial is not the end.
16. Few people bother to think about how to use tools smarter because they
have little motivation to do so. In most businesses, the value created by
efficiencies are captured by owners, not workers.
Under these circumstances, most of us would prefer to match the tasks we
have to the time we have to do them, rather than learn to do them faster,
work more effectively and risk increasing our workloads.
17. Redesigning the workday also requires changing company culture to
respect everyone's attention and to treat focus and concentration as social
resources, not just personal ones.
18. Redesigning meetings : Make Meetings Shorter
- Most meetings are scheduled for a hour without really thinking about it. Be
deliberate about it, cap at twenty or thirty minutes. Hold walking or
standing meetings.
- Invite fewer people – ask – who is really necessary to solve that problem.
- Rather than using meetings to discuss how they might solve a problem, try
solving the problem first then share the solutions with others.
19. Redesigning meetings : Make Meetings More Focused
Eliminate informal meetings ‘Got a minute?’
These interruptions never end up being just a minute, and by the time you
get back to your task, it’s forty minutes later.
20. Redesigning meetings : Use technology to enforce rules
Tools that signal when meeting time is up, or when the group has only a few
minutes left.
Other tips
- Hold meetings with a purpose. Insist on an agenda.
- Restrict meetings to specific period of the day.
21. Once meetings have been shortened, the next step is to consolidate the
workday, create larger reserves of time during which people can work
without distraction. Business writers and productivity experts have long
argued that we do better work and get more done, if we prioritize quality
over quantity of time.
22. At companies where focus is critical for productivity, they block off times for
serious work. e.g. Pomodoro sessions, twenty-five minutes periods of
intensive sprints followed by a five minute rest.
23. Front load important work at the beginning of the day, people have more
energy and capacity to focus in the mornings than in the afternoon.
But businesses organize the working day with the tacit assumption that our
energy and attention levels don’t vary through the day and that each hour is
essentially interchangeable. It’s an approach to work time that borrows
from the factory, where workers would be expected to do the same job for
an entire shift.
24. It’s necessary to encourage workers to both take greater control over their
time and treat their colleagues’ time as just as valuable as their own.
25. Don’t say ‘Goodbye, see you tomorrow’ before you leave. You just leave.
Studies of social life in Western countries reveal that especially in open
offices, people are likely to notice and judge people who leave early.
26. Use technology to reduce distractions.
Noise canceling headphones give people privacy and signal colleagues
that they shouldn’t be disturbed.
Workers who turned off email stay on tasks longer, were able to focus more
and multitasked or self-distracted.
However, emphasis on increased productivity and focus shouldn’t come at
the expense of sociability.
27. Giving people more control over the physical design of their workplaces
increases their job satisfaction and productivity.
People value things that they build more than things they don’t.
28. One of the biggest obstacles to moving to four days is the belief that clients
would not stand for it.
Most leaders take pains to explain to clients why they’re trying shortened
hours, what they expect to get out of it and what features of the relationship
are not changing.
29. Many professionals are socialized to this false belief that our clients expect
us to get back within five minutes, otherwise they’re going to leave us.
When working long hours is a mark of seriousness, cutting back risks making
you look like a dilettante.
But most clients are concerned about results, not the hours you put in.
30. Moving to a shorter workweek closes these gaps. It eliminates flexibility
stigma and reduces the need for career breaks. By giving everyone more
time off, it removes the suspicion and resentment that otherwise attaches to
leaving early. Its egalitarian nature means that people don’t feel obliged to
put in extra hours to make up for the ‘gift’ of flexible work.
31. As a leader, you have to move away from thinking in terms of getting the
most out of people and think in terms of getting the most value out of
people.
32. Implementing a shorter work week also requires leaders to think more
clearly about both their own and their company’s priorities and know where
the company should go.
At the daily level, this means not letting their inboxes take control of their
day and not let other people’s priorities determine theirs. At the company
level, this means putting good work first, being clear about growth and
revenue goals and not demanding long hours in pursuit of a dream of
market dominance, an IPO or status as a billion dollar valuation.
33. In typical companies, long-term thinking is something that happens once of
twice a year, often in a retreat or a formal planning process.
But one should ‘take nights and weekends to strategize and do things that
don’t have immediate ROI’
Reflect and think about new products and pay attention to the weak signals
that can indicate a downturn in the market or shift in consumer preferences.
34. Shorter workweek paradigm
1. Leaders define problems, everyone else solves them.
2. focused hours beat long hours (time is valuable, not all hours are equally
valuable)
3. Boundaries are good. Acknowledge the value of focus & give people
time to recharge
4. Attention is social. My ability to focus also depends on your willingness to
not interrupt me and vice versa.
5. Efficiency gains belong to workers
6. Build superstructures and not just superpowers. Don’t lean in, organize.
7. Ask questions, then find answers
8. Customers are your allies.
9. Communicate openly and intelligently
10. Never stop evolving
35. Economists worry that ageing countries have to deal with ever-rising welfare
costs and lower levels of national productivity. By delaying retirement and
keeping people healthier, the four-day workweek would help ease pressure
on pensions and lower health care spending.
36. Shorter workweek could have a significant effect on commuting times and
traffic. This can also lead to substantial reductions in carbon emissions and
energy consumption.
37. The four day workweek is more wide spread in Western countries. But a wild
card is China.
In 2018 Chinese Academy of Social Sciences made a proposal to shift the
entire country to a four-day workweek by 2030. This, they believe would
help maintain productivity of an aging population, nudge the economy
toward spending more on services, leisure and tourism. And make it easier
for parents to stay in the workforce.
