Does the 4-day work week lead to more worker satisfaction and productivity?

The Spark

Burnout is such a problem for workers that some employers are considering reducing the length of the workweek.

Nearly one-third (30%) of large US companies are exploring new work schedule shifts such as four-day or four-and-a-half-day workweeks, according to a KPMG survey of CEOs released last week.

The idea to attract and retain talent in a hot job market where many employees feel over-worked and underpaid.

American workers don’t get enough free time and our work has become central to our identities.

Journalist Simone Stolzoff explores why what we do and how much we do for a living has become such a priority in our lives in his book The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life From Work. On The Spark Wednesday, he talked about how our jobs became our identities in many cases and how the four-day work week may help us take back our lives,"We live in a country where the majority of people get their health care through their employment. If you're an immigrant, your ability to stay in this country is often determined based on your employment. There are political reasons or economic reasons. There are cultural reasons why we got here. One of the big ones that I harp on in the book is there has been a precipitous decline in the past three or four decades, and the number of institutions and community groups that once provided great sources of meaning and identity in our lives, things like organized religion or social or neighborhood groups. And with the decline of these institutions, the need for identity, for purpose, for belonging remained. And so the majority of Americans turned to where they spent the majority of their time, which is the workplace. Now we live in a country that loves to treat CEOs like celebrities, we plaster "always do what you love" on the walls of our co-working spaces. It's a country where productivity and self-worth are almost one in the same. And so the question is what is the cost? If you're rising and falling based on your professional accomplishments alone, what gets left out? I think the pandemic was a great emblem of what are some of these costs. For one, that your job might not always be there. If you are deriving identity solely based on your title as an employer at a certain company or your job title, and you lose your job due to a furlough or getting laid off offered to retirement, you might be left wondering what's left. The second is just a matter of expectations. If we're always expecting our jobs to be a dream, if we're always expecting our jobs to be perfect, that creates a lot of room for disappointment. A lot of the rhetoric that we use around do what you love and never work a day in your life or follow your passion, obscures the fact that every line of work has monotony, has tedium in it. And if we have these sky high expectations, we can leave a lot to be desired. And the third, which I think really points to some of the studies that are coming out recently about the four-day workweek is that when we are only investing and giving our best time and our best energy into our work selves, we can neglect other parts of who we are. Certainly we all are more than just workers. We are neighbors and partners and parents and siblings and friends and citizens. And yet so many Americans are giving so much of their time and energy to their jobs that they're leaving little room for anything else."

What does Stolzoff disagrees that not as much can be accomplished in a four-day work week,"It's essentially about our capacity to produce at a higher level. Everyone knows this intuitively. Not all hours in the day are created equally. And when workers are well rested. When workers have been able to fully recharge and invest in their lives outside of work, they tend to be better workers. They tend to be more innovative and creative problem solvers. They tend to be more productive on the whole. This might sound counterintuitive. I think a lot of us have internalized this idea that the more hours you work, the more work that you produce, and the better you do. But, for example, there was one study at Stanford University, studying munition workers, and it found that above working a certain amount of hours, 55 hours in a week, there was no increase in productivity with additional hours worked. And so we might trick ourselves into thinking the more time we're spending working, the more work we're getting done, when in actuality we're robbing ourselves of the rest that we need to recharge and become productive workers. That's sort of the business case. And then there's also the moral case, which is because we are all more than just workers. We need time and energy to invest in things like our families, our relationships, our neighborhoods, our local communities. And I think this reduction in the work week provides a great opportunity for people to invest and derive meaning from things other than just what they do to make money. "

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