Why You Want Your Staff to Work Shorter Hours

Remember when shops used to be closed on Sundays? Now we see it as an inconvenience when retailers take the day off. 

Up until the 1930s in Britain, factory workers regularly used to work Saturday mornings as well as five days a week. That’s why football matches are held on Saturday afternoons. 

Further back, it was car tycoon Henry Ford who introduced the five-day work week for his automobile workers back in 1926, introducing the concept of what the French still charmingly call “le week-end”. 

The truth is that the working week has always been a construct.

Now there is a push globally to have a four-day working week – compressing the same number of hours into four days as opposed to five but on the same pay. 

Here in Britain, the new Labour government has proposed making a four-day work week an option for workers unless a business strenuously objects. 

But given the number one priority for growing GDP is increased productivity, don’t shorter hours put a brake on this?

Brigid Schulte, a former award-winning Washington Post journalist and author of the new book Over Work, says not. In fact, says Schulte, as we move into an age when artificial intelligence does a lot of the grunt work, CEOs need their employees to be fresher and more creative – not just burnt-out husks continually in the office. 

Shorter working hours help stamp out “presenteeism” – when somebody is in the office but not actually doing much – and are in fact a “an excellence mission in disguise”, Schulte argues. 

Schulte says: “When you value long hours or overwork, you conflate long hours with hard work. We conflate long hours with excellence. Look at the superhuman hours people work in medicine or finance, for example. When you have cultures that value excessive hours, you end up creating cultures of waste and what I call ‘stupid work’ when you burn out.”

According to Schulte, people who work long hours can see their IQ drop by 13 points because they can only see the problem right in front of them – they cannot think laterally, which is just what you don’t want if staff are employed to be creative or think strategically. 

Between 2015 and 2019, Iceland trialled a four-day working week programme where workers cut the number of hours they worked from a standard 40-hour work week to 35 hours but kept the same pay.

The result was that productivity actually increased in most workplaces, employees organised their time more efficiently, and workforces reported less stress, improved wellbeing and felt more valued.

So much so that 86% of the country’s workforce now either work shorter hours or have the right to do so.

Schulte says: “When I talk to business leaders, they cannot compute that there is a better way to work just because it’s not the way they work. But if you look at those CEOs, many of them are men and many of them do not have caring responsibilities.”

Working shorter hours means that staff are more engaged in what they output and are focused on creating value, not just staying late for the sake of it, says the author.

So, what can CEOs who grasp the concept that a shorter working week actually helps their business implement this change?

3 ways CEOs can encourage a new work culture

#1 - Be open to different ways to do work

When you look at the history of work, it has been organised in many different ways. Take your blinders off. Stop being so stuck in the status quo – work is changing. 

#2 - Follow the data, not your gut

Compressing the five-day work week into four days or even cutting the number of hours your employees work each week for the same pay may seem counter-instinctual but has been proven to pay off.

When it comes to new ways of thinking about your workforce, follow the data, not your gut instinct. 

However, innovation in the workplace needs your leadership as CEO. These workplace innovations depend on leadership mindset. It’s up to you to champion change.

#3 - Don’t go in for wellbeing-washing

Embracing the post-AI workplace, where we all have to be knowledge workers, goes further than organising a weekly yoga session in the canteen. 

First, Generation Z workers are more sceptical about corporate life than their parents and see themselves as the talent which needs to be wooed rather than vice-versa. They’re more vocal about wanting a work/life balance. If you want to keep them on board, you need to walk the walk, not just go in for “wellbeing washing”.  

Partly, companies have to be seen to be a force for good in society. Today’s tech bros are mostly not philanthropists in the vein of Dale Carnegie or Nelson Rockefeller.

Schulte says: “Companies have enormous power to do good or ill. Rather than be obsessed with quarterly earnings reports and engorging shareholders, it’s time they started to think about social responsibility again and not increasing economic inequality and stoking social unrest.”

The shocking truth is that 44% of the American workforce is low wage, while CEOs salaries have grown exponentially: the average salary of an S&P 500 CEO is nearly 200x the average wage of a US worker, compared to just 15x in 1965.

Says Schulte: “An awful lot of companies have a reputation for being a churn ‘n’ burn culture. Don’t sell young people a bill of goods. Don’t promise them a job for life and then fire them when it’s convenient. There’s a moral injury when a company says one thing and does another.”

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