By YOU DON’T REALLY KNOW what a four-day work week is like until you actually work one.
I know how it is because I found myself working one (more on that shortly) back near the beginning of my career. And you quickly learn this: once you work a four-day work week, you NEVER want to go back to a five-day schedule.
It’s an experience I’ve never forgotten.
People have been talking about four-day work weeks for a long time, but the discussion has gotten more focused the last few years. That’s because so many work norms were changed due to the ways that work suddenly changed, courtesy of the Covid-driven lockdown.
Back in September 2021, the Harvard Business Review published A Guide to Implementing the 4-Day Workweek. They wrote then what a lot more people are saying now:
“Workplace norms have fundamentally shifted over the last year and a half. Today we find ourselves in a liminal period: We now have the chance to remake our models of work before things go back to the way they were — and that’s an opportunity leaders must not squander. While no change comes easily, leaders willing to embrace models like the four-day workweek will find the experimentation well worth the effort.“
The opportunity to remake work
Well, we have sort of squandered the opportunity to remake work, and I was reminded of that this week while reading what Josh Bersin, the well-known technology analyst and speaker had to say in his article titled The Four-Day Work Week: An Idea Whose Time Has Come over on JoshBersin.com:
“We just completed a large study of the 4-day work week and the results are clear. Under the right conditions it really works. And the results are very positive: improvements in employee health and well-being, increases in productivity, and overall improvement in revenue, profit, and customer service.
Wait a minute. Are you actually saying that real ‘work-time reduction’ (WTR), without reducing pay, actually helps companies make more money?
The answer is yes. When implemented well, work-time reduction (many versions: 6-hour workdays, half-day Fridays, 9-day fortnights) encourages companies to be more efficient, gives people a more flexible and fulfilling life, and forces the company to focus.”
He also adds this important point:
“As our research points out, the ‘five-day week’ is an artificial construct we’ve been living with for 100 years. Now that remote work, flexible work, and AI-powered scheduling systems are available, we don’t have to operate in this traditional work week fashion anymore.”
Younger workers are voting their preferences
It’s clear that Josh Bersin believes we shouldn’t squander the opportunity to remake work, but a lot of others besides Josh have been focusing on the four-day work week as well. A Google search on the term “four-day work-week” brings up a lot of insights on it. Here are a few examples:
- The realities of the four-day workweek frequently get overlooked in the four-day work week debate, and a BBC Worklife article from March 2022 dug into how and why that happens.
- Can the U.S. embrace a four-day workweek? is a good question asked by the World Economic Forum, and the general consensus back in August 2022 was that ” a four-day week has a slim chance of becoming standard,” and,
- What Leaders Need to Know Before Trying a 4-Day Workweek was an interesting May 2022 article in HBR that tried to zero in on the realities of the four-day approach, including things like “reducing working hours does not necessarily reduce work.”
If nothing else, these three articles get into just a few of the many issues that pop up in the four-day work week debate.
But the changing generations of workers seems to have focused the discussion, leading Josh Bersin to point out that:
“Younger workers, many of whom had difficult work experiences during the pandemic, are voting with their preferences. Just look at major memes like ‘act your wage’ or ‘lazy girl jobs’ or ‘quiet quitting’ or ‘work boreout.”’These are not just social media memes: they are the voices of millions of workers telling employers that they simply do not and will not abide by traditional work norms.”
As with all things, Josh has research to back up his argument, both a four-day work pilot in the UK and a study his own company did with the Worktime Reduction Center of Excellence.
Here’s one nugget from The Josh Bersin Company research:
“If squeezing 5 days of work into 4 is a concern for leadership, one consideration is Parkinson’s Law, which states, ‘Work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion.’ In other words, employees will fill the time they have to complete tasks. If we reduce the time available, we surprise ourselves with how much we’re able to complete. And removing excess time spent on administrative or ‘unproductive’ tasks frees up tangible hours to put back into quality, productive work.”
A PERSONAL NOTE: I worked a four-day week back on my first professional job as an assistant news editor at the late, great Los Angeles Herald Examiner. That was a long time ago (the HerEx closed in 1989), but that schedule came about because of a workload quirk rather than any managerial decision about the merits of a four-day work week.
Some daily newspapers produced eight (8) issues a week back then – seven daily issues and an early Sunday edition that was edited on Friday and sold Saturday on newsstands. That meant eight copy desk shifts a week, with one set of editors working Tuesday-Friday, and another set working Friday-Monday. Both sets of editors overlapped on Friday when one group worked on the Saturday paper and another the early Sunday edition.
I was on a Tuesday-Friday shift and generally started around 3 pm and worked until 1-1:30 am. The daily issue went to press at midnight, but the copy desk had to stay and look at the first newspapers off the press and make any corrections as needed.
This all mattered a lot when newspapers mattered a lot. That’s not the case anymore.
But getting back to the four-day work week I had then, it was a great shift. To this day I tell people it was the greatest work schedule of my life because I always had a three-day weekend. The “other” copy desk crew had a less desirable schedule — their days off were Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday — but three days off every week was a pretty sweet deal for them too.
We aren’t going back to the 2019 ways of work
HERE’S MY TAKE: Josh Bersin surely knows a lot more about this than I do, but if we learned anything from the way work changed during the lockdown, it’s that many work conventions we just blindly accepted weren’t all that good for maximizing productivity and building a better workforce.
Both remote and hybrid — two lockdown-driven changes to the way many people work — were suddenly reasonable options for companies that had resisted such changes for a long time.
There’s no going back to way work was in 2019. Some organizations are pushing for that, of course, but the genie is out of the bottle now, and really, there’s no going back. Plus, as Josh Bersin notes, Artificial Intelligence is now an issue and AI will have a say in this way-we-work debate as well.
Here’s what Josh says about that:
“While I know most of you are wincing at this topic, I want to remind you that AI and automation will to force us to redesign almost every job in business. And as our Dynamic Organization research points out, work redesign is all about helping people work at the ‘top of their license,’ clearly assigning accountability, and relentlessly focusing on the outcome or responsibility at hand. Nowhere in the Principles of Organization Design do we mandate that people show up Monday at 8 and leave work Friday at 5.”
Yes, the four-day work week is an idea whose time has come and now up for debate along with remote, hybrid, and sorts of other non-traditional ways of work. Josh Bersin makes it sound like it is right around the corner, but I suspect it’s a little further away than that, especially with AI entering the picture.
AS JOSH ALSO POINTS OUT, we need to consider “the voices of millions of workers telling employers that they simply do not and will not abide by traditional work norms.”
Better buckle up, because it looks like the four-day work week debate may be a pretty bumpy ride.
