Alex Soojung-Kim Pang's Blog, page 2

United Auto Workers strike for a 4-day week

The United Auto Workers has gone on strike against all three of the big automakers, and one of their demands is a 4-day week.

Regardless of whether it succeeds or not, the fact that the UAW has included the 4-day week in its demands is itself a game changer. In 2019, the AFL-CIO talked about a 4-day week in a report on the future of labor; it looks like the future is now.

If they win the concession, I see two big impacts.

First, the UAW helps set the agenda for the entire labor movement; even in non-unionized businesses they influence how American workers and business owners think about labor. So it would help move the 4-day week up the adoption curve, and turn it from an early adopter move for companies that want to stand out in their industry, to a mainstream aspiration for every worker and business owner.

Second, it would re-establish the idea that the benefits of automation and technological innovation should be shared with workers in the form of living wages and more free time, not just converted into higher stock dividends and CEO bonuses. Given how many jobs and industries could be upended by AI in the next few years, the idea that we should use innovation to make work better, rather than use it to destroy jobs (and thus communities, family stability, faith in the American system), would be a huge turnaround in our thinking.

A 4-day week chatbot

I’ve been experimenting a lot with ChatGPT recently, and among other things have been playing around with ways of making use of my vast array of research notes, podcast transcripts, etc.

This is a chatbot powered by Dante AI that I’ve trained on my book Shorter, my talks, interviews, and other public material. It probably won’t be able to answer questions about how to implement a 4-day week in your own company, or how to deal with various HR or scheduling issues, unless you write an absolutely enormous prompt; and it’s subject to the same issues around hallucination, etc., that any AI-driven chatbot has.

With that caveat, feel free to check it out!

“Rethink Your Employee Value Proposition” and the 4-day week

In the January 2023 Harvard Business Review, Amy Edmonson and Mark Mortensen make the case for thinking more holistically and long-term about compensation and retaining talent.

It’s a good article, though anyone who knows the literature on meaning and work, or the ways a higher salary disincentives and disillusions people, will find it makes sense because its evidence is pretty familiar. To me, though, what’s really striking about the piece is how much their case aligns with the case for a 4-day week.

Edmonson and Mortensen write:

The Great Resignation and a highly competitive labor market have made attracting and retaining talent a major challenge for employers. To meet it, many are following a basic strategy: Ask people what they want and try to give it to them.

Temptingly simple as this response is, it can be a trap. It tends to focus discussions on the material aspects of jobs that are uppermost in employees’ and recruits’ minds at the moment. In the past the foremost issue was often pay, but most recently it has been flexibility — notably, remote and hybrid work. And while material offerings are the easiest levers to pull (you can decide to give a bonus tomorrow) and are immediately appreciated, they’re easy for competitors to imitate, and their impact on employee retention is the least enduring. An overreliance on them can set up a race to the bottom as employers strive to outbid one another for talent.

There’s a much better approach-one that improves hiring and retention and shifts the focus of leaders and workers alike from what they want in the moment to what they need to build a thriving and sustainable future for the organization and for themselves. It’s designing and implementing an employee value proposition — a system composed of four interrelated factors.

So far, makes total sense, though nothing more perfectly captures the world-view of the Harvard Business Review and its ubermensch readership than a description of bidding wars as a “race to the bottom.” (As a friend of mine— and an early employee at Google— put it, it’s surprisingly easy to say “It’s not about the money” when you’re enjoying the view from the deck of your Tahoe vacation home.)

Anyway, on to the four factors.

Material offerings include compensation, physical office space, location, commuting subsidies, computer equipment, flexibility, schedules, and perks.

Opportunities to develop and grow comprise all the ways an organization helps employees acquire new skills and become more valuable in the labor market — for instance, by assigning them new roles, putting them through job rotations, offering them training, and promoting them.

Connection and community are the benefits that come from being part of a larger group. They include being appreciated and valued for who you are, a sense of mutual accountability, and social relationships. Their foundation is an energizing culture that allows people to express themselves candidly and engenders a sense of belonging.

Meaning and purpose are the organization’s aspirational reasons for existing. They align with employees’ desire to improve local and global society. They’re the answer to the core question of why employees do the work they do.

Here’s the thing: companies can boost all of these— at once, at essentially no cost— by offering companies a 4-day week.

You might not think of “more time” as a material offering, but the move to a 4-day week benefits many workers financially. They have more time to shop and cook, so they eat out less— which means they’re spending less on food, and probably generally eating healthier, which has longer-term benefits. They often are commuting less frequently (or were before the pandemic). And if you’re a parent, a 4-day week can be a 20% reduction in your child care bill— which in many places is a pretty serious chunk of money. So a 4-day week isn’t just a theoretical pay rise, in the sense that you’re getting paid the same amount to be in the office fewer hours (though you’re doing the same amount of work, so it’s also not a raise). It creates a real rise in your disposable income.

A 4-day week also opens new professional development opportunities. For some firms, “Free Fridays” are a time for people to study new programming languages, or take a class, or work toward a professional certification. At the very least, having more time for life admin and recovery makes you better able to do your job.

Trialing a 4-day week fosters connection and community. It’s a collective challenge that you solve together. You have to communicate a lot in order to manage the tasks involved in doing five days’ work in four. Everybody has to share the burden in order to share the benefits.

Finally, moving to a 4-day week can create a deeper sense of meaning and purpose at work. Whether it’s a founder making a company more sustainable for her employees, or employees working together to achieve a huge goal that many of them would have imagined was impossible, or everybody working together to create an environment in which they can do what they love for decades rather than years, the pursuit of the 4-day week open up opportunities to make work more meaningful, and to invest even small improvements in how you work with a purpose more tangible than “creating shareholder value.”

As Charlotte Lockhart likes to say, the 4-day week is the only employee benefit that employees themselves create. That’s not a criticism of the 4-day week: as Edmondson and Mortensen argue, it’s important that people be able to find meaning, community, opportunity, and material benefit at work. Creating a workplace and working conditions that allow people to create those benefits together not only makes for an extremely attractive workplace; it makes those benefits even more valuable.

The Right to be Lazy

There’s a new edition of the late 19th-century classic The Right to Be Lazy, by socialist Paul Lafargue, and critic Lily Meyer writes about it in The Atlantic. Lafargue was one of the first to observe that shorter shifts led to an increase in factory productivity. Never heard of the book? There’s a reason for that: “In a preface, the critic Lucy Sante notes that The Right to Be Lazy, though profoundly influential in the late 19th century, is little known today precisely because of its entertaining and approachable nature: It is ‘seldom mentioned in Marxist theoretical literature,’ she writes, ‘because as a populist tract it is refreshingly free of theory.'”

Another observation that struck me:

A machine cannot enjoy its time off. We can, although productivity culture tells us otherwise. All too often, life seems to contain little but working and recuperating from work. Lafargue reminds contemporary readers that our time need not be so binary. Our leisure activities don’t need to burn through our paychecks or turn into second careers. They can be frivolous, exploratory, solitary, useless. In machine time, not working means turning off. In human time, not working can mean anything at all.

Benjamin Franklin on the 4-hour day

From Benjamin Franklin, “On Luxury, Idleness, and Industry,” in The Life of Benjamin Franklin (Auburn: Derby and Miller, 1852), p. 292:

“It has been computed by some political arithmetician, that if every Man and Woman would work for four Hours each Day on something useful, that Labour would produce sufficient to procure all the Necessaries and Comforts of Life; want and misery would be banished out of the world, and the rest of the twenty-four hours might be leisure and pleasure.”

Compressed weeks, employee morale, and work-life balance: Evidence from Sharjah, UAE

In January 2022, the United Arab Emirates officially adopted a 4.5-day week for its public sector and schools. (I wrote about the change here.) Private-sector companies were not required to change as well, but apparently a fair number have done so, to suit the schedules of parents, and because government offices are closed on Friday afternoons.

Sharjah moved straight to a 4-day week, and six months later reported that traffic accidents were down 40%, and surveys reported that employee productivity had gone up. One of the companies in Sharjah that changed its working hours to follow the government was the Sharjah National Oil Corporation (SNOC). Employees there were given the option of continuing to work a regular workweek, or to do a compressed week of four 10-hour days, or four 9-hour days and a 4-hour Friday.

Recently, two SNOC executives, Fatima Muhammad Shafique and Mohammed Al Haddi, wrote about the impact of compressed on employee morale and work-life balance. From the abstract:

Since UAE has adopted a shorter workweek since the new year -2022, to align with global markets, many organizations have had to implement measures to adhere to this change. Sharjah National Oil Corporation has decided to provide their employees with multiples flexible weekend options to choose based on their convenience. A survey was conducted on the options provided to employees, for their feedback and effectiveness of this new change.

The employees had been provided with 3 flexible weekend options containing all details regarding working hours, work schedule, effect on leave entitlement etc. These options were circulated to all employees, and a meeting was conducted to address any questions on the options provided. Employees adopted the new options and a survey was conducted to evaluate the Effectiveness of the new weekend policy and its impact on business and team performance after the 3-month mark….

87% of employees have agreed that there has been no negative impact on their “personal” work productivity and 74% of employees have agreed there is no negative impact on “team” productivity due to the weekend change. Only 7% of employees agreed that the new weekend policy caused disruptions in day-to-day communications with colleagues and 6% agreed there was a negative effect on communication with vendors and other business entities.

Overall majority of employees have been positively impacted with the changes and agreed that the flexible options have provided them with more work life balance and has not impacted their work productivity.

 

Retirement and the 4 day week

Part of the logic of the 4-day week is that it can help people avoid burnout, and make jobs for which they’re highly trained and emotionally invested more sustainable— and hence make it possible to do have longer, more fulfilling careers. In many professions today you have to put yourself at risk of burnout. Indeed, I have a hard time thinking of professions that people enter assuming they can spend a lifetime doing it, given current working conditions. Some, like the military and law enforcement, have always been mainly professions for the young; but law, teaching, medicine, nursing, engineering, management, even the ministry used to be professions in which you could imagine a long career, but which all now suffer from big challenges with burnout.

The Times recently had an article, inspired in part by the Great Resignation, arguing that “early retirement [is] driving inflation and harming growth:”

Early retirement is stoking inflation and damaging growth while adding pressure to already strained public services, a report into Britain’s “missing” workers has said.

It’s honestly too early to know what real impact the 4-day week has on retirement, but it’s absolutely the case that it’s attractive to some people as an antidote to burnout, and a tool for helping people continue to do great work as they age, become parents, and go through other big changes.

 

Korean article about the 4-day week

For those who speak (or just understand) Korean, this new piece on TBS is worth watching:

Juliet Schor on the 4-day week: Companies “took this opportunity to totally rethink how they were doing things”

Juliet Schor talked to Michelle Peng in Time Magazine about the 4-day week trials, and the results she and her team at Boston College are seeing. Of course there are the usual gains in productivity, happiness, etc., but there’s also this important nugget:

one CEO told us that they’ve had a very good experience, but it’s really been less about the time and the number of days in the office than about the fact that they took this opportunity to totally rethink how they were doing things. Quite a few companies talk about that—the opportunity to look anew at how they spend their time and priorities and figuring out what’s creating value for the organization.

Forbes on the global burnout epidemic

Edward Siegel writes in Forbes about a set of surveys that reveal the extent of burnout in workplaces worldwide:

New surveys underscore an essential reality about today’s workplace and workforce: Burnout is an equal-opportunity international crisis that strikes companies, organizations, and the people who work for, manage or own them.

For businesses, burnout can impact productivity, the bottom line and the ability to make the best and timely decisions when confronted by a disaster, scandal or other emergency.

Here are the highlights:

A global Edelman Data and Intelligence survey for Microsoft “found that almost 50% of employees and 53% of managers said they were burned out at work.”
A McKinsey & Company survey in Asia “found that almost one in three employees… were experiencing symptoms of burnout.”
In the United States, Capital One Insights Center finds that “48% of small business owners said they had experienced burnout in the past month.”

Not terribly surprising, perhaps, but still depressing all the same.