Alex Soojung-Kim Pang's Blog, page 3

Bruce Daisley on lessons from the UK 4-day week trial

Bestselling business writer Bruce Daisley has a piece about “5 Things We Learned from the 4-Day Week Trials.” What were those five things?

Firms who implemented the 4 day work week saw no decline in total productivity – but it wasn’t easy
Some firms experimented with having the day off as a ‘gift day’ that was lost if productivity dipped
Interestingly in the US study employees didn’t report that ‘work intensity’ increased
The one thing that did seem to suffer was social time (and team bonding)
The four day project requires continuous buy-in and renewal

As the person who works with lots of those companies, this strikes me as a quite fair and reasonable assessment.

But I also hope that this is just the beginning of the analysis of these trials, what made them succeed, etc.

In five or ten years, it would be awesome if somebody— the dAIsley writerbot, perhaps— looks through this data and sees something totally new!

 

Hutch Games adopts a 4-day week!

London-based mobile games company Hutch just announced on their Web site that after participating in the 4 Day Week Global-organized trial for UK companies, they are making their 4-day week permanent. For background, they’ve been in the news a number of times for the trial, as they’re one of the few companies in an industry that’s traditionally famous (or infamous) for brutally long hours and “crunch.”

I was lucky enough to be able to visit their beautiful office in Shoreditch in June, and meet some of the team.

I’m not surprised that they made it work: they had an engaged CEO, a head of people who was really excellent (they’re interviewed here), and a team that wanted to make it work.

Scrutton Street, where Hutch is located, is where another 4-day week company is located, and just a hundred yards away is a third. A curious little concentration, but it makes doing fieldwork easier!

Nothing is more gratifying that seeing the companies that you’ve helped shepherd through the process succeed. The 4-day week is a lot of fun to write about (obviously), but the responsibility that comes with actually working with companies is immense. It’s a lot of work for them; they put a lot of faith in you, and trust that you have a process that will work for them and that you know what you’re doing. And when it succeeds, it’s really really satisfying.

 

“Slow Down A Little Bit:” Brooklyn USA on the 4-day week

The Brooklyn USA podcast takes a deep dive into the 4-day week.

Historian Benjamin Hunnicutt has called the push for more free time the “forgotten American dream”; but somewhere along the way the pursuit of that happiness was replaced by the idea that work and wealth are ends in themselves. This week, we’re imagining the utopian and dystopian futures of work.

I know there are lots of of podcasts about the 4-day week now, but this is definitely worth a listen.

Financial Times Working It podcast series on the 4-day week

Over the last couple years the Financial Times has run some of the best articles on the 4-day week (as well as columns on the importance of rest in innovation and the value of routines, but I’m highly biased).

This week Emma Jacobs published a long read on the 4-day week trial in the UK, and she and Isabel Berwick have a four-part podcast series on the FT’s Working It:

Part 1, “Rethinking our working hours”
Part 2, “What employees have to say”
Part 3, “What the experts say”

It’s all worth checking out, and from a media analysis standpoint, one thing that’s notable is the this is a series that’s entirely devoid of the “news of the weird” quality that coverage could have a year or two ago. Of course, being in the FT is a signal of seriousness; but now people are writing about the 4-day week the way business or tech writers talk about 5G or the gig economy or supertankers. Another sign that it’s moving from the margins of business.

Talking about the workweek on Newsy

A little while ago I was interviewed about the 4-day week, why the 5-day week exists, and they benefits of working less.

I don’t see an embed for the video, so you’ll just have to click on the link.

“I was also building a completely new frame of reference from the moment I first asked myself whether there might be an alternative to a 5 day week”

British lawyer Emma Haywood has an essay about “The 4 day mindset: Why a 4 day week is more than just an alternative working schedule” that is really worth reading.

When I first transitioned to 4 days, I wasn’t prepared for the change of perspective that was simmering away beneath the practical and logistical arrangements. I was busy writing my flexible working business case, adjusting my childcare plans and completing HR forms. I didn’t realise that I was also building a completely new frame of reference from the moment I first asked myself whether there might be an alternative to a 5 day week.

Haywood talks about crafting her own 4-day week, not moving an entire organization to a shorter workweek. But a lot of what she talks about applies for both individuals working in a conventional company, and organizations making the move.

This bit in particular was something I haven’t run across before, and it struck me as counterintuitive but very smart:

Make yourself dispensable (yes, you read that correctly). Traditional thinking says that career success comes from making yourself indispensable: your importance is measured by how well – or how badly – people manage without you. Over the years, I’ve discovered that one of my superpowers is in fact the opposite: making myself dispensable on my non-working day. I’ve developed a knack for horizon scanning, planning ahead and setting up processes to ensure that things continue ticking over while I’m not there. This is not just about being organised, systems-minded and getting the right tools in place. It’s also a serious ego check. It can be counterintuitive if you prefer to follow standard career advice, but the cornerstone of a successful 4 day week is enabling the work to roll on smoothly and sustainably in your absence.

4-day week and the climate

Allyson Chiu writes in the Washington Post about “How a four-day workweek could be better for the climate:”

Reducing the workweek to four days could have a climate benefit, advocates say. In addition to improving the well-being of workers, they say slashing working hours may reduce carbon emissions….

Over the years, studies have documented a link between fewer working hours and lower emissions — reductions that experts explain may be the result of changes to commuting, energy use and lifestyle habits. One analysis of data looking at more than two dozen countries from 1970 to 2007 predicted that if work hours were reduced by 10 percent, there could be drops in ecological footprint, carbon footprint and carbon dioxide emissions by 12.1 percent, 14.6 percent and 4.2 percent, respectively.

It works in practice, but does it work in theory? A new critique of the 4-day week

Economist Wim Naudé has just published an article in The Conversation listing “Five reasons why the four-day week won’t work.” Unfortunately, it’s one of those economics pieces that can be summarized as, “It works in practice, but does it work in theory?”

Before I get into what’s wrong with it, I should note that it has links to some pretty useful academic economics articles on the history of nation-level working hours and their impact on economic growth, productivity, etc. But my praise has to be limited, as even this reveals two foundational problems with the article’s analysis: it uses nation-level and macroeconomic data to attack firm-level decisions, and completely ignores the literature analyzing firm-level or individual impacts of shorter working hours.

To me, the single biggest problem with the article is that it’s confusing different kinds of worktime reductions. He begins by mentioning 4 Day Week Global’s trials in the UK, US, Canada, Ireland, and Australia and New Zealand, which are specifically about reducing working hours without cutting salaries or reducing productivity; but the rest of the piece is about what happens if companies reduce working hours but cut salaries, or argues that reducing working hours reduces productivity– in other words, arguing that the 4-day week won’t work because things the trials are specifically designed to avoid are bad.

Yes, they are bad. That’s why we’re designing to avoid them.

This kind of logical error is something I see all the time in arguments about automation and robotics. Will robots take our jobs? National economic data suggests that more automation correlates with overall job growth, but that leaves out two things: the quality of the new jobs being created (trading union manufacturing jobs for gig work or lower-paid and less stable retail jobs, for example), and the important role that ownership of automation plays in determining how technologies affect worker’s lives.

Here’s what I mean. Say you’re a taxi driver, and technology for fully autonomous, self-driving cars comes on the market. Will this eliminate your job?

The answer is, it depends on who’s deploying the technology, and who gets the benefits.

if the technology is controlled by a robot ride-haling company– call it 0ber– then you’re screwed. 0ber wants to put you out of business, capture your income, and keep it for itself. The Subzero freezer in the CEO’s apocalypse bunker isn’t going to fill itself with wagyu steak, after all.

But if the technology can be retrofit in existing vehicles, then you could put it in your own car, send it out on the road, and collect the money at the end of the day– because you own the automation. In fact, you could go from driving 10 hours a day, to owning two or three robot taxis.

See the difference? Same technology, completely different outcomes depending on who own the technology and how it’s deployed.

Immediately conflating (or confusing) the 4-day week movement with all other kinds of worktime reduction makes it easier for Naudé to make his case; but it also undermines it.

Now on to specific arguments.

Productivity gains

Naudé’s first claim is that “A four-day week is unlikely to enhance productivity unless it’s already low,” and he goes on to argue that the countries in which companies are trying a 4-day week are at the higher end of the global productivity rankings– and that previous reductions in work time, like Japan in the 1980s and 1990s, had a negative impact on economic productivity.

This claim confuses firm-level and national-level results, and the fact that companies have a lot of agency over what they can do to improve productivity (or efficiency, really) that countries do not. Likewise, there’s a big and ever-growing body of evidence that productivity does not have to go down when you reduce working hours, because there’s a substantial amount of wasted time in the average workday.

The happiness problem

The second argument is that

Claims that we would all be happier working four days overlook the theory of the hedonic treadmill, which argues that permanent extra happiness is a mirage. People may feel happier over, say, a six-month period. But over a longer duration, they would arguably revert to their previous level of happiness.

Yes, the hedonic treadmill is a thing. Is that a reason to never do anything that makes you happier, on the grounds that it won’t make you happier forever? Of course not.

Naudé’s contention that the hedonic treadmill is an argument against the 4-day week reminds me of the scene from Annie Hall (yes, Woody Allen, extremely problematic, etc.) where Alvy Singer becomes depressed after reding that the universe is expanding:

You’re here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!

The more serious response is that the hedonic benefits of the 4-day week are not merely the consequence of a one-time reduction in working hours. The benefits flow from having more time to invest in your own development, pursue hobbies, have children– things that are not a direct product of having a 4-day week, but which are all made possible or easier by shortening working hours.

I spoke recently to one 4-day week company founder who had her first child last year, and she said that it was impossible to imagine being a mother and a CEO (of a company based in London that’s launching offices in New York and Sao Paolo, thanks very much) without the 4-day week.

It’s like money. It’s absolutely the case that money does not make you happier. But money can buy happiness if you know how to invest it– in others. And the other things you can do with a steady source of income, and a greater sense of economic security, absolutely positively can make you happier.

Greater inequality

“A four-day working week may worsen inequities at work,” Naudé’s next argues: “People already working four days a week – at four-day wages – would find themselves doing the same work for a smaller salary than those whose working days had just reduced.”

Again, this is a theoretical objection to a practical reality: companies that move to 4-day weeks have generally given people working part-time the option to reduce work time further, or to become full-time.

Indeed, in Iceland the public sector’s move to a shorter workweek was designed in part to eliminate the inequalities that existed in professions like nursing, where large numbers of women were working part-time and therefore getting smaller pensions, benefits, etc.

Further,

Countries like Ireland or the UK may require draconian work-floor practices to squeeze enough productivity out of a four-day week, including requiring employees to work more daily hours than before.

This is a bit like arguing in 1920 that the 40-hour workweek would be bad, on the ground that if you make people work 20-hour workdays, that would be bad.

Yes that would have been terrible. But that’s not what anyone was proposing, and the 4-day week movement is quite explicitly about reducing total working hours.

Shorter workweeks = more part-time work

This one is a bit odd.

There is a strong association between reduced working hours and increased part-time employment. This is because companies whose full-time workers reduce their hours have to hire part-timers to ensure output does not drop, especially in the service sector.

Part-time jobs are, however, associated with “low pay and temporary contracts”. A surge in part-time employment would therefore lead to reduced earnings overall.

I say odd because while it’s true that part-time employment tends to be less well-paid, and indeed some companies have figured out how to leverage labor market flexibility and technology to depress wages, impose zero-hour contracts on people, etc., you would not expect any of this to happen in an environment in which everyone reduces working hours together. Within a firm, if everyone from the CEO to the brand-new employee moves from a 40-hour workweek to a 32-hour workweek, there’s no stigma around reduced hours.

Further, depending on the type of company, reduced working hours can boost full-time employment. Companies that operated on 8-hour shifts often hire more people when they move to 6-hour shifts (and the lower spending on recruiting, and benefits of lower turnover, can help offset the cost of hiring more people).

No unemployment benefit

One supposed benefit of shortening the working week is reduced unemployment…. When labour markets are so tight, it would be strange to reduce the labour supply by cutting everyone’s working hours…. Such a reduction would exacerbate labour shortages. It would also squeeze public finances – for example health services would require more staff, thus raising the wage bill.

I will admit that the relationship between reduced working hours and unemployment needs to be better studied, for different kinds of reduced working hours. But in a tight labor market, at the firm level it’s completely rational for leaders to pursue a shorter workweek as a way to defend against labor competition, rising wage pressure, etc.

Okay, back to real work (even though it’s a Friday).

Early results from the 4 Day Week Global trials

We’re beginning to get preliminary results of the 4 Day Week Global trial running in Ireland and the UK. Not surprisingly (to me), the news is positive.

Anna Cooban at CNN reports that for some workers, “the verdict is already in: it’s been ‘life changing’.”

More than two years into the pandemic, many have burned out, quit their jobs or are struggling to make ends meet as record inflation takes a huge bite out of their paychecks.

But, for the past eight weeks, thousands of people in the United Kingdom have tested a four-day schedule — with no cut to their pay — that could help usher in a new era of work.

It’s the world’s biggest trial of a four-day work week so far. Already, some workers have said they feel happier, healthier and are doing better in their jobs.

I can also say that we’re getting some early results back from the surveys that my colleague Juliet Schor has been conducting, and those look good too. I don’t want to say more until they’ve had time to crunch and report the numbers themselves, but the arrows are pointing in the right directions!

Having written an entire book about the impact the 4-day week has had on their businesses and lives, I’m not surprised by these results, but still it’s good to have both 1) confirmation from other researchers, and 2) a sense of the magnitude of the changes across a larger population.

Shorter workweek and Singapore

A new episode of the Singapore Straits Times‘ Work Talk Podcast takes on the 4-day week. I talk about it along with “Ms Louisa Lee, CEO of DP Dental, which adopted the four-day work week 1.5 years ago.” She’s an early adopter of a shorter workweek in Singapore, and DP Dental offers an interesting example of how it can work in health care.

I love Singapore, and it would be awesome to get a trial going there.