Alex Soojung-Kim Pang's Blog, page 4

How to convince your boss to trial a 4-day week

I forgot to post about this when it came out a few weeks ago, but MSNBC ran a piece about “how to convince your boss to trial a 4-day week” based on work I’ve been doing.

When I was writing Shorter, the question of how you get your boss to sign off on a trial was kind of a non-issue, because in most cases, it was the boss who had the idea to try a 4-day week. Indeed, in the early days of the movement, the idea was probably was too new and risky to come from anyone else.

Now, though, as more large companies look at the 4-day week and publicity around it has grown, there are more people who want to champion it who need to first get their bosses or boards to green light a trial. This article offers some advice about to build your case.

Talking about the 4-day week on Arirang TV

Here I am talking about the 4-day week on Arirang News, a South Korean English-language TV channel.

If I’m lucky it’ll autoplay from the start of the interview, which is about 29 minutes into the program.

Emma Lewzey and Blue Sky Philanthropy on the 4-day week

Emma Lewzey at Blue Sky Philanthropy did a Facebook Live presentation about the 4-day week. Despite my comments (which I don’t think are visible in the video), she did a great job explaining what’s helped make a 4-day week a success for them.

Among the things she talks about, four are really big:

Minimizing reactive workUsing time blocking to provocatively plan your weekUsing technology and automation to eliminate/offload less valuable tasksPlanning your day off (so you’ll actually take it)

Well worth 30 minutes of your day!

The Fields Medalist who works three hours a day

Quanta Magazine has a profile of Princeton mathematician and Fields Medalist June Huh, who “does about three hours of focused work” per day— a number in line with those of many creatives I wrote about in REST:

On any given day, Huh does about three hours of focused work. He might think about a math problem, or prepare to lecture a classroom of students, or schedule doctor’s appointments for his two sons. “Then I’m exhausted,” he said. “Doing something that’s valuable, meaningful, creative” — or a task that he doesn’t particularly want to do, like scheduling those appointments — “takes away a lot of your energy.”

To hear him tell it, he doesn’t usually have much control over what he decides to focus on in those three hours. For a few months in the spring of 2019, all he did was read. He felt an urge to revisit books he’d first encountered when he was younger — including Meditations by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius and several novels by the German author Hermann Hesse — so that’s what he did. “Which means I didn’t do any work,” Huh said. “So that’s kind of a problem.” (He’s since made peace with this constraint, though. “I used to try to resist … but I finally learned to give up to those temptations.” As a consequence, “I became better and better at ignoring deadlines.”)

(Via Cal Newport’s most recent newsletter.)

Juliet Schor at TED: “The 4-day week is a downpayment on a new way to live and work”

Juliet Schor’s TED talk about the 4-day week is now online:

I’ve been studying work since the 1980s, and I’ve never seen anything like what’s happening today. Pandemic-fueled anxiety is surging around the world. In the US, more than half of all employees report feeling stressed a lot of the day. Job quits are at record levels, running at four million a month. People are burning out.

In response, a growing number of companies are offering a four-day, 32-hour week, but with five days of pay. Now, it’s not a new idea, but the pandemic has turbocharged it. Employers are realizing that if they can rethink where people work, they can also rethink how many days they’re on the job.

If her talk inspires you, you can find out more about 4 Day Week Global’s trials; or if you like the idea but need to convince your boss, you can register for our upcoming workshops about making the case for a trial.

#FocusFriday at SAP

Software giant SAP recently announced that it was implementing #FocusFriday in its German offices. As executive Cawa Younosi explained on LinkedIn,

Intention behind Focus Friday is to guarantee undisturbed and focused working time, based on business requirements, so our colleagues can complete their tasks and start the weekend without action items or to use the time for education and personal development.

CIO Magazine adds,

There will be no automated enforcement of the policy, and SAP is not banning meetings on Fridays—customer appointments and other unavoidable commitments can still take place—but, said Younosi, “We know from pilot projects and feedback from our colleagues that they will take advantage without any nudges from outside.”

SAP will also encourage employees in Germany to use their Fridays for education and professional development, important tasks for IT workers trying to keep pace with technological developments.

Leadership coach Christine Meunch has some suggestions about how to make this work.

One small thing I’ll add: it may seem cheesy, but it seems to me that having names for these kinds of days actually helps them succeed. I see a fair number of companies that adopt 4-day weeks giving them names: software company Polar, for examples, calls its Fridays off “Somedays.”  It’s not the thing that will make the difference between success and failure, but I think it helps establish a collective plan to use time more intentionally.

Talking about the 4-day week on China Global TV

I was on China Global TV, talking about (what else?) the 4-day week:

While it looks like I’m either broadcasting from an earthquake zone or imitating the 1960s Batman TV show’s fight aesthetic (they went to weird camera angles during fights, because that show wasn’t already campy enough!), I was actually using my 2012 MacBook Pro camera. For some reason my regular outstanding Fuji X-T3 decided to not work, and so seconds before airing I was literally stacking books under my MacBook to try to get it high enough to work with this segment.

Just another reminder to always give yourself a few minutes before any interview to test your equipment. Everything had worked fine several hours earlier…

Tory MP speaks out for the 4-day week

Sir Desmond Swayne, an MP from New Forest West, has released a statement in favor of trialing a 4-day week. “The demand for a shorter working week with no loss of pay has been on the agenda of the political left for some time,” he notes. “Most people recognise however, that it is economic suicide unless accompanied by greater productivity in the worked hours to compensate.”

As you’ll recall, the Labour Party talked about a 4-day week in 2019, and at the time the idea was ridiculed by Conservatives as a prelude to Hugo Chavez-like destruction of the economy, nuclear family, space-time continuum, etc..

Things really change in a couple years, especially with the slower-than-expected return to work compared to Europe:

Is it that the experience of lock-down and furlough have left them disinclined to return to the stress of the workplace and that they place a higher value on their time away from it?

Might a shorter working week tempt them back to work?…

A shorter working week will not suit many enterprises: Most of us will have experienced the frustration of enquiring about an important piece of work, only to discover that the key person to speak to is on leave. Adding 52 further such days per year on which that might occur with a 4-day week, would not necessarily make for greater productivity.

Nevertheless, there may be enterprises which could cope well with a shorter week. In 1976 I worked in a factory that operated a three-day week. Initially they had been forced to do so, as everyone had, during the Miner’s Strike of 1973-4. When the strike was over and the 5-day week was restored however, this particular company -having discovered just how much more productive they had become during the national emergency measure- carried on with just the 3 days working.

While the 4-day week has most recently been advocated mainly by politicians on the left side of the political spectrum (Green Party regional leader Sonia Furstenau in Canada, Rep. Mark Takano in the US), it was of course more nonpartisan: in 2008 and 2009 the two American states that have trialed a 4-day week in their public sectors were both governed by Republicans, and in 1956 Richard Nixon talked about the coming 4-day week as an illustration of good Republican management of the economy. You could craft a good small-c conservative argument for a 4-day week as being family-friendly, etc etc. I hope to see more of them.

#4dayweekly, 31 January 2022

This past week in news about the 4-day week:

Companies

Automation Made Simple writes about how they moved to a 4-day week. Not surprisingly, “we’re using automation to reduce our workload and simplify the day-to-day running of our business.”Coconut Software cofounder Katherine Regnier wrote in December about “Why We Created Cabana Days: Our Version Of A Four Day Work Week“

.

DNSFilter started piloting a 4-day week in August 2021
and I just found out about it. In October, they made it permanent, with some tweaks.Fairway Homecare has introduced a 4-day week in its head office.

Pros

Several new articles look at the 4-day week a year, two, or three after it was implemented, at business consultancy Wilson Fletcher, tech company Buffer, and Canadian municipality Guysborough.

I talked about the 4-day week on Cheddar News:

I was also a guest on Connecticut Public Radio’s “Where We Live.”

Cons

Some skeptical coverage is only to be expected when you get a lot of press.

Emily Peck argues that “The needle isn’t moving on four-day workweeks.” She points to a combination of job numbers, along with some reportage from McKinsey, to argue that it’s still not really a thing. I have some thoughts on this.Peter Crush asks, “Does a four-day week undermine true flexibility?” He writes, “suggestions have been made that this model could actually strip away employees’ ability to work more flexibly across the entire week, by shoe-horning them into an even more rigid routines.” However, he also notes that these suggestions “have been rejected by organisations that have already made four-day weeks permanent.”In Morning Brew, Katie Hicks recently wrote, “in agency settings, where business is often subject to client whims and schedules, it’s less a question of why the need for a four-day week and more a question of if it’s even possible.”RedSprout CEO Olivia Webb writes about why her company abandoned its 4-day week experiment. Personally, I really appreciate these pieces, because it’s a lot harder to find companies willing to talk about their failures than their successes.

A note on Emily Peck’s “The needle isn’t moving on four-day workweeks”

In Axios, Emily Peck makes the case that “The needle isn’t moving on four-day workweeks.” Despite the press that it’s getting, she argues, the number of postings of jobs offering 4-day weeks is increasing very slowly (with lots of monthly ups and downs), and “‘There are not a lot of clients looking to do this,’ Bill Schaninger, senior partner at McKinsey, tells Axios.”

And, Peck concludes, “work has taken over white collar workers’ lives seven days a week — it just might not be possible to truly dial it down to four.”

So is this right?

Peck is absolutely right that there’s more press, but it’s not just because there’s a greater hunger for shorter workweeks or other ways of working that don’t just outsource the costs of long hours onto workers and their spouses, and treat burnout as an externality. (I think of this as the “you keep the girl, I find another!” HR school.)

The number of companies that are adopting 4-day weeks IS growing: I wrote about 100 of them in SHORTER, and in the two years since that book came out, I’ve found another 150 that have adopted it.

Further, the fact that companies are more open about their 4-day weeks is itself significant, as I explain in the 2022 annual report on the 4-day week: it reflects a change in how companies and the public view the viability and desirability of a shorter workweek. Just compare the reception to the news of the 4-day week trial in the UK this month, compared to the 2019 proposal by the Labour Party to move to a 4-day week. Three years ago, lots of Serious People laughed at the idea; now, it’s taken a lot more seriously.

What about the fact that a McKinsey partner isn’t seeing clients talk about this? McKinsey is, after all, one of the most important consulting companies around, and so if it’s not on their clients’ radar, can it matter?

The answer is, yes. With a handful of exceptions– Woowa Brothers in Korea, Unilever, Microsoft, and Medtronic (all of whom are experimenting with shorter weeks in local offices)– the biggest companies moving to a 4-day week aren’t as big as McKinsey’s smallest client. The companies I’ve worked with have had, on average, about a dozen employees, and no appetite for or experience working with a giant consulting company.

Big consultancies generate useful information about what’s going on in markets and industries, but their first-hand knowledge tends to be with places that are a lot bigger (and thus prospective clients). So using them as a measure of the spread of the 4-day week is like using a satellite to look for a virus.

So while the absolute numbers are still relatively small compared to the overall economy, I think that the legitimacy of the 4-day week is absolutely growing, and the size of the movement itself is increasing.

Finally, I think that plenty of companies have shown that even while “work has taken over white collar workers’ lives seven days a week,” it’s possible to dial hours back without completely abandoning old professional norms or ambitions. Rather, what happens is that the way you direct your ambition, or interpret working hours through the lens of professionalism, change.

For one thing, a 4-day week isn’t easier than a 5-day week, despite the ubiquity of lawn chairs and hammocks in articles about 4-day week companies. To make a 4-day week work, you need to really know your market, your work, your priorities. You need experience and good judgment. Successfully implementing a 4-day week is not a sign that you’re lazy. It’s a sign that you really know what you’re doing– and you can execute better than the company than needs 5 or 6 or 7 days to get the same work done.

And as you get better at your work, and as companies become more effective, why shouldn’t they work fewer hours? Being able to do the same work more effectively should be a good thing; we shouldn’t run an economy where we all have to perform like Dan Ariely’s locksmith, who could open a lock in seconds because he’d been doing it for decades, but slowed down because customers would get mad and not tip him if he worked “too fast.”