Another company switches to a 4-day workweek without any fall in productivity. Could you do the same?
By Jessica Stillman
Having more hours in the day is the dream of just about every busy
professional, but what if having more time for loved ones, hobbies,
fitness, or relaxation was as simple as deciding you were going to give
yourself the gift of more free time?
Study after study shows distractions at work eat up an insane amount of
time. One report suggests most of us spend just three hours a day
actually working. Another shows we waste a good four hours a day on
email. Yet another says we lose as much productivity to distractions as
we would if we came to work stoned.
So what if you simply decided to get your work done in less time and
then give yourself the gift of an extra day a week off to do with as you
pleased? This sounds too simple to be true, but as The New York Times
recently reported, an experiment out of New Zealand suggests that, for
entrepreneurs at least, all that may be standing between you an extra
day off is the decision to take an extra day off.
One less day, same amount of work.
The article, by Charlotte Graham-McLay, charts the progress of an
experiment run by a 240-person New Zealand firm, Perpetual Guardian,
which manages trusts, wills, and estates. Earlier this year,
Graham-McLay reports, the company's founder, Andrew Barnes, decided to
see what would happen if he gave his people one more day a week off for a
couple of months, reducing the required hours from 40 to 32 for the
same pay. He asked a pair of local academic researchers to keep track of
what happened.
"Supervisors said staff were more creative, their attendance was better,
they were on time, and they didn't leave early or take long breaks,"
Jarrod Haar, a professor at Auckland University of Technology who
studied the experiment, told of the paper. "Their actual job performance
didn't change when doing it over four days instead of five."
Let's say that again: employees got just as much work done in four days as in five.
How was that possible? As the above studies suggest, there's a lot of
fat that can be trimmed from most of our workdays, and these employees
found it. "Workers said the change motivated them to find ways of
increasing their productivity while in the office. Meetings were reduced
from two hours to 30 minutes, and employees created signals for their
colleagues that they needed time to work without distraction," reports
Graham-McLay
It isn't a one-off miracle.
This is easier to do for some firms than others, clearly. (And if you're
an employee, you'd have to convince your boss, which is obviously a
tall order for many). Customer service reps, nurses, and firefighters
need to be available when people expect them to be. But other, similar
experiments suggest this isn't a far-fetched one-off. A town in Sweden,
for instance, made headlines a few years back by switching municipal
employees to a six-hour day for the same pay. The town was thrilled with
the results.
Even in ultra competitive industries like tech there are companies
proving it is possible to hunker down and get more done in less time if
you just decide to do it. Online tech training startup Treehouse has
operated on a 32-hour workweek for years with great success. "My wife
and I just had this thought, 'Hey, I wonder if it's possible to work
less and still be effective?' We tried it and it was great," co-founder
Ryan Carson told me.
On a more personal note, when I switched to freelancing, I found that
working away from the office I get as much done in six hours as I used
to in eight. Self-employed friends report similar jumps in productivity.
When you don't have eight hours to fill, work seems to miraculously
shrink.
All this suggests that a lot more organizations could probably follow
Perpetual Guardian's lead if they simply had the will to do so. Experts
recommend short bursts of intense productivity instead of long,
meandering, distracted workdays anyway. And just think how thrilled your
people would be if you marched into the office tomorrow and announced
they would suddenly be getting paid the same amount for one less day of
work.
If you're a leader who could make this move a reality, it's worth
considering: could your people get the same amount done in four days if
you just let them give it a try?
https://www.geezgo.com/sps/32625
Comments
Post a Comment