Something wonderful is happening in the U.K. this year, and it makes me think I might be living in the wrong country.
More than 3,000 workers, in about 70 British companies, are participating in an experiment to find out if a four day work week will increase productivity.
The experiment will last six months while researchers track how people respond to having an extra day off.
This is the same country that produced the Beatles hit song, “Eight Days a Week”. How far they have come.
I think I could tell the researchers how people will respond to having an extra day off. Assuming that the British feel the same way about work as Americans do, they will still show up on Monday with a hangover, and will leave the office early on Thursday to get ready for their long weekend.
But the British researchers seem to believe that — magically — productivity will be increased.
Joe O’Connor, CEO of 4 Day Week Global, was quoted by NPR.org
“The impact of the ‘Great Resignation’ is now proving that workers from a diverse range of industries can produce better outcomes while working shorter and smarter,” he said.
I’m all about working shorter and smarter… although we recognize that ‘shorter’ is a lot easier to achieve than ‘smarter.’
Pretty much anyone is capable of working 32 hours instead of 40 hours. Even Americans, I suspect. But how does a person become ‘smarter’?
I’ve never seen any scientific studies that suggest a person can get smarter by working only four days a week. I was raised to believe that you got smarter by going to college, but when I got there, I discovered that everyone thought it was just a four-year party, and the main point wasn’t to get smarter; the main point was to get laid.
I can easily imagine that this ‘four day work week’ idea was drummed up by some people who graduated from college.
As a worker myself, I tend to view these kinds of studies through the ’employee lens’ rather than through the ’employer lens’. But I’m not totally unsympathetic to the captains of industry. The ‘Great Resignation’ has been hard on corporations and business owners who thought they could pay their workers $12 an hour and still walk away with millions of dollars in profits.
Curiously enough, a similar ‘four day work week’ experiment was conducted by Microsoft Japan in 2019, and it reportedly resulted in a 40% increase in productivity. (The story once again shared by NPR.org. Are we seeing a pattern here?)
Workers at Microsoft Japan enjoyed an enviable perk this summer: working four days a week, enjoying a three-day weekend — and getting their normal, five-day paycheck. The result, the company says, was a productivity boost of 40%.
Microsoft Japan says it became more efficient in several areas, including lower electricity costs, which fell by 23%. And as its workers took five Fridays off in August, they printed nearly 60 percent fewer pages.
Encouraged by the results, it plans to hold a similar trial in the winter.
Dozens of media outlets shared the 2019 results of Microsoft’s four-day-week experiment, but some of the media outlets may not have noticed the credentials of the two people who performed the study.
Courtney Gatlin-Keener, MBA
University of the Incarnate Word
Ryan Lunsford, PhD
University of the Incarnate Word
“University of the Incarnate Word”? Not a university that I’m intimately familiar with. But at least they were college graduates.
I’m most excited by the reduction in printing pages. “60 percent fewer pages,” in fact. The Daily Post was originally established in 2004 as an ‘online only’ news source because the owner was too cheap to pay for paper and ink. So even without hiring researchers from the University of the Incarnate Word to study a four day work week, the Daily Post has printed 100 percent fewer pages than comparable news outlets in Pagosa Springs.
Microsoft Japan could learn a thing or two from us, about wasted paper.
Japan and the U.K. are not the real trend-setting pioneers in studying the four day work week, however. Iceland has been conducting similar trials since 2015. Their studies have determined that productivity remained the same, even when workers were given a three-day weekend.
But you have to wonder, what would you do with a three-day weekend in Iceland? Sit on the porch and watch the volcanoes erupt?
Of course, the people in Iceland could make the same kind of sarcastic remark about us. Like, what would a worker in Pagosa Springs do with a three-day weekend? Sit on the porch and watch the sky fill with smoke from the latest wildfire?