Instant Genius - The argument for a four-day workweek, with Alex Pang

Episode Date: July 2, 2023

For many, working only four days a week – and enjoying a longer weekend – might sound like a pipe dream: However, some workplaces are now experimenting with just that. 61 UK companies recently piloted a four-day workweek, with above 90 per cent of them continuing the scheme after the six-month trial. What impact does a four-day workweek have on a person’s productivity, mental health and physical wellbeing? And are there many drawbacks to working less? To answer this and much more, we’re joined by Alex Pang, productivity researcher, author of Work Less, Do More and programme director at non-profit organisation 4 Day Week Global. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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the bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. I'm Thomas Ling, digital editor at BBC Science Focus magazine. For many, working only four days a week and enjoying a longer weekend might at first sound like a pipe dream. However, some workplaces are now experimenting with just that. 61 UK companies recently piloted a four-day work week, with above 90% of them continuing the scheme after the six-month trial. So, according to these experiments, what impact does a four-day work week have on a person's

productivity, mental health and physical wellbeing? And what could be the main drawbacks of working less? To answer this and much more, I'm joined by Alex Pang, productivity researcher, author of Work Less Do More, and Program Director at Non-profit Organisation 4-Day Week global. Hello, Alex. Welcome to the show. Oh, thanks for having me. I should probably admit this towards the start that I am quite skeptical about the four-day work week. And I think a lot of people think like me in saying, won't a four-day work week really impact productivity. Yes, it will. It'll improve it for the following reason. Studies tell us that the average knowledge worker loses something like two to three hours of productive time every day to overly long meetings, to

badly used technology, to outmoded processes, and distractions. And so essentially, we're already all working a four-day week. We're just also coming in on Fridays and sitting in meetings, trying to figure out what's going wrong with the printer and like filling out unnecessary forms that should have been sort of discarded years ago. And so what happens when, companies move to four-day weeks is an awful lot of the work of the transition is figuring out how to deal just with those things, making meetings more effective, figuring out how to use technology in ways that enhance efficiency or allow us to focus on the things that matter most to us, while automating or outsourcing the sort of much more routine kinds of work, and collectively

thinking through how we can improve processes, communications, how we can collaborate better, so that everybody is able to get out the door Thursday afternoon and having gotten all the work done for that week so that we can all have a three-day weekend. What we have seen both at the individual and the company level is that it provides a terrific incentive to figure out ways of eliminating these kinds of inefficiencies or pain points that we have all lived with for a very long time. And to do so in a way that empowers workers, that makes companies better places, and provides a really terrific incentive for implementing changes, but also making them stick over the long run. So it's not really a four-day work week asking people to cram five days' worth of work,

into four days. Is it essentially you're just getting rid of the unnecessary elements? Is that what you're saying? You know, I think about, I would say roughly 70% of the gains come from dealing with meetings, technology, and interruptions and distractions. So you just do that stuff you can get from, let's say, a 40-hour week down to, let's say, 35 or 34. The next couple hours are tougher, and they involve really having to think more deeply about process stuff, about, sort of workflow, or communications, as is often the case, the last 20% of improvements are the hardest. One of the worries with moving to a four-day week is that it's essentially a kind of work intensification. But what we see is that between the redesign of the work and the fact that

redesign isn't done mainly by external consultants or by the CEO, because honestly, no CEO knows everybody's job well enough to tell them how to do it, sort of 20% better. A lot of that work is actually done by people themselves. When you give people more control over how they work, they tend to feel less stressed about it because they feel like they've got more decision-making and autonomy and so forth. And we see this sort of borne out. in things like, you know, sort of surveys of work satisfaction or stress levels. There was one company in London called Synergy Vision that did a survey right before starting its trial and then six months later. And one of the most interesting things that came from that

was that the percentage of people who said they had enough time to get all their work done went from under 50% to nearly 80% even though, objectively, they had 20% less time every week to get everything done. And so I think what that speaks to is the kind of psychological sense that they had more control over their time and consequently greater ability to decide what I'm going to work on when, which meant that they were still able to get the work done, but they didn't feel a lot of extra pressure in the course of doing so. What do you think about the argument that all those distractions you're talking about? So maybe the more sort of useless meetings might actually be beneficial to people that of mental health, because it's, is that social interaction?

That's a great, you know, that's a great point. And I think that one of the things that can kill a four-day week trial is not paying enough attention to the social dimension of office life. I think that we tend right now to downgrade the importance of social connection or the presence of other people in our arguments about return to work. But that's actually a really big part of what makes offices and work pleasant for a lot of people. It's also the case that there's plenty of stuff that you learn in informal exchanges with people, right? Shop talk at, you know, when you're having coffee or hearing stories about how you fixed some particular thing or dealt with some clients during lunch. And that's really important as a way of both sharing kind of informal knowledge,

but also teaching people kind of how to be a professional, not just how to do the work. So you definitely don't want to lose that. So what smart companies do is they set aside time for deep focused work when everybody has permission to ignore the phone, stay off slack, and just like concentrate on the stuff that matters most of them. But you also have things like coffee bricks together and you schedule lunches so that everybody, you know, puts the pen down at this time you all gather together and that's when you're able to have sort of those other conversations. The other thing that we see is there is some more socializing that can happen between people on their fifth day, on their day off. One of the first stories I heard

when I was researching the four-day week that made me realize there's actually something really interesting going on here was I was in Glasgow interviewing some people at a company called Pursuit Marketing. And they were telling a story about when they, the first month or so that they had a four-day week, there were a couple, three or four people who were coming into the office on Friday doing one call and then disappearing. And finally, the general manager grabbed one of these guys and asked what's going on. And he said, well, actually, we haven't told our wives that we're working a four-day week. So we're just spending the day going to the pub or going climbing or doing other stuff. And I think that's a great illustration of how important office friendships can be.

And a signal that, yeah, you know, you definitely do not want those to be eroded by a four-day-week trial, you know, that turns the workplace into like just some kind of, you know, sort of nightmarish Dickensian workhouse. Is there some evidence that the four-day work week can improve people's physical health too? Yes. So there's lots of anecdotal stories about people adopting or taking up again healthier habits, like being able to cook for themselves rather than get takeout, which means generally people are eating better, also saving a little bit of money, also being able to spend more time exercising. I think that the average number of minutes people sort of exercised during trials went up from, I want to say, like 10 to about 20 odd minutes, which doesn't

sound like a lot, but every minute helps. It's also the case that people are sort of sleeping something like half an hour more per day, which over the long run can make a real difference given how important sleep is both for physical health and sort of for mental health. And then finally, you know, sick days dropped something like 65% during the trial, which is, I think, a good indicator that baseline health of your workforce is improved by sort of moving to a shorter work week. And I guess is there any evidence that a four-day work week could put less burden on the healthcare system, which might actually help the economy as a whole. Is there anything there? You know, in theory, you would, yes, you would, it is reasonable to assume that if this were, you know, that applied much more widely, you'd have healthier people who, you know, which would translate into better habits, fewer visits maybe to the A&E, and maybe over the long run, or of lower rates of chronic illness, etc., that come from years of too little sleep, too much bad, food, higher rates of obesity, etc. In order to really know that, you'll have to give me a country

and 30 years, and then I'll be able to answer that question definitively. However, it's not unreasonable to extrapolate from what we've seen so far. One of the things I'm consistently impressed with is when you give people more time, it turns out they do disgustingly wholesome things with it. It's not like people are going from two-day benders to three-day benders. They're spending more time with family, right? They're sort of doing more life admin. They're cleaning house. They're cooking.

They're doing volunteer work. It's like really boring stuff that's also, however, says something really good about people. So I'm hopeful that as this becomes more popular, we will begin to see some evidence in the form of like lower insurance rates for companies or lower spending. on health bills. But right now, I think we can make an educated guess that we'll see that and hope the evidence comes in sooner rather than later. What about mental health then? I think most people would assume that having a four-day work week is incredibly beneficial to someone's mental health. It is. And there are both within the workplace and in terms of improved work-life balance, we see sort of those numbers go up.

So, more than half of people in the UK study said that it was easier to balance work with the work of managing a household, partly because more men were spending time looking after children and doing stuff with families, but also, I think 71% said they felt less burned out at work, and 39% of employees reported feeling less stress during the trial. And it's also important to note that it's not just workers who benefit from this. It's also founders and executives as well. And not to make an argument along the lines of who will think of the billionaires, but company founders and CEOs suffer from levels of stress, burnout, and depression that are multiples higher than the rest of the workforce. And this is why we see. We see in smaller companies. Very often, it's the CEO, often the original founder, who is the biggest advocate of moving to a four-day week, often not just because they're trying to solve like challenges with the work, right? They're struggling to recruit people. They've got sort of

retention issues or so on, but they want this for themselves. They have faced some sort of personal crisis, maybe it's a health crisis, they realize they're going to burn out if they keep, if things keep going this way. And so for themselves, they need to make a change. And as a founder, one of the best ways to implement that habit is to have the whole company do it. So, you know, which provides sort of, you know, basically an excuse for them to have a four-day week as well. So without getting this to sound too much like a business podcast, has there been any evidence that profits increase before they work week also? Yeah, so broadly speaking, modest increase in order profits, though it's not,

and also additional savings coming from having to spend less on posting job advertisements or less spending on training people, less disruption in the form of that just comes from higher turnover and in a care home, for example, having to, hire nurses from a temp agency at five times sort of the normal salary. So in some places, indeed, in places where you have to hire more people in order to make a shorter work week or functional, in some of those, actually those savings have actually paid for the additional staff, which is a pretty remarkable thing. Historically, how unusual is a four-day work week? So how many days have people worked in the past?

Well, if you're like David Graber or anthropologists who talk about the Neolithic Leisure Society, you would argue even moving down to a four-day week as a real step down from 10,000 years ago when people maybe worked about four hours a day. Taking a slightly narrower view, for a long time, the history of industrialization and automation was a history of work time reduction, of going from 12-hour days in the factory, six days a week, to eight-hour days, and then finally to or the five-day week and sort of the 40-hour work week that became part of normal life in lots of countries starting in the 1930s. And what I think we've seen, as we all know, there were Keynes and Bertrand Russell talked in like what, 1929 and 1930 about how by now we

would all be working three or four hours a day if economic trends continued. What was interrupted or why that was interrupted is a little complex, but basically for the last generation or so, we've had a kind of reversal of this long historical trend. And so I think that the four-day week in a way is the economy kind of getting back on track, realizing again that it is possible to take these great improvements in technology and productivity and order to use them to create more free time for people, for workers, rather than use those technologies to speed up work to produce more and nothing else. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast.

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name audio creates systems that deliver exceptional sound and unforgettable listening experiences at home. Try it for yourself at a focal powered by name boutique. Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. That's really interesting. How do you think that future technology might help in terms of accommodating the four-day work week? Are you quite hopeful about things like AI?

I am cautiously optimistic. I mean, I think with AI, the real challenge comes in who it is who controls it and who decides how it gets deployed in the workplace. Basically, if it's something that workers get to use in order to automate their least interesting work to allow them to work on the stuff that matters most of them, and if it can be used in ways that enhance that work, then I think it can be really, really used. If, on the other hand, it's deployed in ways that de-skill workers or create conditions in which their jobs can be eliminated, then I think that's obviously bad. I mean, I have been playing around myself with ChatGPT, and having written several books, a lot of op-eds and articles, and literally thousands of emails answering questions about the four-day week, I've taken all of that stuff and actually put it into a system that works with you. chat GPT so that I now use to help answer these kinds of questions. And it's basically like having a smart reference librarian on call to help you out.

It's nothing like its own sentient intelligence, no offense to reference librarians. And it definitely engages in a certain amount of confabulation, you know, making up sort of citations or companies that sound completely plausible, but actually, don't exist. So it definitely helps that, helps me that I can catch that stuff. I have not actually written something for the Harvard Business Review, even though Chat GPT created a completely reasonable looking citation for an article that I had published there like a year ago, which I absolutely love. But still, but, you know, the point is that it is helping me do this kind of work better. But if it were in the hand,

of some big company that could charge some amount of money per month to users instead, then I really wouldn't get a lot of benefit out of that. And so the fact that I'm able to use it to improve my own work means that it's really great for me, and I think ultimately it's still pretty good for the world. But I think it underlines that giving people control over how this technology gets used is going to be essential for determining whether AI is a net positive or a net negative in shaping the future of work. Why do you think a rested worker makes for a more productive worker?

I think that almost regardless of the kind of work that you're doing, being well-rested is sort of valuable for a couple obvious reasons and a couple non-obvious ones. The obvious ones is that we all have a... finite amount of energy that we can spend in the workplace in a day. And coming in with a tank fuller, with the batteries, completely recharged means that we'll be able to perform better at our jobs. Another thing is that we have done a really good job of underestimating the impact that fatigue has on work. And I think that even though industrial psychologists and, you know, engineers have been telling us for more than a century, that long hours are actually counterproductive,

both at the individual level and also at the organizational level. There are actually studies of munitions factories and written during World War I that showed that when they went to seven days a week, 12 hours a day, production went up for about two or three weeks, and then it dropped again sometimes below where it had been when people were working 40 hours because you had higher turnover, you had people getting sicker, you had more accidents, which in a place where you're dealing with explosives is really a bad thing. And workplaces today have only

become more sophisticated, more complicated, places that require ever greater amounts of judgment, even if you're not dealing with nitroglycerin and dynamite. An awful lot of the work that can be offloaded onto machines has been, which means that even in work that we think of as relatively low-skilled or that require relatively few or a few credentials actually involve a lot of judgment and empathy and decision-making, all of which are greatly affected by energy and health levels. You know, if you're a nurse's assistant in a

nursing home, that doesn't look from the outside like a very complicated job, but dealing with people, for example, with memory problems or dementia, getting them up, getting them dressed, getting them interested in activities, this is something that's actually really hard. And the ability to do that well is something that generates a lot of value for the world, even if society doesn't recognize that that is really valuable work. And so I think that's why we're seeing places like nursing homes and nurses' assistants or benefiting from a four-day week just as much as like web design firms. So I really have to ask, what are the biggest drawbacks of a four-day work week?

So I think there are plenty of logistical challenges that you need to overcome. The good news is that for most companies, it is possible to figure out how to redesign schedules and would have been workflows so as to make it feasible. I do think that in work that is highly seasonal or jobs that you commute to by helicopter. So basically, if you're working on an oil rig, you're on 14 days, you're all 14 days, you're probably not going to get a four-day week anytime soon, I'm sorry to say. Likewise, people working in construction in places where the construction site is under snow for four months of the year, again, there's a cyclical quality to that work that makes implementing a four-day week, sort of a challenge. I think also that it does

really require a shift in mindset on the part of workers and leaders and a willingness to tear up the rulebook, to experiment with lots of different things in ways that are really challenging for some people. There are some folks who come into this with, you know, having been in their fields for, you know, let's say 10 years or so, they're good at what they do, and they have a list in the back of their minds of things where, if I were in charge, we would do differently because this profession does this set of things really stupidly. For that person, the four-day week is a great opportunity to take that list and actually try it out, to see whether those things do make a difference in how people work.

For folks for whom, who aren't comfortable with that kind of thing, then that I think is a, you know, there are people who will find new jobs rather than move to a four-day week. I think for leaders, it is, plenty of leaders have these kinds of struggles as well. But if you want an economy and a business environment characterized by a high degree of certainty, I'm sorry to say you're living on the wrong century. And in a way, one of the good things about a four-day week is that it gives you a great reason

to develop the kind of leadership style and sort of resilience and flexibility that you're going to need when the world faces whatever next pandemic or crisis or big global challenge comes down the line, which I think we can all assume is going to happen sooner or later. So I think a lot of people listening to this might be wondering what's the best way to do it. So say if you had an employee who was told, okay, you can do a four-day work week. Is it best to do Monday and Tuesday working and then have a break and then work the rest of the week? What's the best way to do it? So the most popular way to do it is Fridays or Mondays off.

When you give people the option, I think something like in one company that did this, 60% of people chose Fridays, 20% chose Mondays, and the rest chose, almost everybody else chose a Wednesday. A lot of it depends on the rhythm of your workplace and your market. So lots of ad agencies, for example, when they do this, take Fridays off because Fridays are already kind of a quiet day, right? You use it to release bad news. Nobody launches a new product on a Friday, so that's an easy target. In other places, if you retail, for example, you still need to stay open five days a week, so you tend to have a Rota system. Some people are

on Monday through Thursday, others Tuesday through Friday. That's often also the case in customer service departments in or to larger companies, or they might have someone on call on a Friday. I am still looking for a company that would be willing to take one of its offices and put it on a four-day week, another one do six-hour days, and measure the heck out of both of them, and see whether people are actually happier and more productive in one versus the other. because I think that the only bad shorter week is the one that you don't implement, but I still don't have evidence about whether a shorter work day is better than a shorter work week or under what conditions you should prefer one versus sort of the other. From an organizational perspective, if you can make it work and if your clients permit,

I think that or the value of doing Fridays off is that it provides incredible clarity. If you move to a six-hour day, it's easy for people to work a little bit extra or to leave at 3.30 rather than 3. It's really hard for people to accidentally come in on Friday. Plus, I think that there are benefits to having that big block of time to yourself. it does allow for more time for kind of deeper recovery, for making life admin run a little bit more efficiently and still have time for your family or for yourself. So sorry, if you are doing a four-day work week,

do you think it's a good option, basically on those four days we are working, to be working much longer to say a 10 or 11-hour day just so you can have one day off? No. Look, I think that, okay, there are places that will move to four-day weeks with 10-hour days. What I hear from people is it really depends on whether you like a three-day weekend more than you hate a 10-hour day. I mean, I think that the, you know, all the evidence tells us that working longer than eight hours for extended periods of time, those last couple hours are not nearly as productive as, you know,

like the first four or five. You know, when you look at the lives of people who, creatives who have a lot of control over their time, so writers who've really made it, or Nobel Prize winning scientists, they tend to work super, super intensively for about five hours a day. And that's it for them. So what that, I think what that, you know, what that tells us is that, you know, number one, you can get enormous amounts of really important stuff done working with that kind of schedule if you have control over it. We're talking about like Stephen King and Charles Darwin and Tony Morrison after she was, be a full-time novelist.

So four or five hours of intensive work is about what most people can reasonably do. And indeed, likewise, professional athletes, professional musicians, when they're practicing, that's about their upper limit too. So the 10-hour day is something whose logic you can understand, but I think really is far less preferable than a genuine reduction in working hours. So there's been plenty of studies and trials of the four-day work week. What one finding from all these studies has really blown you away? One finding that's really blown me away.

Let me nominate two. One is how little difference there is in the level of benefit across countries and across industries. Coming into this, I assumed that there'd be more difference between big companies and little companies or companies in Asia versus Europe versus the United States. We talk a lot about how different business cultures are in different parts of the world. But it turns out everybody appreciates more time, and they appreciate, appreciate it in pretty much the same ways plus or minus a couple percent. The second thing that really strikes me is that the four-day week is great for everybody, but it is transformative

for working moms for a couple reasons. One is just working mothers are unbelievably time-pressed and spend enormous amounts of energy having to cobble together systems to manage their work, families, get kids to, you know, violin practice or other activities, and having another day is really gigantic. And even if their spouses are the ones who have the extra day, that still seems to have, deliver pretty substantial benefits for them. The other thing is that companies that move to four-day weeks, demonstrate a preference for hiring working moms. Now, this is right now all anecdotal because we don't have enough data over the long run about who's applying for jobs, who's getting hired, and so on. But in my conversations with founders and CEOs, I've heard one of

them say, when I started this company, basically my ideal worker was a 25-year-old guy who didn't have pets, right? Someone who I knew could always stay late, who I could ask to, always do extra work, you know, who could basically sleep under their desk during crunch times. Now, on the other hand, now that we've flipped and we've moved to a four-day week, being able to work 12 hours a day doesn't impress me any longer. What I need is someone who can do that same work in six hours and get out of here. Someone with professional experience, with good judgment, who is empathetic and can work well with colleagues, but is also ruthless about their time. Who is it who has that combination of, or a professional experience,

and soft skills, who really puts a premium on being able to work efficiently and have a life. It's working mothers, who also generally in the workforce, despite our best efforts to make this better or to create more progressive workplaces, still suffer both from penalties from being moms in terms of their career slowing down, but also suffer when they move to, let's say, more flexible or part-time roles that are meant to help them, but still raise questions about, well, is she really dedicated to this job? And would she really want to be put on this big project that would lead to a promotion because she's picking up kids?

And so, however, in companies that move to four-day weeks, all of those skills are really, really valued. And so motherhood goes from being something for which you're a penit. in the conventional labor force, to something for which you can demand a premium in order four-day week companies. That was Alex Pang, program director at non-profit organization Four Day Week Global, and author of Workless Do More. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you by the team behind

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