Should your team move to a four-day workweek?

Transcript

Christine Dela Rosa:
Welcome to Work Check, an original podcast from Atlassian where we take everyday workplace practices and debate if they’re actually working for us. And today we’re asking, should your team move to a four-day workweek? I’m your host, Christine Dela Rosa, who likes to measure the workweek, not by days, but by amount of anxiety.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Arguing in favor of the four-day workweek, we have Kelvin Yap, who I just learned worked a 40-hour workweek in the last three days.

Kelvin Yap:
Don’t recommend it, but I am happy to be here.

Christine Dela Rosa:
And debating Kelvin today and coming out against the four-day workweek, here’s Marshall Walker Lee who told me he has an idea to pitch.

Marshall Walker Lee:
I’ve been thinking about this for a while. Kelvin, Christine…what do you think? A zero-day workweek?

Kelvin Yap:
Sign me up. This debate is over.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Okay. Countering opinion…it is just beginning! Let’s at least start with a little context. The four-day workweek: It’s become a hot topic in workplaces around the world, but people are applying it in different ways. Some are pushing 40 hours into four days, while some are cutting the work week down to 32 hours. And some companies are decreasing pay while others are keeping full-time salaries going. But specifics aside, is the four-day workweek worth a shot? As we always do, let’s start on the pro side. So Kelvin, tell us, why should we move to a four-day workweek?

Kelvin Yap:
Thanks Christine. Look, my opening gambit here, we need a retrospective on the working week and I think the four-day workweek is a stepping stone for us to kind of rethink and try new ways of working. Let’s be real, and I think everyone here can agree – employees today are overworked and it’s obvious that something has to change to avoid this burnout. Even for me personally, I suffered from burnout myself late last year. I had to take a few weeks off work, work graciously gave me the time off, but I was really suffering from the amount of hours I was working from home, compounded by the pandemic. And it really took its toll mentally and physically on me. And it’s been a long time coming and I’m slowly getting over it, but my story isn’t a unique one. Everyone has their own stories to kind of tell.

Kelvin Yap:
And so many people have similar stories. Working more hours from home, feeling totally overworked, and really struggling to set aside time off on a two-day weekend. And frankly, I think it’s ridiculous that we’re still working the five day, 40-hour workweek. We’ve been working the same legal work week since Franklin D. Roosevelt amended the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1940. That was 82 years ago. Think about how much has changed in that time in the world, but the workweek hasn’t. And what’s interesting to think about is that, at its time, the 40-hour workweek was kind of revolutionary.

Kelvin Yap:
During the industrial revolution in the 1800s, workers were suddenly working extremely long hours. Sometimes six days, over 70 hours a week, and they realized this just wasn’t sustainable. So they fought it. Workers successfully lobbied for the luxury of working 10 hours a day…so 60 hours a week. And over the course of a few decades and some technological innovations, they realized this wasn’t the best schedule either. Henry Ford famously reduced Ford’s factory hours to eight hours a day in the 1920s and saw a huge spike in productivity. And eventually this eight-hour schedule caught on and was written into law, giving us the five-day, 40-hour workweek we know and, quite frankly, loathe today.

Kelvin Yap:
We’ve had so much technological innovation of the past a hundred years, tools that promise to make us work faster and smarter. So why are we still working basically the same number of hours? I think we should allow workers to take some of that time back and reap the benefits of these technological advancements. In fact, I’d argue we’re working even more hours than we were then because we don’t clock out anymore. I know I rarely work just 40 hours in a week. How about you two?

Marshall Walker Lee:
No comment.

Christine Dela Rosa:
For me, I’ll be honest, I have a pretty balanced work week now. But when I first started working, the nine-to-five was the bare minimum. Meaning if you were a committed worker, you showed up for extra hours.

Kelvin Yap:
Exactly.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Boo.

Christine Dela Rosa:
I know, I know.

Kelvin Yap:
Looking at this history tells me a couple of things. First, the workweek we know today is arbitrary. It isn’t innate. We just made up this five-day schedule and stuck with it. And secondly, when we realize things aren’t working, we can change them. So I think it’s time for a change. And if we look around the world, we can see that many other countries and companies agree it’s time to try something new. For example, Microsoft Japan ran a really successful four-day trial where they reported 40% increased productivity and a 24% reduction in their electricity bill.

Kelvin Yap:
There have been successful trials happening around the world in Belgium, Iceland, New Zealand, Ireland, and even the UK. This tells me people around the world agree: work life balance is more important than ever. And letting workers take back some of the ‘life’ part of that balance means they’re more productive in the ‘work’ part. So I think the four-day workweek is the next evolution. I’d even go as far as to say that the four-day workweek is one small step for man, one giant leap for the future of work.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Houston, I have a problem with that joke.

Kelvin Yap:
Come on.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Okay. Okay. For real though, I hear you. It’s not like we’re literally saying the four-day workweek is the answer, but maybe it’s the answer to shaking things up so that we’re not always doing the status quo.

Kelvin Yap:
Exactly.

Christine Dela Rosa:
I like it. Marshall, how do you feel about that? How does that compare to your zero-day workweek idea?

Marshall Walker Lee:
Well if Microsoft Japan went from five days to four, and it increased productivity and decreased energy consumption, then why not three…and then two? I think we’re on track for the zero-day workweek. Alright so lots to respond to…but first Kelvin, I just want to make sure I’m understanding you correctly. Is it fair to say that you’re arguing that burnout is the main reason why we would switch to a four-day workweek?

Kelvin Yap:
I think it’s a big reason. Yeah.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Okay, great. Because I want to contend that in many companies, the four-day workweek is actually going to make burnout worse.

Kelvin Yap:
Ooh, spicy.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Alright. So now is a great time to introduce my guest. Her name is Abigail Marks, and Kelvin, you’re going to love this, she is a professor of the Future of Work at Newcastle University Business School.

Abigail Marks:
Whilst in principle, I think that the four-day working week would be a fantastic thing for everybody. I think that the reality is a big challenge. So what we’ve seen is some employers putting five days worth of work into four days, because clearly they don’t want to lose working hours, working time. Now with a workforce that is already overburdened…that is going to be further detrimental to employees. Many of us work hours and hours of unpaid overtime a week in order to be able to do our jobs. Then that fifth day of work may end up just being unpaid overtime. And that’s my great fear about the four-day working week.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Okay, so here is an unpleasant dose of reality. If you are working five days a week, and you’re totally burned out, and you have enough waste in your week that you can cut a whole day out without affecting productivity, then frankly, you are working on a very badly managed team. So if you’re reducing time, but not workload, then really you’re just condensing the work and the burnout into four days instead of five. And if work is making us sick, then the four-day workweek is going to be like taking a stronger dose of the thing that is making us feel bad. Have you guys heard of Parkinson’s law? It’s that idea that a job will fill up whatever amount of time you devote to it.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Yup.

Marshall Walker Lee:
I think the same thing goes for burnout. Burnout is a psychological phenomenon that will fill up whatever container we put it in, whether that’s five days or four. And that should be a signal that’s telling us that the problem is not the amount of hours or the amount of days that we’re working, it’s something else. Now, right now you might feel good if, say you have a long weekend for a holiday, but that’s a cognitive illusion. What you’re feeling there is the difference between four days and the five days you normally work. If you implement a four-day workweek, after a while, it might take a couple of weeks, it might take a couple of months; that feeling of the difference will wear off and you’ll revert to your emotional mean, your emotional baseline. And you’ll be just as fed up, just as burnt out with four days as you were with five. And not every job can be done in a four-day workweek. My guest, Abigail, is a university professor, right? And she said, it’s just not plausible for her to fit her workload into a four day container.

Abigail Marks:
I have never done a four-day workweek. It’s something, as a parent, I’ve toyed with…if I reduce my hours to say 80%. And then I look at my colleagues who are on a four-day workweek and they seem to be squeezing five days of work into four days. I really have 60 hours of work a week. Currently, I try and squeeze it into about six or seven days. So trying to squeeze it into four days would be absolutely impossible.

Marshall Walker Lee:
So if our goal is really to solve for burnout, then I don’t think that shortening the workweek by an arbitrary amount of time and squishing all of our work into fewer days is going to be a solution. I think the better approach is to have flexibility in the workweek. You can work longer one day and then take the following afternoon off to help your kid with a project or to go to an exercise class. That to me is a better solution than chugging coffee and skimping on sleep just to push through four intense 10-hour days so that you can have a luxurious three-day weekend. When all you’re doing is catching up on all the things that you couldn’t do during your intense four-day sprint. When workers have the freedom and the autonomy to work when they’re energized, when they’re focused, and then to stop when they need to stop, I think that they stop pushing past their limits and they stop burning out.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Got it. So what I think I’m hearing is a question of whether the four-day workweek is better for burnout, or if it’s just squeezing five busy days into four. I hear y’all on both sides. Kelvin, what do you think about Marshall’s idea that flexibility is better than the four-day workweek?

Kelvin Yap:
So I disagree with his last point. I don’t think flexibility is the solution to burnout we might hope it is. We need the structure of a mandated day off if we really want people to work less. It’s like the unlimited vacation policies some companies have adopted. It’s a great promise, but in reality, these companies find their workers actually end up taking less time off. Or think about working out…you can sign up for a class at a gym or have an exercise bike at home you can use any time. For me, a bike at home just becomes an expensive clothing rack. I need the pressure of a class, with a set time and a teacher yelling at me to really get going.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Me too.

Kelvin Yap:
If you want to help employees who are burnt out work less, sure, you offer them a flexible schedule. But in my experience, that can balloon into five long days and maybe even work over the weekend. Now, I want to bring in my guest. I had a lovely conversation with Kath Blackham. She’s the CEO of VERSA, an AI technology company built in Melbourne, Australia. At VERSA, they’ve been running a four-day workweek since 2018, and have seen productivity and profit gains during that time. She even said in their first year, profits tripled. They take Wednesdays off and work longer hours for the four work days, and have seen huge success with that model. But before that, they actually tried to just offer the team a flexible schedule, like Marshall’s proposing. So I asked Kath what that looked like for her team.

Kath Blackham:
Yeah, it was mayhem. So the reason really that I came to this four-day week was because allowing everybody to have complete flexibility means that you never know when you’re going to be with another person. We work in a very collaborative environment. And so we need to be together and working together; and managers need to be with their teams so that they can mentor them. And what I found is that some people were here on Mondays, some people weren’t, some people were here on Tuesdays.

Kath Blackham:
We had one guy that worked three days a week. He alternated the Monday and Thursday off. So no one ever knew when Skye was actually in the office and when he wasn’t. So because no one could remember “is it Tuesday…is it Thursday this week?” So I think that standardizing things makes it much easier for people just to show up when everybody else is going to be there. And it also means that you’re not getting emails all through the day because everybody else is working. So we all don’t work on a Wednesday. So there’s no pressure of looking at Slack and thinking, “Oh, I’m missing out on a conversation here because there is no conversation going on.”

Kelvin Yap:
So for folks who are interested in implementing a four-day workweek, what kind of considerations or advice would you give them as they embark on that journey?

Kath Blackham:
Yeah. So the first one would be that you have to lead from the top. So it was actually a piece of advice that my husband gave me when I first started this in 2018. He said to me, “you do realize that you are going to have to take Wednesdays off?” Because I was known for doing reasonably long hours myself. And that has actually been really good for me, as I can’t be seen to be working all day on a Wednesday when I’m expecting my team to take it off. So you have to lead from the top. If your boss is working five days a week, you will work five days a week. For sure.

Kelvin Yap:
So Kath says that structure does two things. It means everyone works the same schedule, which is crucial for collaboration. And secondly, because it’s mandated from the top down, it means workers really do work less hours than they did with flexibility.

Marshall Walker Lee:
So the workers at VERSA are working the same amount of hours. Productivity went up and profits went up – did burnout and stress go down, did you ask?

Kelvin Yap:
Actually it did go down. So they do regular surveys, just like we do with our TIP surveys. And it showed that, just in general, employee happiness went up over that time too. They’re starting with longer days for those four days, but they’re trying to eventually get to a point where they reduce those hours too; but it’s hard when it’s client facing. So they’re just trying to figure things out, which is interesting.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Yeah. Interesting.

Kelvin Yap:
Kath found that she had to lead from example. That if she didn’t show that she was living by this idea of having the four-day workweek and working those hours, none of her employees would follow suit. It comes down to this idea that, sure you can have the ultimate flexibility. I think that’s the ideal world everyone wants to live in and be in. But when you are beholden to folks who, quite frankly, pay you money and keep you employed, you’re always trying to follow suit. And if they aren’t showing that they are also taking care of their mental health, it’s really hard for you to kind of follow as well.

Marshall Walker Lee:
And this might be our deepest point of disagreement, Kelvin. Because I see the wisdom in what you’re saying, however, I am not a big believer in top down structures. And I think that they often produce negative effects that get dispersed throughout the system. So instead, I think we need to empower workers. We need to give them the autonomy to have more control over how they work. People should feel like they can go to their manager and say, “I’m working too many hours”, “I’m burned out”, “I need less on my plate.” Or even better, the workers can have the freedom and the flexibility to just make those changes themselves without ever asking for permission.

Kelvin Yap:
So to say that the power to make those decisions around when to work is in the hands of employees, I feel is false because there are negative repercussions for taking those decisions and that action…right? If a company doesn’t provide you the opportunity and that structure to say, “I am not going to work this long”… If I were to go to my manager and say, “I’m overworked. I’m reducing my hours,” what do you think the repercussions are going to be in terms of my output, how I’m viewed by my team, my potential to be promoted, to earn more money – all very important things in my life? That’s why for me, yes, I bristle at the idea that everything has to be mandated and it has to come top down. But in situations where there are serious negative repercussions for looking after your mental wellbeing, without the support of your organization or the company you work for, that’s where I would strongly disagree, right. It has to come from the top. I would rather have the pressure to say, do less work than the pressure to say, do more work, right?

Marshall Walker Lee:
Maybe, but maybe not. I think that some people identify so deeply with their work that removing a day from their schedule might actually make them feel lost or guilty or unproductive. A New Zealand company called Perpetual Guardian ran a four-day workweek experiment, and some of the employees actually reported struggling to figure out what to do with the day off. It can be stressful to work less when we’re socialized to put work at the center of our identity. Think about it, work is the first thing you talk about at a party. It’s the reason why, in the Western English-speaking world, we have last names like Taylor and Sawyer and Smith. For hundreds of years, work has been at the center of who we are.

Kelvin Yap:
Wait, wait, wait. My last name is Yap and I talk a lot. Holy crap. Mind blown. Sorry, go ahead, Marshall. I just got distracted.

Marshall Walker Lee:
So I think this is a larger problem and it requires a larger solution. We need a total mindset shift, not an extra day off. And one way to accomplish this is to stop focusing on the hours or the days that you work. Instead, we need to focus on the outcomes of our work.

Marshall Walker Lee:
So that’s really what we should be focusing on when we design our workdays and our workweeks, right? if the amount of outcomes that you’re being asked to produce is too burdensome, too difficult, then you need to adjust the demands being made on you, not the hours in and the hours out. So a report produced by Gallup called “Employee Burnout: Causes and Cures” found that employees who strongly agree that they always have too much to do, are more than twice as likely to experience burnout either very often or always. And my contention here is that in four days, you can be just as likely to have too much to do. So Kelvin, your guest’s company takes Wednesdays off, right? And they work longer days on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday?

Kelvin Yap:
Yeah, slightly longer.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Okay. Well, if we’re optimizing for outcomes, that’s not necessarily going to be the best strategy. Research shows us that the optimal workday for most people is only five hours long. That’s about how much productivity each of us has in us in any given day. So that’s, let’s say 9:00 AM to 2:00 PM. If we’re really thinking about what’s best for productivity, maybe we should think about shorter bursts of work instead of the classic eight-hour workday or the 10-hour workday. If you are going to be working four longer days, a lot of that time is going to be unproductive. But I want to make it clear, I’m not necessarily advocating for a five-hour workday. I’m just advocating for a workweek and, in general, way of working that is focused on the outcomes of what we do, not by the hours that it takes us to do it; or the amount of time we spend showing up at work.

Christine Dela Rosa:
So Kelvin, you argue that the four-day workweek provides structure, and that’s why it’s effective. Marshall, you’re basically advocating against structure altogether. So Kelvin, what do you think about having a work week not shaped around hours or days at all?

Kelvin Yap:
I have so much I want to say about that because I agree, we need to look at the outcomes. But as I made clear when I talked about structure, I think there’s real value in having full days without any work. I personally like to cordon off days that are just for my life. Bike rides, walks along the beach, candle at dinners. Just time to be me.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Sounds lovely.

Kelvin Yap:
And what if we can get the same outcomes and have three days off instead of two? I mentioned before that Kath said her company saw huge profit and productivity gains when they started the four-day workweek. And they’re not alone. So many trials have found similar results, but there’s another benefit for employers to take on the four-day workweek: retention.

Kelvin Yap:
They call it the great resignation. And in our conversation, my guest Kath called it the great reshuffle because those employees are going somewhere else. They’re choosing where they want to work. There’s been this big power shift where workers are realizing they’ve been working too much, too hard, and quite frankly, they’re voting with their fate. The four-day workweek is not generosity on the part of employers; it’s actually pragmatic. Turnover is expensive. Hiring is expensive. So it is worth doing whatever it takes to keep the employees you have around. And the four-day workweek is just one way of doing that. A survey of over a thousand Americans from SimpleTexting found that nearly three quarters of respondents said they’d consider leaving their current job if they were offered a position that only worked four days a week. Employers should take note of this trend and use it to differentiate themselves to attract talent. Give employees a day back and in exchange, give employers a happier, healthier, more productive workforce that’s not itching to walk out the door.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Okay. So I do agree, Kelvin, that the four-day workweek is potentially one way to do that. But not everybody is going to be interested in working for a company with a four-day workweek. I personally would not. Now you might, but I think ultimately what we need is options for employees. Some people will be more drawn to a company that allows you to structure your work in whatever way is best for you with less mandated top down control. I say, let’s run a whole by inch of experiments and find out what’s the best way of working.

Kelvin Yap:
I get where you’re coming from.

Marshall Walker Lee:
That’s very generous. Kelvin. You know what, I think this is a great time to drill into the question of who the four-day workweek affects and who benefits from it. I got my first job the summer I turned 16. When I was about 25 was probably the first time I was working as a copywriter full time for the first time. Now in between 16 and 25, here’s some jobs that I did: I was a car detailer, I was a dishwasher, a waiter, a cashier, a ticket taker, a delivery driver, a line cook, a house painter, an electrician’s apprentice, a used book buyer, a customer service specialist, and a teacher.

Kelvin Yap:
Jack of all trades. I love it.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Would any of those jobs be eligible for the four-day workweek?

Kelvin Yap:
In general? Probably not.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Right. And that’s because the four-day workweek is not feasible for most people. And it’s not feasible for most jobs. I’d actually like to bring my guest Abigail Marks back in at this point because this is an issue that she brought up about the four-day workweek.

Abigail Marks:
I think there is a certain group of workers that would be privileged by the four-day working week. Yes, some great examples of four-day working week in hospitality and manufacturing. But for the most part, it’s white collar office workers, it’s government workers. It’s really those workers where it’s possible to take a day out of their work. And that, therefore, makes it potentially discriminatory to people in the gig economy, platform workers, those really low wage workers who probably on an hourly basis are not going to get the salaries that they require. So I think it would need a really significant change in society for it to be universally sustainable.

Marshall Walker Lee:
So I think that if the debate we’re having today is really just about how a tiny fraction of technology and knowledge workers can have an additional benefit accrue to them that doesn’t accrue to the rest of society; we should pause and seriously reflect on how comfortable we all feel pursuing that.

Kelvin Yap:
I think we’re touching on a larger discussion that probably deserves its own debate. But I don’t see why we can’t do both. Like why can’t we continue to look at ways we can improve what the working week looks like for all manner and type of employees, and all manner and type of industries?

Marshall Walker Lee:
Sure. I think that’s fair. And generally, I’m not someone who says that if we know that there is something good we could do, we shouldn’t do it if it doesn’t affect everyone equally. So if I believe that the four-day workweek was going to be an effective solution to the problems that we’re discussing like burnout, then I would probably be in favor of it. But even if we’re only talking about knowledge workers, there are so many situations where it’s still nearly impossible. I mean if your business is client facing, that’s going to mean that you’re either inconveniencing your clients, asking them to adjust to your schedule; or more likely, you’re still going to have to serve those clients when they want to be served. And some of you will end up working that fifth day anyways. And the same thing goes for teachers and doctors and firefighters.

Kelvin Yap:
I get it. It’s not for everyone, but setting boundaries with clients isn’t impossible. Not to bring up Kath again, but her company communicates with clients on a Tuesday and Thursday; and their client base knows Wednesday is a day off.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Okay. But not everybody can do that. It’s also a problem if you’re collaborating across time zones. We’re having a conversation right now while you’re in Australia, Kelvin, and I’m in the States. Christine and I are in different time zones in the States. Our work weeks only overlap four days already, so if I drop a day from my work week, that means that as a team, we’re actually losing two days. So I think the four-day workweek might work in certain circumstances. If you’re a knowledge worker, if your team is highly autonomous, if you’re all co-located in the same time zone, and if you’re not client facing; but I’m not convinced that applies to most teams.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Kelvin, you suggested earlier that the five-day workweek is arbitrary. And I totally agree, but that arbitrary choice has been cemented for over 80 plus years into the way that we work and the way that our society operates. For example, childcare is scheduled around the typical workweek. So if you’re suddenly pulling four longer days, that becomes an issue for people like myself, who send kids to childcare and for the workers who supply us with the childcare. Making a change to the four-day workweek for more groups than just this select little portion of knowledge workers would require a pretty seismic shift in the way that we organize, not just our work, but everything we do. And I just don’t think that most of these trials are taking that into account.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Alright. We have covered a lot of ground today. I came into this conversation with some bias, because I personally enjoy a flexible schedule, as you said and know, Marshall. However, Kelvin, you poked some holes in the idea of a flexible work week where sometimes a lack of workweek boundaries means my brain has to be on all the time. I also realize that the four-day workweek really isn’t doable for all teams, but for those that can, I think maybe it’s a good practice to experiment with. But it doesn’t have to be the option, so long as you’re trying to improve the way people work – or at least that’s what I’m going to tell my team. Which means, for the purpose of this debate, Marshall, I declare you the winner!

Marshall Walker Lee:
And I’m taking tomorrow off to celebrate.

Kelvin Yap:
Oh, of course you will.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Well, it’s obvious that we add some opinions on this. But I believe divergent opinions can make the workplace even stronger. So if you’re interested in checking out some topics to align with your team on, head to atlassian.com/teams-perceptions. Until next time folks, this is Work Check, an original podcast from Atlassian.