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Now it's official: 4 working days a week is good for everyone - Walla! Business and Consumerism

2019-12-05T06:23:27.744Z


Since the 1950s, politicians have been making promises to move to a short working week. Meanwhile, companies that reduce weekly or daily work hours are reporting an increase ...


Now it's official: 4 working days a week are good for everyone

Since the 1950s, politicians have been making promises to move to a short working week. Meanwhile, companies that have reduced weekly or daily work hours are reporting increased productivity

Office (Photo: shutterstock)

Office staff meeting (Photo: ShutterStock)

In September 1956, then-Vice President Richard Nixon appeared in the Republican Party election campaign and promised Americans a four-day work week. "In the not too distant future," said those who would later become US president, Americans "can live a fuller family life" with just four working days a week. Two weeks ago, Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn staged a televised confrontation for the kingdom election And promised the British public a four-day work week by 2030 only if they chose Labor. In the seven decades that passed between the two politicians' statements, the idea of ​​shortening the working week came and went, and returned to public consciousness and neglected.

But this situation may change. Not just because of politicians 'promises, but because of employers' demands and the changing nature of work in the digital age. Already, much of modern work, especially those related to information processing, requires full concentration and creativity, which experts believe may be maximized by significantly reducing working hours and making related changes. Whether it is reducing working hours to five or six hours a day or shortening the work week to four days - "less is more" is a mantra that has been heard in recent months more and more in the context of work efficiency in the near future.

In recent weeks, for example, the economic press is full of reports on the results of an experiment conducted by Microsoft in Japan, which included shortening the work week. Workers in Japan are known throughout the world for their many hours of work, and several communicated cases of employees who have died as a result of overwork involving malnutrition, exhaustion and dehydration have caused a stir in the country in recent years. Last summer, the American software company decided to carry out a one-month pilot, which included shortening the four-day work week instead of the country's top five today.

The results were surprising. What was supposed to be a project that would increase work-life balance actually boosted the efficiency and productivity of the work itself. Every Friday, last August, Microsoft offices in Tokyo were closed. Employees were paid in full on this day. To counter the reduction in total working hours, the company announced that every hour of the week's remaining week would be reduced to half an hour, and encouraged employees to communicate directly on mobile messages rather than multi-authored e-mails or appointments. The result was that, compared to the previous year's performance metrics that month, employee efficiency and performance jumped 40%, in addition to a 23% savings in electricity spending that summer.

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The phones stay out of the office

Cal Newport was not surprised. The American researcher who wrote the book Deep Work and titled "Guru of Work Productivity," published an opinion article in the New York Times, which claimed that the so-called Knowledge Work required by growing sections of the population is changing the job, and it is appropriate. For five-hour work days, the maximum is concentrated, or to shorten the work week to four days. The number of working hours may be diminishing, he writes, but the focus and creativity are rising, and as a result the efficiency of digital workers in the new age.

Newport mentioned the fact in a small technology consulting firm in Germany called Rheingans Digital Enable, where new owner, Lassa Reigns, decided with the company two years ago to reduce daily working hours from eight to five, but to keep pay levels the same and social conditions. "They weren't sure if I was kidding them," the owner told The Wall Street Journal, "but I was completely serious."

Please note that the five hours required by employees are full - the phones remain in the files outside the office, the email is limited to only a few times, you are not allowed to log on to Facebook or other social networks, and corridor calls are not well received. Workers start at eight and can walk at one. According to the owner, employees provide the same 25-hour concentrated output as the 40-hour supply that is full of distractions and waste of time. The benefit, of course, is that they spend the "wasted hours" with the family or as part of their leisure time, which contributes to their health and chances of continuing to work, and possibly their work efficiency.

"We've all experienced it: We sit in the office, without energy, read newspapers or scroll through Facebook. We need small breaks to reload, but we can't really do that," said the owner. "My idea was to concentrate only on the first five hours. Of today and then just leave and enjoy a significant break. "

Newport, a work efficiency expert, writes that this way companies can take advantage of "deep work" that lasts only a few hours. "This is a type of work that requires full focus and pushes us to the limit of creativity and thought," and is essential for many of the works, such as writing, programming, designing and more. "It is hard to maintain that level of efficiency for more than three or four hours a day," he said in an interview with Harvard Business Review, "but this time of deep, continuous, uninterrupted work is all we need to change efficiency. our".

Continuation of historical trend

If the working week is shortened, or the working hours are shortened on their own days, it will be a continuation of a historical trend. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, 12-hour workdays were standard, and included children and boys. From there, working hours narrowed and gradually diminished - in part due to determined labor union struggles that began to emerge - from 80 hours a week to 70, until the US Congress adopted a law that sets the working week at 40 hours a week in the 1940s. Since then the situation has not changed much, and the gap between the country where the most hours of work per week in the Union (Greece, 42) and Germany (35), for example, stands at seven hours a week. "There is only one problem with this number in 2019," wrote Waird magazine, which also devoted an article to the topic - "It is impossible to work for eight hours in many jobs that many of us do."

Those who support or reduce work hours appear to be the employees themselves. A large part of them believe that they can do the same amount of work in a reduced number of hours. A comprehensive survey conducted by the Workforce Institute in eight countries last year found that a four-day work week is the "ideal time period" defined by the employees themselves to achieve the required productivity but also maintain work-life balance. Half of the respondents, which included workers in the West but also in India and Mexico, said they could do their job in less than five hours a day, just as efficiently.

In this regard, Forbes recently published the success story of an Austrian PR firm (eMagnetix), which has reduced the number of weekly business hours from 40 hours to 30 hours, and experienced a boom in business. In addition to the fact that an overwhelming majority of employees felt healthier than before the change, and everyone was exceptionally pleased with the reduction in working hours, the company became highly sought after in the job market, and the number of job applicants jumped tenfold. Perhaps more importantly, while the company was expecting some decline in profits, that did not happen, and sales even grew by 40%. The company has expanded significantly since it adopted the work week in this format.

Not for everyone

Of course, the ability to achieve more in fewer hours is limited to organizations and companies where concentration and creativity are important, where work is task-based, and not suitable for those providing services or requiring high-tech or availability jobs. Some organizations in the UK have looked into the possibility of doing so, but abandoned it. One of them, the Wellcome Foundation, which is engaged in promoting scientific breakthroughs, including in the field of human fertility, ruled last month that "shortening the work week cannot be done equally in all departments," so she opted to prevent such an experiment.

Brian Krupp, a Gartner consultancy expert, told The Wall Street Journal in this regard that the short working day trend is part of the current trend in the job market where flexibility - workplace, hours and character - is most important to employees, sometimes more intoxicating. He confirmed that research shows that most employees are only effective for four or five hours on an average work day, so reducing the time they are in the workplace from eight or nine hours a day does not necessarily hurt companies, or their productivity. Maybe the other way around.

Source: walla

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