Pictured Above: Best MBA project? Taking a day “off” to shoot a music video! (The other stuff still got done – just saying…)

Click here for Part 1: Introduction
Click here for Part 2: Going Remote

“I don’t care what hours you keep so long as the work gets done.”

If you work an office job, as I do, then you’ve probably heard some variation of the quote above. Not everyone agrees with it, mind you, because there are still some organizational cultures that clearly prioritize hours logged and physical presence as vital keys to success. And there’s a good reason for that. When it comes to measuring the productivity or output of knowledge workers there’s a lot more ambiguity than there is for a job that produces a uniform, tangible outcome. 

An Amazon distribution centre worker, as you may have heard, is measured (some would suggest aggressively) on their ability to hit certain targets. For instance, the number of packages they pick and prepare for shipment – bathroom breaks be damned! However, it’s not as clear-cut when it comes to your average marketer, accountant or even salesperson. Don’t believe me? Ask someone who worked at Best Buy in the late-2000s or early 2010s. 

Hours Worked ≠ Productivity

Now you may be thinking, “wait, salespeople are easy to measure.” Perhaps, but is a veteran salesperson who works four hours a day and consistently hits their numbers cheating the company? What about their colleague who inherited a severely neglected and economically depressed territory but works 10 hours a day to hit 80% of their target? If you have to cut headcount, which of these two gets the door first?

This is why it’s critical to identify and measure the most important output(s) and not overvalue one simple input. Inputs alone usually don’t tell the full story, nor does focusing on a single output. Besides revenue, what do their margins look like? Perhaps the salesperson who’s always hitting quota is doing so because their deals are pushing the company’s operational resources to the brink. They might be committing a classic sales sin – overpromising. Also, are they bringing in new business or simply renewing existing customers? How many warm leads do they have in their pipeline? And what do their coworkers say about them?

The reality is that hours logged and availability to the job over everything else are poor metrics, and we know that. Research suggests that during an eight-hour workday the average worker is actually “productive” for about three of those hours. At a glance, it would appear most of us are dogging it but here’s why that’s not necessarily true.

First, we spend far too much time (60% by one estimate) on “work about work” (e.g., meetings, calls, emails, Slack, etc.). Second, it’s hard to accurately predict what’s going to eventually count as “productive” in most white-collar settings. Projects get cancelled, day-to-day “fires” demand attention and some ideas that looked great on paper simply never gain traction despite people’s best efforts. Ultimately, work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Unfortunately, not all of it produces value.

The Four-Day Workweek

This brings us to all the recent talk around four-day workweeks. Last year Iceland announced that the four-day workweek trial they ran between 2015 and 2019 (pre-pandemic even!) had been deemed an “overwhelming success.” In most of the workplaces that participated in the trial, productivity either remained the same or improved despite the shorter workweeks.

Earlier this year San Francisco-based tech unicorn Bolt announced their permanent shift to a four-day workweek following a successful three-month trial. While doing so, they also admitted that the change wasn’t without its share of (surmountable) challenges along the way. Now the UK has decided to get on board with this experiment in a big way. In June 2022 they kicked off a four-day workweek pilot involving approximately 70 companies and 3,000 workers. It’s thought to be the largest scale four-day workweek experiment to date.

Somewhat hilariously, we probably should have been able to predict these outcomes. In 1914 the Ford Motor Company shocked the business world by doubling wages to $5 per eight-hour workday. At the time, 10- to 12-hour days were the norm across the automotive industry and daily wages were closer to $2.50 despite the longer hours. They took things one step further in 1926 and formally reduced their workweek from six days down to five. The 40-hour workweek was born (technically not true, but this is generally considered the tipping point, at the very least). And the result? Ford’s profits nearly doubled over the next two years.

What comes next?

As you may have already noticed, the fight for talent has become hyper-competitive. Companies are in serious competition with each other to fill their collective surplus of open positions. Roughly 2.4 million Americans above expected retired during the first 18 months of the pandemic, but in an interesting turn of events, about a million of those people have since returned to work in the last 12 months. High among the many reasons why is flexibility. Even the recent economic turbulence hasn’t stopped that momentum…yet.

Employer accommodations, whether it’s the location (e.g., remote vs. office), time commitment (e.g., four-day vs. five-day), and often both, are now more negotiable than they were before the pandemic. With such a tight labour market, flexible hours or shorter workweeks are eye-catching levers that organizations can and sometimes must pull to attract talent. Another positive sign is that an increasing number of employers appear to be taking the mental wellness of their employees more seriously of late. While there’s still work to be done, more and more are offering robust employee assistance programs and no-questions-asked days off (i.e., mental health days).

It stands to reason that companies were always going to experiment with more flexible working arrangements even without a pandemic. In the previously mentioned four-day workweek pilot at Bolt, 84% of employees reported higher productivity levels and an improvement in their work-life balance. However, with those new freedoms come new responsibilities.

Flexible work arrangements will likely increase each employee’s obligation to carefully document their impact. Traditionally, people get some benefit of the doubt just for showing up to the office each day. Shorter weeks or remote work removes at least part of that benefit. Realistically, there has to be a trade-off in exchange for more flexibility. That may mean fewer (or zero) days in the office hearing stories about your coworker’s dachshund (haha, sorry…) in exchange for some form of routine (weekly, monthly, etc.) report summarizing what you did and why you did it. Not loving the sounds of that? Another alternative is getting straight-up spied on. And that seems like a situation best avoided. 

Final Thoughts

Flexible work hours, including four-day workweeks, will continue to grow in popularity as organizations perfect the art of implementing these structures without interruption to their customers or other key stakeholders. So long as future trials continue to demonstrate no losses in productivity (maybe with a little bit of help from what’s discussed in the next section) while simultaneously increasing employee wellness metrics, then why wouldn’t more organizations make the switch? Ultimately, money talks, and there’s already data to suggest that less may really be more here. A win-win if you will.

A century ago we transitioned to the five-day workweek and, for the most part, our economy has done perfectly fine ever since. If anything, we now have more disposable time to pair with our disposable income and thereby support a wider variety of businesses. So, following in the footsteps of Ford, which major corporation of our era will forever affix their brand name beside the four-day workweek in the history books? 

But if we’re working less, does that mean… Robots might take our jobs?