Hi,
Earlier this week, when I wrote a column demanding an overhaul of the modern workplace hurting and killing people with its toxic stress, the first response I got from a reader was let us all learn the "new way" from Finland. They were referring to breaking news that Sanna Marin, Finland’s prime minister, was planning to cut down the work week to just four six-hour days.
The news triggered much cheer and excitement on the internet, which has been desperate for something to celebrate amid all the talk of doom and destruction. "Is it the secret of happiness?" asked the Guardian. "Y’all ready to move?" asked one person on Twitter.
Alas, the fun didn’t last long. According to Bloomberg, Finland has since clarified that "a four-day week isn’t on the agenda" and "there hasn’t been any recent activity on the topic". In other words, it was fake news.
But what if the news were true? Would that have justified the enthusiasm with which it was greeted? As wonderful as more freedom from work sounds, I believe the answer is no.
More time at work may not harm you. More time at an oppressive workplace will
To be sure, shortening the work week is hardly a new idea. In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that technological advances and productivity improvements would make it possible for people to work 15-hour weeks. And as this BBC article points out: "In 1954, a German politician expressed excitement over the transition from a six-day work week to a five-day one: "Once we have the free Saturday … we will have time to exercise; we will visit the cinema, theatre or circus; we will breed rabbits, take our motorbikes and scooters to the countryside, and tend to our allotment gardens."
More recently, in 2018, New Zealand trust management company Perpetual Guardian trialled a four-day work week over two months for its 240 staff members. Microsoft Japan had the Work-Life Choice Challenge Summer 2019, giving its entire 2,300-person workforce five Fridays off in a row without decreasing pay. Both initiatives were said to have delivered fantastic results.
Despite such evidence, I had avoided prescribing a shortened work week as a magic solution for workplace problems in my column. The reason appears so simple to me that I am surprised we are still debating this: human beings get bored and dissatisfied easily. Four days sounds awesome compared to five days, but give us four days, and soon we will want three, two, or none at all.
On a more serious note, shorter work weeks, nap rooms at work, free salad – all of these tricks are utterly useless by themselves. Are you really telling me that four days of work is so much better than five days if you still have to deal with a bully for a boss and an oppressive, count-your-bathroom-breaks work culture?
Repeat after me: people don’t get sick just because they spend a lot of time doing something but because of what that time looks and feels like.
A quantitative fix to a qualitative problem
Moreover, trialling a shorter week for a week or a month is incomparable with implementing such a policy permanently. I’d be deeply suspicious of any kind of data coming out of such experiments.
At this point, it is hard to tell whether the companies that tried such exercises achieved anything beyond some positive press coverage. The BBC again reports the case of Treehouse, an online education company in Portland, Oregon, which had to abandon a four-day week and revert to the standard 40 hours. "Like many companies, Treehouse faced cutbacks and redundancies – and it was not a good look to have to lay off some workers while the rest continued to work four-day weeks." There are other such examples in the same article.
Then there is the question of identity associated with work. As much as people love to catch up over weekend beers and slam their evil employers, take away their identity cards and cubicles, and it would create a gaping void that isn’t too good for their mental health, either. More free time to raise rabbits and whizz around on motorbikes only makes sense when you have a tonne of privilege.
The fundamental problem in all this is that because management thinking is dominated by numbers and data, we spend too much energy finding quantitative solutions for qualitative problems. Hacking the work week to spare employees a few hours of agony does nothing to take away the root causes of the agony. Quite the contrary: it is basically an admission that the damage at the workplace is so bad that there is no point even trying to repair it. The only thing we can do is to stay away from it as much as we can.
As you can see, far from being a radical, revolutionary proposal, it is actually a rather defeatist line of thinking.
I perceive the same kind of defeatist fixation with numbers when people say building a healthy workplace is important because it helps improve productivity by 10, 20, 30, 40%. I mean, didn’t we get here primarily because the corporate vocabulary is obsessed with productivity?
Which is why I advocated that we urgently ditch the old language of business – where everything that is good and right is measured in terms of productivity and profit – and start thinking of a healthy workplace as what it is: a fundamental human right.
Some readers thought I was being "naive". I would like to win them over as I explore this subject further.
Do you believe fewer hours is a cure-all for our workplace peeves? Let me know.
Until next week, take care, and for peace of mind, don’t read too much news.
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