June 18, 2025 • 28 mins
Prof. Juliet Schor, author of Four Days a Week, shares how organizations can make the workplace work better
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
episode is going to be a longer one part of
the series where I interview fascinating people about how they
take their days from great to awesome, their expertise, and
any advice they might have for the rest of us.
So today I am delighted to welcome Juliette Shore to
the show. She's a professor at Boston College, the author
(00:32):
of several books, including The Overworked American and a new
one called Four.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Days a Week. So, Julie, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Thank you, great to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Yees, So why don't you tell our listeners a little
bit about yourself and your work.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
So I'm an economist originally, and I worked on issues
of work time. I was in the Harvard Economics department
when I sort of got intrigued by a sort of
theoretical error in a philosopher's book. I mean, it just
kind of a strange way to get into it, but
(01:06):
it got me looking at American work time, and I
was surprised to find that contrary to what everyone believed
would happen, and was happening. Americans were actually starting to
work more and more. So that book came out in
the nineteen nineties and it cataloged a couple of decades
of rising work time, high levels of stress, burnout, et cetera.
(01:30):
And since then I've done much more research on work
and work patterns, and in twenty twenty one, I was
invited to be the lead researcher for a path breaking
series of trials that ended up taking place all around
the world with companies who were giving their employees a
(01:53):
four day, thirty two hour work week, so not a
compressed with full pay, but with an attempt to try
and maintain their productivity. So a lot of the kinds
of things that go under the rubric of personal productivity
of course, that you work on and so forth. These
companies were trying to implement some of those ideas in
(02:16):
the workplace and the results have been phenomenal, like very
very successful, huge increases in people's well being and great
successes for the company.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
Well, let's talk.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
About that successes for the company, because you know, I
have many people here who are probably individual contributors listening
to this. Also people who are managing companies, running companies,
who are wondering like, Okay, I can see why, you know,
your average worker might enjoy having a four day week.
What's in it for the organizations?
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Like? Why were the organizations willing to try this out?
Speaker 3 (02:48):
Yeah? I think there's sort of two categories, and I
talk about these in the book. The founder of the
organization that ran the trials was an entrepreneur or in
New Zealand, a man named Andrew Barnes, and he tried
it at his own finance company. He called it the
one hundred eighty hundred, so one hundred percent of the
(03:09):
pay for eighty percent of the time. But he asked
his employees to all sign a contract saying they would
get one hundred percent of their work done in those
four days. He believed there was a lot of slack
in his organization, and many of the companies are in
that model. So what's in it for them is they're
able to maintain their productivity or maybe even increase it.
(03:32):
And we can get into a bit more about how
that happens. I think a key point of this is
although individuals do make changes in how they do things,
there's also a full organizational effort. I mean, often by
teams sometimes by the whole group together, and you know,
depending on size of organizations, to figure out what they're
(03:55):
doing that isn't efficient, you know, where they're wasting time,
where they putting a lot of time into low value activities,
et cetera. And so the organization maintains its productivity, but
it gets big well being impacts for its employees. And
(04:17):
that has multiple impacts. One is that often they report
better quality of work because people are rested, they're not
burning out, they are looking forward to coming to work
on Monday morning. Many of them take Fridays off, they
don't get the Sunday scaries, et cetera. So there's that
piece of it, but that also leads to the other
(04:40):
interesting phenomenon that I call the one hundred eighty eighties.
One hundred percent of the pay eighty percent of the work.
We're not asking you to do anything more. We're not
asking you to get more efficient. Why you're already crazy efficient.
You are a nurse in a hospital with no wasted time.
You're the chef ft a restaurant who's just working a
(05:02):
really long day and you've already optimized out anything time wasting.
But you're burned out and so you just need a
day off to recharge. And so for those companies or organizations,
they're stopping the bleeding of the burnout, the resignations, et cetera. So,
(05:26):
for example, with some of the nurses in our studies,
they rescinded resignation letters when they heard they were going
to get a four day week. And for these people
it's just life changing because they're kind of on the edge.
So it's a paradox I argue because it's the low
intensity organizations that could actually you know, they got a
(05:46):
lot of slack there and they're really high intensity that
at the beginning are sort of the early adopters here
where it's very easy to see how they might benefit.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Yeah, well, especially on that latter one, because what I
think a lot of people don't understand is the toll
that turnover takes on productivity. That you know, if you
have your five member team running at full tilt, that's great,
but when one of them leaves, you are suddenly not
running at full tilt until you can you know, hire replacement,
(06:18):
train that person. You know, for the first however much
time they are not you know, operating at where that
person was who left and you're also encouraging management costs
in training the person.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
And so from an organizational perspective, if you.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Can cut that at all, you boost productivity even if
the average person is working fewer hours.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Is that's what I'm hearing you say?
Speaker 3 (06:41):
Absolutely, Laura, I mean that is such an important point.
So I have a sort of deep dive into a
company where that was so interesting what happened. And the
book is both a lot of you know, kind of
statistical findings, but also those deep dives into individual companies
(07:04):
that represent different ways, strategies, experiences. So this one is
a global marketing company and advertising and marketing. They were
the person who ran the trial, the manager saying like
thirty to forty percent turnover in that industry. And so
(07:28):
what she figured out she did a lot of calculations
with their accounting people to figure out how much it costs.
But when she went the company, which is a lot,
and she said on her team, she had a fifty
seven person team, they're constantly onboarding, hiring, training, et cetera.
And when she put in the four day week, she
went to zero resignations, zero turnover. Okay, And that we
(07:52):
hear that from quite a few of our companies. And
then what was so fascinating about it was she began
to figure out, I can monetize this in my contracts.
So she put in, we get a bonus if no
one leaves the team, and the clients just couldn't believe
(08:13):
it because like table, yeah, and sure enough, and so
it's yeah, it's really I mean there's very cold, hard
cash here sitting on the table, lying on the lying
on the table, if you will, if you can stop
that those resignations in those high turnover places, and that's
(08:35):
why we're hearing from like social service agencies, restaurants, healthcare.
I mean, these are many of the places which have
had these big turnover problems in recent years. And you know,
of course advertising and marketing, there's a lot of a
lot of those kinds of companies in our sample.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
Absolutely, Well, we're going to take a quick ad break
and then I will be back with more from Juliette Shore. Well,
I am back talking with Juliette Shore, who's the author
of the new book Four Days a Week, looking at
the results of a broad experiment with a number of
(09:14):
organizations that experimented with a four day work week. So
Julie we were talking about very you know, intensely structured organizations.
We're reducing turnover had a positive benefit. Now we mentioned
that there's also some you know, organizations that have a
fair amount.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Of slack in how people are working.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
And I'm sure you and I have both seen the
time diaries of people at some organizations. Who are you know,
in meetings all day or who are you know, switching
applications frequently? You know as they're constantly interrupted? You know,
what's going on in those organizations and how are they
sort of thinking about becoming more productive instead of just
(09:54):
assuming that there's kind of an infinite number.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Of hours that you can you can put out a task.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
Yeah, so that's probably the more common kind of organization
among the hundreds that we have been studying. So for them,
I would say ground zero has been meetings, and that's
a kind of well known problem in these kinds of organizations.
(10:20):
So when a company joins one of these trials, there's
a they're sort of groups of companies doing it together
and they do two months of onboarding and what we
call work reorganization where we figure out with them, they
go through these trainings and so on for they get
(10:43):
peer mentors people who have done it before figure out
where they're wasting time. So meetings is a key place,
and a lot of them make their meetings more productive.
They reduce their numbers of meetings, and there's a you know,
there's like a huge amount of literature now on meetings
and sort of how they're affecting productivity in many organizations.
(11:06):
The flip side of that is the focus time. Because
of that distraction problem, so many of these organizations also
set times in the day when people will have focused
time and they shouldn't be bothered and so forth, and
there will be no meetings, et cetera. Other people can
do that sort of individually, but then there are other
(11:29):
sorts of things that they do to figure out how
to make it work. So in some of the manufacturing companies,
they do like a process engineering exercise where they go
through every stage of their process and figure out where
they wasting time. Where could they slot one thing one
task into a dead time with another task. If they
(11:51):
you know the brewery that I talk about in the book,
they have many different tasks going on it once. But
the same thing can be done in way call organizations
where you sort of follow the chain of decision making
or you follow you know, a form going through all
the steps, and so they do those sorts of things.
(12:12):
One interesting one at Kickstarter, which was the lead company
in our first US trial, was that they realized the
leadership team was not giving clear enough instructions to the programmers,
you know, when they wanted them to do something, and
they would get stuck or go down the wrong fork
(12:32):
for a while. So leadership team figured out how it
could make its intentions clearer to itself to begin with,
and then give better instructions to the programming teams and
then kind of just let them run with things. One
other thing really important in certain kinds of businesses. We
(12:55):
had a broadband provider that got a massive new contract
at the same time that they went to the four
day week, and we did in addition to all the
surveying we did before and after interviews with this group,
and when we came back to them, we were like, well,
how did you make it work? You had this huge
influx of business and mostly it was like dealing with
(13:19):
customer service problems, connecting and so forth. And what they
explained was, well, they finally got serious about documentation. They said,
first of all, no, the four day week is what
made it viable. Otherwise everybody would have burned out. But
they got serious about documentation something. And this is a
more general point, like if you don't put the time
(13:41):
in upfront to save you time later, you're going to
get overloaded. And so you know, their people had previously
been reinventing the wheel with customer service, but now they documented.
And that's a more general point to which I think
many of us, you know, don't do it, which is
you get some new piece of software, equipment, whatever, you
(14:03):
don't spend the time at the beginning learning how to
make it more efficient for you because you just want
to get going. And I call it the forcing mechanism
of the four day week because it forces you to
get more efficient earlier on.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Well, just in general, I think a lot of people
and probably organizations too, just don't treat time as valuable.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
And it's one thing.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
If you're paying somebody by the hour, because then obviously
you know how many hours they are working and there's
a you know, natural accountability on that. But for people
who aren't, there just isn't that accountability. It is why
you see one of these things. But with that I
think you mentioned in the book that it was harder
(14:47):
for managers though to adopt this sort of.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
Schedule, especially the scene, especially seniors. Yes, so what we
heard a bit more from them is more some of
them took that day off and that was it. So
I don't want to make it seem like none of
them were successful with this, but what some of them
(15:11):
would do is use it a little bit as a
catch up day because nobody else was working. So this
is another key thing.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
So you don't have any meetings.
Speaker 3 (15:21):
You don't have any meetings, and you don't have people
giving you work. And that's also an important principle when
companies think about how are you going to do this?
Is everybody going to be off on the same day,
because that's one way of making sure that people don't
just get overloaded when they come back because their coworkers
were putting more on their plate. They use it as
(15:42):
a catch up day, or they you know, they work
a little bit on that day. They can't take it
totally off. But part of what that means is they
don't have to do as much work on weekends and nights,
so they are getting a break. It's just a little
bit different number one, I did. She talked to me
about how she would work from home that day and
(16:05):
she'd feel free to put in laundry, pick up her daughter,
this than that, which on a regular work from home
day she wouldn't feel she could do that. And so
it was just it was a huge blessing to them
as well, even if they didn't manage to reduce by
the full eight hours that many of their.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
Co workers do.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Yeah, well, I wonder and I think you talk a
little bit about this, that there's some drifting toward this,
especially as you know, if you think about summer Fridays
or more, people are sort of working from home on Fridays,
not that they're not working.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
I mean, I want to put that out there. I'm
a big fan of working from home.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
People working from home generally are working, but they're probably
is a tendency to leave a little bit earlier on
a Friday, if it's a work from home day for instance.
Speaker 3 (16:46):
And we are seeing, yeah, this is great. I call
it the evolution of Fridays. We are seeing this showing
up in hard numbers, interesting numbers, like in finance numbers,
where like stock traders and other kinds of people, there's
less activity going on, or studies of business people responding
(17:08):
to surveys. And this is actually one of the interviews
of a guy a marketing the head of a marketing
company talk to me about how by taking Fridays off,
there really wasn't as much going off on Fridays anyway,
So Friday is no longer a sort of twenty percent
(17:30):
productivity day in lots of places. And then I you know,
I've got a lot of anecdotal stuff in there about
how things really have evolved to be different on Fridays,
and it's just it is evolving into less of a workday,
(17:50):
especially Friday afternoons.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Yeah, well, there's I mean, there's obviously some caveats here.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
I mean people are like, well, okay, four day's great,
how about three? How about two? You know, I mean
there's there's.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Some limits on this obviously, of how much productivity we
can wreak out of the ring out of the system.
And then also with that, one of the caveats being
that I imagine one of the things that makes this
extra weekday off useful is that places are open that
you could then go. I mean, one of the things
(18:19):
people are doing is they're doing their grocery shopping, or
they're going to the doctor, or they're you know, doing
those life maintenance things, which we couldn't then have every
place only open a certain limited number of days or
we'd lose that benefit.
Speaker 3 (18:32):
Oh absolutely. I mean there are many organizations in our
trials that are twenty four to seven organizations and they're
still twenty four sevens or that are five days. That
marketing person I was just talking about his company went
to half teams on Monday and Friday because they wanted
(18:56):
a full forty hour availability for their clients for example.
You know, another message of the book is that there
isn't a one formula for this, that each of these
companies sort of figures out what's going to work for
them based on their their business, their what their employees want,
(19:17):
you know a lot of different factors. But yeah, absolutely
you need to Uh, if you're an access business, good
chance you're going to keep that access.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
Yeah, yeah, that people are counting on that.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
We're going to take one more quick ad break and
then I will be back with more from Juliette Shore.
Speaker 3 (19:42):
Well.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
I am back talking with Juliette Shore who is the
author of the new book Four Days a week.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
So, Julia, we always like to.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Hear about how people manage their own personal productivity. I mean,
you're obviously, you know, leading research and writing books and
being a public intellectual about things like that, and I
I assume have duties at your university as well.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
Do you have any routines that make you more productive?
Speaker 3 (20:08):
It's funny you ask this, because I do. Just we
were just talking about the Friday evolving thing. I mean,
I often get asked when I wrote The Overworked American,
I was always asked how many hours a week do
you work? And at that point I was like the
poster child for needing a makeover by you, which was
(20:29):
I was in the office long, long hours, and many
of them were not productive.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
It was okay.
Speaker 3 (20:34):
The office was also my socializing place. I didn't have kids,
I wasn't married in those early days. So with this one,
of course, I get asked how many days a week
I work? And I always used to say, well, I
just work when I want and I don't work when
I don't feel like it, et cetera, et cetera. But
I noticed about two weeks ago someone asked me that
and I was like, you know, what Friday is evolving
(20:57):
away from a workday for me, so productivity. Yeah, So
I do think taking that Friday has really helped me.
I'm feeling pretty relaxed, despite you know, juggling a lot
of balls. When I am writing a book or articles,
I start first thing in the morning, after exercise, so
(21:21):
I have started a morning exercise routine. I do my
exercising first thing in the morning. I actually run exercise classes.
I'm not the teacher. I just put on the tape
and do the zoom room. But it means I have
that accountability to the other people who come. And then
I then I, you know, go trudge up to my
(21:44):
third floor and start writing. I do find that first
period of the day, the morning, is most productive. I
write until I just peter out. You know. If I'm
writing a book, for example, and that works really well
for me, I just do that. What are some of
my other tips? So I think those are the two
(22:06):
most important things, Like I have a dedicated place and
time for my most And you say that you made
that point about trying to do the hardest thing first.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
I always do that.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
Now with writing a book, I always start with my
hardest chapter and dedicated time, place, exercise routine. And then
I think also that point I started with just making
sure I have enough rest time and relaxation, and that
(22:38):
I'm not feeling like I work all the time and
I don't have time to do other things that I want.
I just I just you know, I'm lucky because I
control my own time basically, so I take as much
time non work time as I feel I want. And
that also makes the working so much easier because I'm
(23:00):
not feeling like, oh, I have to work all the time.
Occasionally during the semester when I'm teaching, I sometimes feel like, oh,
why am I working so much? But that's you know,
that's the part of my job I can't really control.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
Well, that comes with the territory, So dealing with people's
messages and questions all the time, I am sure in
that role. Well, I always ask guests something and man,
we can talk about the things maybe that you do
in your non working hours. What is something you have
done recently to take a day from great to awesome?
Speaker 3 (23:35):
The delayed Mother's Day celebration, so my favorite thing to
do is to take a bike ride. On a Sunday,
took a bike ride with my son, which was really wonderful,
and then went out with son and husband sadly daughters
on the other coast to our favorite vegetarian restaurant and
(23:58):
had an awesome meal and then watched a playoff basketball
game for my wonderful team that sadly lost, the Boston Celtic.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
We can guess where you are, and yes, sadly, well,
I'm not a I'm not a Boston fan myself, but
I understand, I understand the feeling and the Sixers here
have been a long string of disappointments lately, so yeah,
it's sure, you know, oh well.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Some yere some here and what are you looking forward
to now?
Speaker 3 (24:31):
So two big things. One is we are extending our
research into looking at the relationship between the four day
week and AI. So our hypothesis is that four day
week companies are better at adopting and using AI. There's
some survey evidence that suggests that might be true, and
(24:53):
we're we're going to be able to get some sort
of harder evidence about that. We now have companies all
around the world, hundreds of companies, tens of in the
you know, more than ten thousand employees that we can
go back to and find out what they're doing now,
so that's pretty exciting. And I also do a lot
(25:14):
of research on climate change and the impacts of working
hours on climate change and how countries or places I've
done research across the US too, that have reduced their
working hours actually also reduced their carbon emissions. So I've
got some new papers coming up on that too.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
I guess that would make sense.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
I mean, you know, if you're not driving to and
from work on Friday, that's at least one less time.
And then probably the you know, electronic activity that's that's
going on with that, that too fascinating. Yeah, well, the
AI thing, I mean, you know, people, there was always
the probably the idea that technology would be able to
reduce hours without reducing you know, lifestyle and product because
(25:54):
of the productivity statistics would still be high. I mean,
just real quick. I mean, this is it told separate topic.
But you think that that might finally be the case
with AI.
Speaker 3 (26:05):
Well, we don't know what's going to happen. I mean,
I have a chapter in the book on AI. The
first Industrial Revolution had tremendous productivity enhancing machinery and technology,
and it led to big increases in hours of work
and with AI. I just think we could go down
two paths. I mean, one is we could go down
(26:27):
a similar path in which what companies do is they
just lay off lots of workers and they buy that
AI and they use it more intensively, and the people
they have work more intensively, and that's it took a
long time to reverse that upward trend of hours from
the first Industrial revolution. That could happen with AI. The alternative,
(26:52):
and the one I argue obviously for in the book,
is we could actually use technology to reduce hours of
work and not not just lay people off, but actually
share out the work more equitably and reduce hours per job,
keep more and more, you know, people in work with
(27:13):
incomes and meaningful lives from that work. But we're gonna
have to that's gonna have to be a social choice
and not just something that where the companies just see
the incentive. We know, Microsoft just laid off a lot
of workers.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
Absolutely, so we'll see that's.
Speaker 3 (27:30):
Going to be a really bad social outcome.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
We will see how it plays out. Yeah, so we
do not know.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
Well, Julia, thank you so much for joining us. Thank
you to everyone for listening. If you have feedback about
this or any other episode, you can always reach me
at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. In the meantime,
this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's to making
the most of our time.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
Thanks for listening to Before or Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas,
or feedback, you can reach me at Laura at Laura
vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia.
For more podcasts from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app,
(28:21):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
episode is going to be a longer one part of
the series where I interview fascinating people about how they
take their days from great to awesome, their expertise, and
any advice they might have for the rest of us.
So today I am delighted to welcome Juliette Shore to
the show. She's a professor at Boston College, the author
(00:32):
of several books, including The Overworked American and a new
one called Four.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Days a Week. So, Julie, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Thank you, great to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Yees, So why don't you tell our listeners a little
bit about yourself and your work.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
So I'm an economist originally, and I worked on issues
of work time. I was in the Harvard Economics department
when I sort of got intrigued by a sort of
theoretical error in a philosopher's book. I mean, it just
kind of a strange way to get into it, but
(01:06):
it got me looking at American work time, and I
was surprised to find that contrary to what everyone believed
would happen, and was happening. Americans were actually starting to
work more and more. So that book came out in
the nineteen nineties and it cataloged a couple of decades
of rising work time, high levels of stress, burnout, et cetera.
(01:30):
And since then I've done much more research on work
and work patterns, and in twenty twenty one, I was
invited to be the lead researcher for a path breaking
series of trials that ended up taking place all around
the world with companies who were giving their employees a
(01:53):
four day, thirty two hour work week, so not a
compressed with full pay, but with an attempt to try
and maintain their productivity. So a lot of the kinds
of things that go under the rubric of personal productivity
of course, that you work on and so forth. These
companies were trying to implement some of those ideas in
(02:16):
the workplace and the results have been phenomenal, like very
very successful, huge increases in people's well being and great
successes for the company.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
Well, let's talk.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
About that successes for the company, because you know, I
have many people here who are probably individual contributors listening
to this. Also people who are managing companies, running companies,
who are wondering like, Okay, I can see why, you know,
your average worker might enjoy having a four day week.
What's in it for the organizations?
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Like? Why were the organizations willing to try this out?
Speaker 3 (02:48):
Yeah? I think there's sort of two categories, and I
talk about these in the book. The founder of the
organization that ran the trials was an entrepreneur or in
New Zealand, a man named Andrew Barnes, and he tried
it at his own finance company. He called it the
one hundred eighty hundred, so one hundred percent of the
(03:09):
pay for eighty percent of the time. But he asked
his employees to all sign a contract saying they would
get one hundred percent of their work done in those
four days. He believed there was a lot of slack
in his organization, and many of the companies are in
that model. So what's in it for them is they're
able to maintain their productivity or maybe even increase it.
(03:32):
And we can get into a bit more about how
that happens. I think a key point of this is
although individuals do make changes in how they do things,
there's also a full organizational effort. I mean, often by
teams sometimes by the whole group together, and you know,
depending on size of organizations, to figure out what they're
(03:55):
doing that isn't efficient, you know, where they're wasting time,
where they putting a lot of time into low value activities,
et cetera. And so the organization maintains its productivity, but
it gets big well being impacts for its employees. And
(04:17):
that has multiple impacts. One is that often they report
better quality of work because people are rested, they're not
burning out, they are looking forward to coming to work
on Monday morning. Many of them take Fridays off, they
don't get the Sunday scaries, et cetera. So there's that
piece of it, but that also leads to the other
(04:40):
interesting phenomenon that I call the one hundred eighty eighties.
One hundred percent of the pay eighty percent of the work.
We're not asking you to do anything more. We're not
asking you to get more efficient. Why you're already crazy efficient.
You are a nurse in a hospital with no wasted time.
You're the chef ft a restaurant who's just working a
(05:02):
really long day and you've already optimized out anything time wasting.
But you're burned out and so you just need a
day off to recharge. And so for those companies or organizations,
they're stopping the bleeding of the burnout, the resignations, et cetera. So,
(05:26):
for example, with some of the nurses in our studies,
they rescinded resignation letters when they heard they were going
to get a four day week. And for these people
it's just life changing because they're kind of on the edge.
So it's a paradox I argue because it's the low
intensity organizations that could actually you know, they got a
(05:46):
lot of slack there and they're really high intensity that
at the beginning are sort of the early adopters here
where it's very easy to see how they might benefit.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Yeah, well, especially on that latter one, because what I
think a lot of people don't understand is the toll
that turnover takes on productivity. That you know, if you
have your five member team running at full tilt, that's great,
but when one of them leaves, you are suddenly not
running at full tilt until you can you know, hire replacement,
(06:18):
train that person. You know, for the first however much
time they are not you know, operating at where that
person was who left and you're also encouraging management costs
in training the person.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
And so from an organizational perspective, if you.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Can cut that at all, you boost productivity even if
the average person is working fewer hours.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Is that's what I'm hearing you say?
Speaker 3 (06:41):
Absolutely, Laura, I mean that is such an important point.
So I have a sort of deep dive into a
company where that was so interesting what happened. And the
book is both a lot of you know, kind of
statistical findings, but also those deep dives into individual companies
(07:04):
that represent different ways, strategies, experiences. So this one is
a global marketing company and advertising and marketing. They were
the person who ran the trial, the manager saying like
thirty to forty percent turnover in that industry. And so
(07:28):
what she figured out she did a lot of calculations
with their accounting people to figure out how much it costs.
But when she went the company, which is a lot,
and she said on her team, she had a fifty
seven person team, they're constantly onboarding, hiring, training, et cetera.
And when she put in the four day week, she
went to zero resignations, zero turnover. Okay, And that we
(07:52):
hear that from quite a few of our companies. And
then what was so fascinating about it was she began
to figure out, I can monetize this in my contracts.
So she put in, we get a bonus if no
one leaves the team, and the clients just couldn't believe
(08:13):
it because like table, yeah, and sure enough, and so
it's yeah, it's really I mean there's very cold, hard
cash here sitting on the table, lying on the lying
on the table, if you will, if you can stop
that those resignations in those high turnover places, and that's
(08:35):
why we're hearing from like social service agencies, restaurants, healthcare.
I mean, these are many of the places which have
had these big turnover problems in recent years. And you know,
of course advertising and marketing, there's a lot of a
lot of those kinds of companies in our sample.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
Absolutely, Well, we're going to take a quick ad break
and then I will be back with more from Juliette Shore. Well,
I am back talking with Juliette Shore, who's the author
of the new book Four Days a Week, looking at
the results of a broad experiment with a number of
(09:14):
organizations that experimented with a four day work week. So
Julie we were talking about very you know, intensely structured organizations.
We're reducing turnover had a positive benefit. Now we mentioned
that there's also some you know, organizations that have a
fair amount.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Of slack in how people are working.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
And I'm sure you and I have both seen the
time diaries of people at some organizations. Who are you know,
in meetings all day or who are you know, switching
applications frequently? You know as they're constantly interrupted? You know,
what's going on in those organizations and how are they
sort of thinking about becoming more productive instead of just
(09:54):
assuming that there's kind of an infinite number.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Of hours that you can you can put out a task.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
Yeah, so that's probably the more common kind of organization
among the hundreds that we have been studying. So for them,
I would say ground zero has been meetings, and that's
a kind of well known problem in these kinds of organizations.
(10:20):
So when a company joins one of these trials, there's
a they're sort of groups of companies doing it together
and they do two months of onboarding and what we
call work reorganization where we figure out with them, they
go through these trainings and so on for they get
(10:43):
peer mentors people who have done it before figure out
where they're wasting time. So meetings is a key place,
and a lot of them make their meetings more productive.
They reduce their numbers of meetings, and there's a you know,
there's like a huge amount of literature now on meetings
and sort of how they're affecting productivity in many organizations.
(11:06):
The flip side of that is the focus time. Because
of that distraction problem, so many of these organizations also
set times in the day when people will have focused
time and they shouldn't be bothered and so forth, and
there will be no meetings, et cetera. Other people can
do that sort of individually, but then there are other
(11:29):
sorts of things that they do to figure out how
to make it work. So in some of the manufacturing companies,
they do like a process engineering exercise where they go
through every stage of their process and figure out where
they wasting time. Where could they slot one thing one
task into a dead time with another task. If they
(11:51):
you know the brewery that I talk about in the book,
they have many different tasks going on it once. But
the same thing can be done in way call organizations
where you sort of follow the chain of decision making
or you follow you know, a form going through all
the steps, and so they do those sorts of things.
(12:12):
One interesting one at Kickstarter, which was the lead company
in our first US trial, was that they realized the
leadership team was not giving clear enough instructions to the programmers,
you know, when they wanted them to do something, and
they would get stuck or go down the wrong fork
(12:32):
for a while. So leadership team figured out how it
could make its intentions clearer to itself to begin with,
and then give better instructions to the programming teams and
then kind of just let them run with things. One
other thing really important in certain kinds of businesses. We
(12:55):
had a broadband provider that got a massive new contract
at the same time that they went to the four
day week, and we did in addition to all the
surveying we did before and after interviews with this group,
and when we came back to them, we were like, well,
how did you make it work? You had this huge
influx of business and mostly it was like dealing with
(13:19):
customer service problems, connecting and so forth. And what they
explained was, well, they finally got serious about documentation. They said,
first of all, no, the four day week is what
made it viable. Otherwise everybody would have burned out. But
they got serious about documentation something. And this is a
more general point, like if you don't put the time
(13:41):
in upfront to save you time later, you're going to
get overloaded. And so you know, their people had previously
been reinventing the wheel with customer service, but now they documented.
And that's a more general point to which I think
many of us, you know, don't do it, which is
you get some new piece of software, equipment, whatever, you
(14:03):
don't spend the time at the beginning learning how to
make it more efficient for you because you just want
to get going. And I call it the forcing mechanism
of the four day week because it forces you to
get more efficient earlier on.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Well, just in general, I think a lot of people
and probably organizations too, just don't treat time as valuable.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
And it's one thing.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
If you're paying somebody by the hour, because then obviously
you know how many hours they are working and there's
a you know, natural accountability on that. But for people
who aren't, there just isn't that accountability. It is why
you see one of these things. But with that I
think you mentioned in the book that it was harder
(14:47):
for managers though to adopt this sort of.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
Schedule, especially the scene, especially seniors. Yes, so what we
heard a bit more from them is more some of
them took that day off and that was it. So
I don't want to make it seem like none of
them were successful with this, but what some of them
(15:11):
would do is use it a little bit as a
catch up day because nobody else was working. So this
is another key thing.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
So you don't have any meetings.
Speaker 3 (15:21):
You don't have any meetings, and you don't have people
giving you work. And that's also an important principle when
companies think about how are you going to do this?
Is everybody going to be off on the same day,
because that's one way of making sure that people don't
just get overloaded when they come back because their coworkers
were putting more on their plate. They use it as
(15:42):
a catch up day, or they you know, they work
a little bit on that day. They can't take it
totally off. But part of what that means is they
don't have to do as much work on weekends and nights,
so they are getting a break. It's just a little
bit different number one, I did. She talked to me
about how she would work from home that day and
(16:05):
she'd feel free to put in laundry, pick up her daughter,
this than that, which on a regular work from home
day she wouldn't feel she could do that. And so
it was just it was a huge blessing to them
as well, even if they didn't manage to reduce by
the full eight hours that many of their.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
Co workers do.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Yeah, well, I wonder and I think you talk a
little bit about this, that there's some drifting toward this,
especially as you know, if you think about summer Fridays
or more, people are sort of working from home on Fridays,
not that they're not working.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
I mean, I want to put that out there. I'm
a big fan of working from home.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
People working from home generally are working, but they're probably
is a tendency to leave a little bit earlier on
a Friday, if it's a work from home day for instance.
Speaker 3 (16:46):
And we are seeing, yeah, this is great. I call
it the evolution of Fridays. We are seeing this showing
up in hard numbers, interesting numbers, like in finance numbers,
where like stock traders and other kinds of people, there's
less activity going on, or studies of business people responding
(17:08):
to surveys. And this is actually one of the interviews
of a guy a marketing the head of a marketing
company talk to me about how by taking Fridays off,
there really wasn't as much going off on Fridays anyway,
So Friday is no longer a sort of twenty percent
(17:30):
productivity day in lots of places. And then I you know,
I've got a lot of anecdotal stuff in there about
how things really have evolved to be different on Fridays,
and it's just it is evolving into less of a workday,
(17:50):
especially Friday afternoons.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Yeah, well, there's I mean, there's obviously some caveats here.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
I mean people are like, well, okay, four day's great,
how about three? How about two? You know, I mean
there's there's.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Some limits on this obviously, of how much productivity we
can wreak out of the ring out of the system.
And then also with that, one of the caveats being
that I imagine one of the things that makes this
extra weekday off useful is that places are open that
you could then go. I mean, one of the things
(18:19):
people are doing is they're doing their grocery shopping, or
they're going to the doctor, or they're you know, doing
those life maintenance things, which we couldn't then have every
place only open a certain limited number of days or
we'd lose that benefit.
Speaker 3 (18:32):
Oh absolutely. I mean there are many organizations in our
trials that are twenty four to seven organizations and they're
still twenty four sevens or that are five days. That
marketing person I was just talking about his company went
to half teams on Monday and Friday because they wanted
(18:56):
a full forty hour availability for their clients for example.
You know, another message of the book is that there
isn't a one formula for this, that each of these
companies sort of figures out what's going to work for
them based on their their business, their what their employees want,
(19:17):
you know a lot of different factors. But yeah, absolutely
you need to Uh, if you're an access business, good
chance you're going to keep that access.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
Yeah, yeah, that people are counting on that.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
We're going to take one more quick ad break and
then I will be back with more from Juliette Shore.
Speaker 3 (19:42):
Well.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
I am back talking with Juliette Shore who is the
author of the new book Four Days a week.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
So, Julia, we always like to.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Hear about how people manage their own personal productivity. I mean,
you're obviously, you know, leading research and writing books and
being a public intellectual about things like that, and I
I assume have duties at your university as well.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
Do you have any routines that make you more productive?
Speaker 3 (20:08):
It's funny you ask this, because I do. Just we
were just talking about the Friday evolving thing. I mean,
I often get asked when I wrote The Overworked American,
I was always asked how many hours a week do
you work? And at that point I was like the
poster child for needing a makeover by you, which was
(20:29):
I was in the office long, long hours, and many
of them were not productive.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
It was okay.
Speaker 3 (20:34):
The office was also my socializing place. I didn't have kids,
I wasn't married in those early days. So with this one,
of course, I get asked how many days a week
I work? And I always used to say, well, I
just work when I want and I don't work when
I don't feel like it, et cetera, et cetera. But
I noticed about two weeks ago someone asked me that
and I was like, you know, what Friday is evolving
(20:57):
away from a workday for me, so productivity. Yeah, So
I do think taking that Friday has really helped me.
I'm feeling pretty relaxed, despite you know, juggling a lot
of balls. When I am writing a book or articles,
I start first thing in the morning, after exercise, so
(21:21):
I have started a morning exercise routine. I do my
exercising first thing in the morning. I actually run exercise classes.
I'm not the teacher. I just put on the tape
and do the zoom room. But it means I have
that accountability to the other people who come. And then
I then I, you know, go trudge up to my
(21:44):
third floor and start writing. I do find that first
period of the day, the morning, is most productive. I
write until I just peter out. You know. If I'm
writing a book, for example, and that works really well
for me, I just do that. What are some of
my other tips? So I think those are the two
(22:06):
most important things, Like I have a dedicated place and
time for my most And you say that you made
that point about trying to do the hardest thing first.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
I always do that.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
Now with writing a book, I always start with my
hardest chapter and dedicated time, place, exercise routine. And then
I think also that point I started with just making
sure I have enough rest time and relaxation, and that
(22:38):
I'm not feeling like I work all the time and
I don't have time to do other things that I want.
I just I just you know, I'm lucky because I
control my own time basically, so I take as much
time non work time as I feel I want. And
that also makes the working so much easier because I'm
(23:00):
not feeling like, oh, I have to work all the time.
Occasionally during the semester when I'm teaching, I sometimes feel like, oh,
why am I working so much? But that's you know,
that's the part of my job I can't really control.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
Well, that comes with the territory, So dealing with people's
messages and questions all the time, I am sure in
that role. Well, I always ask guests something and man,
we can talk about the things maybe that you do
in your non working hours. What is something you have
done recently to take a day from great to awesome?
Speaker 3 (23:35):
The delayed Mother's Day celebration, so my favorite thing to
do is to take a bike ride. On a Sunday,
took a bike ride with my son, which was really wonderful,
and then went out with son and husband sadly daughters
on the other coast to our favorite vegetarian restaurant and
(23:58):
had an awesome meal and then watched a playoff basketball
game for my wonderful team that sadly lost, the Boston Celtic.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
We can guess where you are, and yes, sadly, well,
I'm not a I'm not a Boston fan myself, but
I understand, I understand the feeling and the Sixers here
have been a long string of disappointments lately, so yeah,
it's sure, you know, oh well.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Some yere some here and what are you looking forward
to now?
Speaker 3 (24:31):
So two big things. One is we are extending our
research into looking at the relationship between the four day
week and AI. So our hypothesis is that four day
week companies are better at adopting and using AI. There's
some survey evidence that suggests that might be true, and
(24:53):
we're we're going to be able to get some sort
of harder evidence about that. We now have companies all
around the world, hundreds of companies, tens of in the
you know, more than ten thousand employees that we can
go back to and find out what they're doing now,
so that's pretty exciting. And I also do a lot
(25:14):
of research on climate change and the impacts of working
hours on climate change and how countries or places I've
done research across the US too, that have reduced their
working hours actually also reduced their carbon emissions. So I've
got some new papers coming up on that too.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
I guess that would make sense.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
I mean, you know, if you're not driving to and
from work on Friday, that's at least one less time.
And then probably the you know, electronic activity that's that's
going on with that, that too fascinating. Yeah, well, the
AI thing, I mean, you know, people, there was always
the probably the idea that technology would be able to
reduce hours without reducing you know, lifestyle and product because
(25:54):
of the productivity statistics would still be high. I mean,
just real quick. I mean, this is it told separate topic.
But you think that that might finally be the case
with AI.
Speaker 3 (26:05):
Well, we don't know what's going to happen. I mean,
I have a chapter in the book on AI. The
first Industrial Revolution had tremendous productivity enhancing machinery and technology,
and it led to big increases in hours of work
and with AI. I just think we could go down
two paths. I mean, one is we could go down
(26:27):
a similar path in which what companies do is they
just lay off lots of workers and they buy that
AI and they use it more intensively, and the people
they have work more intensively, and that's it took a
long time to reverse that upward trend of hours from
the first Industrial revolution. That could happen with AI. The alternative,
(26:52):
and the one I argue obviously for in the book,
is we could actually use technology to reduce hours of
work and not not just lay people off, but actually
share out the work more equitably and reduce hours per job,
keep more and more, you know, people in work with
(27:13):
incomes and meaningful lives from that work. But we're gonna
have to that's gonna have to be a social choice
and not just something that where the companies just see
the incentive. We know, Microsoft just laid off a lot
of workers.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
Absolutely, so we'll see that's.
Speaker 3 (27:30):
Going to be a really bad social outcome.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
We will see how it plays out. Yeah, so we
do not know.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
Well, Julia, thank you so much for joining us. Thank
you to everyone for listening. If you have feedback about
this or any other episode, you can always reach me
at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. In the meantime,
this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's to making
the most of our time.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
Thanks for listening to Before or Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas,
or feedback, you can reach me at Laura at Laura
vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia.
For more podcasts from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app,
(28:21):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Host
Laura Vanderkam
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