Take a Three-Day Weekend Without Losing Any Pay (with Juliet Schor)

Many of us toil for long hours - and even take work home at the end of the day. That's bad for us in so many ways - but extensive research shows that it just doesn't have to be this way. Many of us could work a four-day week and still get everything done. 

Economist Juliet Schor has studied every kind of business - from breweries to ad agencies - and found that thoughtfully reducing work hours benefits employees, improves productivity and increases profits. She explains how you too can enjoy a three-day weekend with insights from her new book Four Days a Week: The Life-Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving Well-Being, and Working Smarter.    

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Do you ever feel like you don't have the
time for all the things that you need to do
in your daily life, let alone the space to do
the fun stuff that might bring you joy. Many of
us have a whole host of responsibilities dealing with errand's,
caring for children, helping out elderly parents, but most of

(00:38):
us are also holding down a job. On top of that,
you might easily spend forty fifty, maybe even sixty hours
a week at work, and then there's all the stuff
that creeps in after hours, like emails from customers, clients,
or your boss. Unfortunately, feeling completely overwhelmed by a packed
schedule is not great for your well being. It can
even feel like drowning. But what if I said I

(01:00):
could give you back nearly a whole day every week
and with no impact on your ability to pay your bills?
Sounds amazing, right, Well, that's a big idea from the
author of one of my favorite new books.

Speaker 2 (01:11):
I'm Juliette Sure, and I'm the author of Four Days
a Week, a book on companies that are giving their
employees for eight hour days with no reduction in pay.

Speaker 1 (01:22):
Juliet is an economist and sociologist at Boston College. Her
new book explains all the reasons we should cut down
our standard work week. She also addresses lots of the
old arguments that have always been made to keep Americans
from having more free time. Remember, of course, that one
hundred years ago, there was no such thing as a weekend.
Six day work weeks were the norm. Activist back then

(01:44):
pushed for less time on the job, but employers wouldn't
have it. A five day work week would destroy the economy.
Employers argued less time at work would increase the price
of goods in stores, it make workers decadent and lazy,
It would disadvantage people who wanted to get ahead in
their careers, and would hurt workers who were happy to
work long hours. But labor union encountered that companies could

(02:05):
find clever ways to maintain productivity and that workers with
more free time time would spend more money and actually
boost the economy. Eventually, a few companies decided to try
out this radical idea, and they kind of liked it.
Now decades later, the five day work week ain't so radical.
In four days a week, Julia argues that it's now
time that we reduce work hours again. Lots of people disagree,

(02:29):
and for exactly the same reasons that folks used over
one hundred years ago. But could those reasons now be
just as wrong as they were before. I begin my
chat with Juliette by asking her how she stumbled on
this area of study in the first place.

Speaker 2 (02:43):
Well, without dating myself too much, I did start studying
this when I was an assistant professor back in the
nineteen eighties. And then I went to the data and
was very shocked to find that rather than working hours
declining as they had been for seventy five eighty five
years beginning somewhere in the sixties, that sort of stalled out.

(03:06):
Then through the seventies eighties, working out hours were rising
in America, and so I wrote a book called The
Overworked America The Unexpected Decline of Leisure. At that time,
I tried to get some companies to reduce their working
hours without reductions in pay, and do some studies of
actual interventions. And in the end, none of those conversations

(03:26):
that I was having worked out. And when the pandemic hit,
I was getting more and more invitations, typically from Europe,
to talk about reducing work time. And after one of
those talks, a man approached me and said he was
organizing a trial of private sector employers in Ireland and
they were going to go to a thirty two hour

(03:47):
work week, no reduction in pay, and they were going
to be helped to figure out how to keep their
productivity up even in four days, and would I do
the research? And that is what led to studying hundreds
of companies. I think more than four hundred have gone
through these pilot programs or trials. Over eleven thousand employees
have been part of this research. So it's been very exciting.

Speaker 1 (04:10):
So I want to go back to how you're thinking
about work back in the day, because I don't know,
it seems striking to me that it was forty years
ago that you wrote this book called The Overworked American
in nineteen ninety two. It seems like people weren't talking
about that as much back then. Is that right?

Speaker 3 (04:25):
Well?

Speaker 2 (04:25):
It actually it's funny. It sort of has gone through
some ups and downs. So at the time I published
that book, as you say, nineteen ninety two, literally the
week that my book came out, a prominent Japanese politician
came out and said Americans are lazy, and that created
a whole big news thing around my book, so it

(04:50):
got a lot of attention, and there was kind of
widespread agreement that we were too stressed, people were too busy,
we didn't have enough time for families. And another interesting
thing about it was it sort of went across the
political spectrum because kind of everybody was agreeing Americans are
working too hard. But by the end of the decade,

(05:12):
I would say we'd sort of switched into we can
call it austerity mode or scarcity mode.

Speaker 3 (05:19):
Two things happen.

Speaker 2 (05:20):
One is this idea that we're getting poorer, the country's
de industrializing, et cetera, we need to work harder, So
that became more prominent. And then among the constituency who
would have typically been more attuned to shorter work hours
and here I'm thinking about unions or sort of left
liberal economist types and so forth, they were just increasingly

(05:43):
concerned about inequality, which of course is understandable, but it
kind of pushed work time off the table. So then
there was a long period where there was just no
traction for the issue. And then the pandemic hit and
that changed everything.

Speaker 1 (06:00):
It also seems like in intervening years between nineteen ninety
two and the pandemic. Things that you saw as bad
in the early nineties were only getting worse. What are
some of the symptoms of our overwork getting worse, especially
in the US in the last few decades.

Speaker 2 (06:14):
Well, I think we've got two things. One is, hours
of work were creeping up. You have the introduction of technology,
which expanded the day for many people, even if it
wasn't showing up in their official working hours. So if
your workplace, your boss could contact you outside of work

(06:34):
hours now with a smartphone or with email. There was
that always on problem. And another dimension of this which
has been documented by my collaborators Philis Moohen, Aaron Kelly,
and others. They wrote a really great book called Overload,
about a big software firm, and what happened was as

(06:56):
many of these American companies started outsourcing work to other
countries far away, the work day expanded because there were
teams in India and Korea, and so the people in
the US had to be communicating with those people, and
the work day really was stretching. And then the other

(07:16):
thing that happened is on the home front, a phenomenon
that sociologists have called intensive parenting, the continual escalation of
what is expected from parents and the amount of time
that they have to parent, and the pressures on parents
and the growing competitiveness in the college admission and the

(07:38):
labor market and so forth. That creates a lot of
anxiety for parents and the scheduling of children and all
of that. So you have those two forces, you know,
and of course they combine into ever greater time squeeze.
That's the term I have historically used. It's a really
high pressure situation for many American families.

Speaker 1 (07:59):
So that reason is a question of why Americans are
so overworked. And I think that culturally we have this
one explanation, which is like, well, it's always been that way, right.
The United States is a culture of the stant work ethic.
We're always working so hard. Talk to me about why.
Historically there's reason to question that view.

Speaker 2 (08:15):
Yeah, I mean, that is the most common view, and
one of the reasons I really think it's important to
argue against it is that view thinks there's no way
we can reduce working hours. But if you look historically,
what you see is that the US was the world
leader in work time reduction until you know, sometime after

(08:36):
the Second World War. So we were the first to
get a five day week. We had lower working hours
than many countries, and part of it's that we were wealthier,
you know, we had a successful rapid industrialization, and we
had labor unions that pushed for shorter hours and so forth.
And then we start to diverge pretty much around the

(08:57):
seventies and eighties is when you see big divergence with Europe.
They were on a path of worktime reduction. That worktime
reduction path started in about eighteen seventy before that, by
the way, and this isn't interesting if we talk about
AI or some other things. The First Industrial Revolution led
to big increases in people's hours of work through the

(09:17):
nineteenth century up until that last quarter, and then you
start to go in the other direction. That's the peak
of work in all of human history. That's the peak
of work hours. So the idea that this is deep
in our culture from you know, the Protestant settlers and
all that, it just doesn't make sense. It's a pretty
recent phenomenon of the US becoming, you know, a long

(09:41):
hour's country.

Speaker 1 (09:42):
And just to put that in perspective, I mean that
seems like we had decades and decades where the move
was reducing work hours. We were going down and down
and down, and then something shifted, like in the post
war maybe nineteen seventies, where we start to go up again.
So this idea that it all has always been that
way is just because we've forgotten our history of a
few decades ago.

Speaker 2 (10:01):
Yeah, I mean, it's part of the myth that capitalism
reduced us from toil, because that myth forgets that long
period from you know, starting the eighteenth century through to
the later part of the nineteenth in which the development
of a capitalist economy and industrial economy led to big
increases and hours of work. So there's myopia there, right,

(10:21):
there's that kind of looking at the wrong point in
history and drawing the.

Speaker 3 (10:26):
Wrong conclusion from it.

Speaker 2 (10:27):
Whether we're talking about failing to look at seventeen seventy, I.

Speaker 1 (10:31):
Think we also have some mistaken notions that are coming
up more recently. You talked in the book about this
idea of the ideal worker norm what's that and how
has it made our normal work hours today even worse.

Speaker 2 (10:42):
It's the idea that the ideal worker is the one
who puts the job first always, and family or a
person's own passions and activities and so forth comes second.
So in practice, that ideal worker norm is one in
which the person is available twenty four to seven and
in which they don't have family or other outside obligations

(11:05):
that prevent them from giving all to the firm. And
it's been identified by people who were looking at gender
issues in the workplace. And if the ideal worker is
the person who has someone at home taking care of
the family, there's gender inequality there because women are disproportionately

(11:25):
the ones doing that, and so it privileges the men
who have a support system. And once you get into
a dual earner family situation or a single parent family
where there is no person back there supporting the worker,
it's really key to understanding those high levels of stress, burnout,

(11:46):
family and work life conflict. I had a little anecdote.
There was an excerpt of my book published in the
Wall Street Journal, and I got it kind of eventually.

Speaker 3 (11:55):
He did agree that his email was hostile.

Speaker 2 (11:59):
From a guy who talked about how he'd worked.

Speaker 3 (12:03):
I don't remember.

Speaker 2 (12:03):
It was sixty or seventy hours a week, and you
know that this four day week idea was terrible, and
he'd put all this time in and everybody else should
be doing that today and so forth. And then he
talked about his wonderful sweetheart of fifty five.

Speaker 1 (12:16):
Years who was doing all the emotional labor in the background,
right and.

Speaker 2 (12:21):
Not just and I said, and I bet that person
was a big part of why you were able to
work seventy hours a week because she was taking care
of your kids and so forth.

Speaker 3 (12:32):
I mean, we're talking about a traditional guy.

Speaker 2 (12:34):
He didn't actually come back on that, because I think
it was true.

Speaker 1 (12:39):
And so we were talking about how, you know, things
changed to the nineties and people weren't really talking about this.
But then March of twenty twenty hit explain how the
conversation changed during the pandemic.

Speaker 2 (12:50):
So things started happening. In terms of workplace dynamics. Number one,
lots of stress among the workforce, some of it unrelated
to what was going on inside the workplace, like kids
at home having to be schooled, people just really anxious
about the disease, their loved ones dying and so on

(13:10):
and so forth. But then within the workplace also a
lot of stress, So we have highly stressed employees. Number two,
we have companies employers who never thought work from home
could work and suddenly everything's okay. Work from home is working,
and so their minds are kind of opening up a

(13:31):
little bit, not all of them, but many of them
to like other kinds of changes that might be viable.
This is one of the things I've heard from, you know,
some of the employers who transitioned to a four day week, Like,
we didn't think work from home could work, but it did,
and so then we thought we'd give this a chance.
And then the other really big thing was the great resignation.

(13:53):
And even before the peak of it, you have companies
that are experiencing high levels of quits and feeling like
they've got to do something and understanding that that stress
that I started with is key to it. So you
have quite a few who sort of said, we got
to do something. Let's try the four day week as

(14:14):
a way of keeping employees and dealing with all that stress.
So I think those are the big changes in terms
of what sort of triggered. And then once we started
getting results and more and more evidence. There were case
studies before our research, so individual companies had done it,
and so you had a little bit of interest in it,

(14:35):
but it was sort of bubbling along at very very
low levels of take up until you get groups of
companies doing it, and we had lots of publicity about
the great results we were getting.

Speaker 1 (14:45):
And so it seems like there were these massive changes
that happened during the pandemic. But it seems like these
trends have continued post pandemic too, right, not just like
at people actually quitting their jobs, but this idea of
quiet quitting or even folks who aren't quiet quitting. I
think what the productivity expert cal Nupert calls the Great exhaustion.
It just seems like the stress that we experienced during

(15:05):
the pandemic has not gone away. And if anything has
gotten worse, you know, it seems like people are really
questioning their life choices.

Speaker 2 (15:12):
Yeah, well it's come down from the absolute peak, but
it's it's still really high. So you're right that it's
gotten worse I think compared to pre pandemic. So there
are still high levels of quits and unfilled position. The
stress levels are very high, that exhaustion is very high. Yes,

(15:32):
we haven't returned to a base. The baseline was tough anyway,
there was already a lot of exhaustion and stress burnout,
but we haven't gotten back to that, and you can
look at I mean that's global Gallup does ongoing studies
of things like stress and various types of employee engagement,
the quiet quitting, the loud quitting. Are people thriving, are

(15:55):
they struggling? Are they you know? And it's just really
high levels of distress on all of their metrics.

Speaker 1 (16:01):
So one of the reasons I love your book so
much is that it's pushing for what might seem like
a radical solution. What is this radical solution?

Speaker 2 (16:08):
So the radical solution is a four day week, not
four tens. Often when people hear four day week, they
immediately go to four tens. These are four eight hour days,
so it's a thirty two hour work week, no reduction
in pay. So people get there one hundred percent of
pay they're working thirty two hours.

Speaker 3 (16:28):
And what most.

Speaker 2 (16:30):
Although no, not all, and we can talk about the
differences the ones who do and don't. Most of these
companies are expecting one hundred percent of people's productivity in
those four days, so they're not expecting to lose productivity
or production or output or revenue in that time. There
are some that are in a different category. So that

(16:51):
first model of maintaining all the productivity. The entrepreneur who
did this at his company and then started the NGO
and four day Week Global that organized these trials that
I was doing the research from closet the one hundred
eighty hundred model one hundred percent of the money, eighty
percent of the time, one hundred percent of the production
or the output. There's also an one hundred eighty eighty

(17:14):
model I talk about. I mean, that's my terminology. But basically,
companies where people are so overworked they're leaving at such
high rates that the company just gives them a break
and it turns out to work out for them. They
save a lot of money because people stop.

Speaker 1 (17:29):
Leaving, so people only working thirty two hours a week.
How novel is this idea? I mean, before you started
thinking about it, were there any companies that were already
trying it out.

Speaker 2 (17:39):
I don't think most of them were on that one
hundred eighty one hundred model. There were four day week companies.
I mean, I co founded an NGO back in the
nineteen nineties that was called the Center for a New
American Dream, and part of the New American Dream was
working less. So our folks were all on a four
day work week from day one, and so there are
places that were in four day weeks. Increasingly you had

(18:00):
a number of companies that were on those nine day,
fortnight schedules, So one week five, the next week four,
back and forth the four day one weeks. Like at
our organization, we didn't explicitly say we had eighty percent salary,
but you know, we tended to be a little bit
on the lower side with salary, and so I think

(18:21):
until this movement, the more dominant idea was that there'd
be some trade off of income, whereas this model is saying, no,
you can get everything done in four days, and therefore
there shouldn't be a reduction in income because you're just
as productive.

Speaker 3 (18:36):
To some extent, I think this has.

Speaker 2 (18:38):
To do with the fact that there was increasing discussion
in the media of white collar workers kind of having
you know, what we would call the kind of low
intensity work, right, that there was slack in their work
day or work week that could be engineered out, or
that there were the companies were spending a lot of

(19:00):
time that wasn't very productive. The you know, poster child
for that being meetings, like so many meetings that people
had to go to and escaping them from doing their work.
And if they could just you know, have a more
functional meetings culture, maybe they could get everything done in
four days.

Speaker 1 (19:15):
And so you had this radical idea. You know, there's
been some kind of interest in it, but you really
decided to test whether this was possible. So tell me
the story of how the four day work week tests
came about.

Speaker 2 (19:27):
So during the pandemic, I was giving talks on shorter
worktime and I was approached by a man named Joe
O'Connor who said he was organizing a trial of private
sector companies who were going to do six months on
this one hundred eighty hundred model of giving a thirty
two hour work week with no reduction in pay. But
the trial was going to be preceded by two months

(19:50):
of coaching, onboarding, mentoring to help companies figure out how
to get one hundred percent of their output or productivity
in those four days. Now, one of the interesting things
about O'Connor was that he actually worked for a union,
the largest public sector union, maybe the largest union in Ireland.
It's called FORSA, and they had sort of released some

(20:13):
of his time to organize this trial because they wanted
to argue for shorter work time for their members, but
they felt unless there was private sector proof of concept,
they weren't going to get it because it would just
look I mean, he haven't said this, but you know,
maybe lazy public sector workers or something. So that's how

(20:34):
it came about. He knew my work. He asked if
I would lead the research for this. But very quickly
Joe teamed up with this group, four Day Week Global,
the entrepreneur from New Zealand who co founded it, Andrew
Barnes and his wife Charlotte Lockhart, and we began organizing

(20:55):
a North American trial and then a large British and
so it was the start of a year in which
every two months we had another trial groups of companies,
starting with the UK trial being the largest. I think
there were seventy companies in all. So they asked me
to do the research. We sort of set up as
an independent research team, and we developed a protocol with

(21:18):
employee surveys before and after, with getting administrative data from
the companies, and then where we had capacity doing interviews
with people, sometimes before and after and occasionally just you know,
mid midpoint after. So we have hundreds and hundreds of
interviews also with employees at you know, various levels of

(21:40):
the corporations or the organizations.

Speaker 1 (21:43):
And what was really the goal to find out with
kind of all this data you're.

Speaker 2 (21:46):
Collecting, So what happened when you go to a four
day week? We had a lot of access to employees.
So one of the big questions is what about their stress,
their burnout levels, their work family conflict, their emotions, their
satisfaction with their job, and whether they're thinking about leaving.
How much is a four day week worth to them?
But also what are they saying about their productivity and

(22:08):
how they're working. And people were worried they'd be less
socializing in the workplace and that might have a bad impact,
or what's happening to people's creativity, And so we collected
data on all of these things. Are they just getting
a second job or what about their work intensity? I mean,
the whole theory of this was to organize work and
get rid of things that take a lot of time

(22:28):
and don't yield much value. But what if it was
just a speed up. I mean, people still might like it,
but it's a very different thing than saying there's scope
to reorganize work, to get rid of a lot of
wasteful things. You can have a whole day back each
week from that and no lass of productivity.

Speaker 1 (22:47):
It's time for a quick break, but we'll be back
soon to hear whether cutting a day from the work
week had employees signing up for second jobs or stressing
out trying to cram everything into shorter hours. The Happiness
Lab will be back in a moment. The economist Juliet

(23:10):
Shore explained all the fears employers had about giving their
workers an extra day off each week. Would cutting eight
hours out cause a bunch of unfortunate blowbacks? Would workers
feel more stressed out and less creative? Would they waste
the gift of extra time by just going out and
getting a second job.

Speaker 2 (23:26):
The interesting thing is we didn't see those blowbacks. No
increase in second job holding, almost no increase in work intensity,
just a smidgeon higher and workload, but really wonderful big
increases in all those well being indicators, like sixty nine
percent of people who go through these trials have lower
levels of burnout in six months than they did at

(23:47):
the baseline. But the thing that was most surprising to us,
I think, was this huge jump in self reported productivity.
People just felt so much better about their jobs and
their performance and their jobs. And that turned out to
be so big and sort of understanding, you know, the
whole story of what was happening.

Speaker 1 (24:05):
The first kinds of effects you tested were the change
for employees. What did you find?

Speaker 2 (24:11):
So we find significant improvements in well being across the board.
So we measure people. We have the twenty well being
measures that they fill out before the trial starts. Interesting,
even in three months, you see significant increases. Then we
also surveyed at twelve months, and for a while we

(24:32):
were surveying at twenty four months. So basically every well
being indicator increases significantly, some with quite large increases. But
we're talking burnout, stress, fatigue, anxiety, physical health, mental health,
sleep levels, sleep problems, People exercise more. They score higher

(24:53):
on various types of satisfaction, satisfaction with time. Especially in
some cases, you see a big increase in satisfaction, say
with relationships with the restaurant workers who'd been working fifty
five hours before the trial. Now they got down to
about forty five hours, but their satisfaction with their relationships
went way up because they just.

Speaker 3 (25:14):
Were able to be at home way more than they were.

Speaker 1 (25:17):
One of the things I was shocked by in your
book was just the words that you talked about people using.
Give me a sense of just like how profound this
change was for the employees.

Speaker 2 (25:26):
I think life changing. I mean some people would say
game changing, but life changing, transformational, best thing ever, very superlative.
Even I always think about this one comment I read
as a person just complaining about everything my job. There's
too much to do in four days and nobody else
can do it, and I don't you know this and that,

(25:48):
and then at the end the person says, but of
course this is so much better than a five day week.

Speaker 1 (25:55):
So good, so good, I mean, and the reasons for
better were kind of surprising. I mean, some of the
changes really were emotional changes, like what people talked about
in terms of their stress and burnout. But I was
also shocked to see that you also saw a lot
of behavioral changes, like just people were using their time differently.
Give me a sense of what some of those behavioral
changes were.

Speaker 2 (26:14):
So we did at the three month point, we did
what's called a time diaries. We wanted to see how
people were spending that off day. The thing that people
spent most time on was leisure activities and hobbies. They
just were able to get into things that they loved
or just relaxing in ways that they loved. You know,

(26:34):
some might have joined a chorus or a theater group,
but then others it's I can have a pedicure without guilt,
or I go visit my grandmother every Friday.

Speaker 3 (26:44):
Gym is a big one.

Speaker 2 (26:46):
Doing more exercise, which we know is so key to
people's wellbeing and happiness. I mean, the other thing is
sleeping more or catching up.

Speaker 3 (26:55):
You know.

Speaker 2 (26:55):
Part of what that having that extra day does is
it makes the other days less frenetic, especially where we
talked to some of the really senior people who just
you know, have overwhelming workloads. So they were able to
shift some of that to the Friday, and then that
would free up other parts of their week. So they
just had a much more they could catch up. They
didn't have to catch up on Sundays.

Speaker 1 (27:15):
Right, And what's so remarkable about some of these changes
is that so many companies have been trying to figure
out a mechanism to help their employees feel less stressed. Right,
So so many companies bring in you know, wellness apps
or meditation classes and you know, while those techniques tend
to work, the research shows my understanding of the literature
and companies is that by and large those kinds of

(27:37):
things have mostly been a failure. They don't move the
needle that much. But this kind of intervention is moving
the needle a lot. Right. People are sleeping more and
exercising more and saying that they have transformationally less stress.
I mean, why do you think the four day work
week works so much better than some of these other techniques.

Speaker 3 (27:53):
So I think there are two reasons. One is it's big.

Speaker 2 (27:57):
I remember I once I was having migraines and I
went to the doctor and the doctor prescribed that I
go by an aquarium so I could look at the
fish and relax. I mean, anyway, that created a lot
of stress for me because then I had to gittle
buy the aquarium and keep the fish alive and whatever.
And there's a sense in which some of those wellness things,

(28:18):
you know, they just require people to perform and do
things that just puts one more thing on their plate. Now,
they may work for some, but also, as you say,
they are, they're small things. So number one is a
huge block of time, and number two it gives people
what they need, which is people are time stressed, and

(28:39):
those things don't give them more time.

Speaker 3 (28:41):
In fact, they take time to do. So that's number one.

Speaker 2 (28:44):
But I think there's another really important thing they don't
get at the underlying sources of the stress, part of
which is those excessive work time. And in the past
we've had individual accommodations to people, so you might go
on a part time schedule and give up that income
or whatever, and then you'd have a stigma, you would

(29:04):
stop progressing in your career and so forth. Where you
get the whole organization changes. This is really important. Everybody changes.
We have measures now in our surveys of the sense
to which people believe that at their company you have
to be an ideal worker in order to succeed, and
that falls with the four day week. Because the whole

(29:28):
culture changes, nobody's being penalized for taking that time off.
You think about, oh, we just gave our employees unlimited
paid time off, you know, but people can't take it
because they're worried about the stigma or because it doesn't
transform their workload. Here the whole company got together and
figured out how to takes stuff off people's plate and
give them the time back, and it's just such a

(29:50):
different thing. One is to put it onto the individual.
Oh you're stressed, Well, the problem is you don't do
enough yoga or you're not mindful. No, the problem is
you've organized a workplace that is too demanding.

Speaker 1 (30:02):
So so many of these positive changes came about. And
the other cool thing about your book is that it
looked at the sort of path pathways towards these positive
changes right kind of where they came from. And one
pathway is one that we've talked about a lot. Right
outside of work, people are doing different things. They're exercising,
they're sleeping more, they're seeing their grandma, they're having more
time for their family. But I think I was shocked

(30:23):
by in your book is that there's a second pathway
to get towards these positive changes, and that's a set
of changes that employees are experiencing during the work day.
Talk about what's happening there to change how employees are
feeling and how stress they feel.

Speaker 2 (30:37):
Yeah, that pathway, which is the transformation of people's work
experience from the five to four, was not necessarily something
that we had anticipated. But what happens is that people
feel so much more productive at work. They feel on
top of their work, instead of things like coming to

(30:57):
the middle of the week that hump day they call
Wednesday the hump day and feeling like, oh my god,
I can't get through the week, so already feeling stressed,
or so called Sunday scaries, really dreading going back to work. Instead,
what people tell us is they feel refreshed and ready
to get back in. And when they come back in

(31:18):
they use terminology like my whole self is there. I'm
energized to be back. I'm excited about the work. They
have energy levels and motivation, and it shows up in
their self reports of productivity and work ability. We ask
them your current workability compared to your lifetime best. But
the other thing is that because they feel so much

(31:40):
more competent and on top of their work, they score
higher on the smart working scale, So they feel competent
and smart efficient and that just.

Speaker 3 (31:50):
Makes people feel good.

Speaker 2 (31:51):
Why who we are at work, It's a big part
of our well being, and it's also a big.

Speaker 3 (31:57):
Part of how we spend our time.

Speaker 2 (31:59):
We spend a lot of time at work, so feeling
good about what we're doing rather than sort of ending
the day feeling drained and horrible. It's just it really
improves their emotional and physical They say it improved, you know,
I think it improves people's physical wellbeing as well.

Speaker 1 (32:18):
I love this result about what's happening inside work so
much because I think a thing that people don't realize
about burnout, and this comes from the work of Christina Maslack,
is that one of the main symptoms of burnout is
what she calls a sense of personal ineffectiveness. You feel
like even if you were doing your job perfectly, it
kind of wouldn't matter, or would feel sort of crappy,
it wouldn't be worth it. And it seems like what

(32:38):
you're intervening on with the four day work week is
you get people to feel like they're effective at work.
And what happens is the opposite of all the emotions
that come with burnout. You feel kind of excited to
be on your job, you feel agency, you feel intentional,
and those things just contribute to people's happiness, I think
in lots of ways that we don't really expect.

Speaker 3 (32:56):
Yeah, that seems so right to me.

Speaker 2 (32:58):
And then the other piece of it I would add
is they also feel more loyal to their jobs.

Speaker 3 (33:04):
They value their jobs more.

Speaker 2 (33:05):
I mean, this gets to why people in four day
week companies don't quit. They almost ever quit. They's so
much more positive about their work. It's not a source
that's draining them. It's a source that they're getting energy from.

Speaker 1 (33:20):
So it seems like people really enjoyed this. They got
a lot out of this emotionally, behaviorally. Did you get
a sense of how many employees wanted to keep this
new policy in place? How many were like, yes, let's
keep going with this trial.

Speaker 2 (33:33):
Yes, it's about ninety four and ninety five percent when
we ask which you prefer? And then so we ask
which they prefer, And then we asked them if they
were going to another job, if it were a five
day week job, what would their salary requirements be, Because
if they prefer this, maybe they would want more money

(33:53):
to go to a five day And there's pretty significant
salary increases required all the way up to the thirteen
percent to say, no amount of money could induce me
to take five.

Speaker 1 (34:05):
Day I'm never giving this up, no matter how much
you are.

Speaker 2 (34:09):
That twenty five to fifty percent increase in salary that's
a lot of increase.

Speaker 1 (34:13):
So most workers really value a four day week and
would even need a substantial pay rise to go back
to the old system. But are there any benefits for
companies to offer shorter weeks. We'll have the surprising answer
to that question when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment.

(34:37):
Here's a no brainer question for you. Would you like
a big reduction in your working hours with no corresponding
cut to your pay. That sounds like a great deal
unless you're an employer paying the same money just for
your staff to stay home. That sounds terrible. But economist
Juliette Shore has found that bosses also see the benefit
of a reduced work week.

Speaker 2 (34:57):
So the model is called the one hundred eighty one
hundred model. It was invented or conceptualized by Andrew Barnes,
who was the New Zealand entrepreneur who did this at
his company. He actually asked his employees to sign a
contract saying that if they got a four day week
with no reduction in pay, they would do one hundred

(35:19):
percent of the work that they were currently doing. That
was the dominant model, based on the idea that there
were enough ways that companies could save time through looking
at things they were doing that were wasting time. Meetings
being really key there, like excessive numbers of meetings, too
many people at them, meetings that went on too long, etc.

(35:40):
Creating focused time for people where they could just put
the head down and get a lot done and not
be distracted by constant interruptions. There's a whole science of
work interruptions which shows that it's very bad for people.
It's stressful, but also obviously it's going to interrupt their productivity.

Speaker 3 (35:58):
To other kinds of things.

Speaker 2 (36:00):
Where they brought in speakers who talked about had they
done this in their own companies and figured out they
were spending a lot of time doing things that weren't
yielding much value, so kind of getting intentional about what
you do. What these companies did to reorganize work and
make it possible to get everything done in four days
really varied. Like at the brewery we studied, they did

(36:24):
time and motion studies for all the tasks. There are
many stat tasks that go into brewing, a lot of
cleaning equipment and you know, waiting around. They figured out
how much time each task could take. They sequenced them
differently so they could slot shorter tasks into things that
took a long time, but that had sort of dead
time in the middle and so for so that's one

(36:45):
model that was probably the dominant model. But one of
the things I realized as I was doing interviews for
my book, and as I was also looking at other
data and just hearing companies talk about what was going on,
was there was another model which was based less on

(37:05):
sort of meetings and time saving and more on keeping
people from leaving, and that you had a whole group
of companies who were experiencing high levels of quits which
are very costly, or high levels of burnout, which even
if they didn't lead to quits, were just leading to,

(37:26):
you know.

Speaker 3 (37:27):
Not good outcomes.

Speaker 2 (37:28):
Some of these were basically saying to me, we just
gave people a break most of the companies. Was that
one hundred eighty hundred. But as I was analyzing the
data and doing interviews and so forth for the book,
I realized you had a group of companies that I
called one hundred eighty eighty. People get one hundred percent

(37:49):
of the money, They only have to work eighty percent
of the time, and they're not expected to do more
than eighty.

Speaker 3 (37:55):
Percent of the work.

Speaker 2 (37:56):
So they work at their normal pace on those four days,
but they get an extra day, and those companies are
the ones where work intensity is very high. In other words,
we gave them a day off and we didn't really
change that much about what was happening on the other
four days. They didn't have a lot of meetings, they
didn't have slack time. People were running really fast. And

(38:19):
I call this the paradox of intensity, because that first
group are sort of low intensity workplaces, but these others
are really high intensity. And what was happening in the
healthcare organizations and in the restaurant chain that I looked into.
You know, kitchens run really efficiently in restaurants. They're not
sitting around having meetings there. You watch a kitchen out

(38:43):
of you know, a good restaurant, they're like, whooah, they're
really they're moving and they're really burned out at the
end of the day or the end of the week,
and so they're just, nope, you got an extra day off,
You're still going to do things pretty much the same
way on the FOSSE four days.

Speaker 3 (38:59):
Same thing with some of the nurses studies.

Speaker 2 (39:02):
So the nurses studies were nurse managers, So these were
a lot of the entry level nurses are on three
twelve hour shifts, so it's the four day week.

Speaker 3 (39:12):
Is not so relevant for them.

Speaker 2 (39:13):
But you have these nurse managers working five days with
really long hours, and they burning out a lot, and
they're the most experienced and responsible, you know, they're running things.
A couple of these hospitals just said you're on four
days now, So you had people rescinding their resignations when
they got that news, and they don't leave patient outcomes improve.

(39:36):
In both of these cases, they figured out how to
adjust their divisions of labor. In the restaurant, they hired
a few people, but the costs, they said was really
minimal compared to the benefits. In the nursing studies, they
tended not to actually hire new people. They just changed
responsibilities and they gave people that third full day off

(39:56):
where they could just decompress and rest and just had
really really strong results.

Speaker 1 (40:02):
Give me a sense of the kinds of companies that
join this trial.

Speaker 2 (40:05):
Well, we have all kinds of companies in these studies.
So we have some restaurants, brewery, there are healthcare, so
there's manufacturing. We have an RV customization manufacturing plant, a
company that makes skateboards, but most of them are white collar,
so the large number of white collar. The biggest group

(40:26):
are professional services, so there are a lot in graphic
design or PR, marketing, advertising. We have lawyers, architects, finance,
so there are banks, a lot of tech firms. There
are a lot of social services. There are also some
local governments, and we're seeing more and more local governments.

Speaker 1 (40:48):
So it seems like it was really broad. This was
trying to ask whether the four day work week worked
across all kinds of form.

Speaker 2 (40:54):
It does, but here are the caveats. Number one, these
are mostly small firms. The biggest firm that really did
it for a lot of employees was a five thousand
person kind of a social services healthcare firm in the UK,
which started with a thousand of its five thousand employees,
and then after the success of the trial, they've been

(41:14):
rolling it out to all of them. But a lot
of them are in the you know, sort of one
to five hundred person range, or the even the twenty
five to fifty, you know, and then we have the
big clump of really little firms to under twenty person,
so we don't have a giant firm that has transitioned
to everybody. Yet I think the giant firms are going

(41:35):
to do it. They're going to start with some divisions.
We are very overwhelmingly white collar, though, but a range
of white collar if you count I don't know, social
service workers. If you're a head start teacher, or you know,
a residential counselor in a facility for young people.

Speaker 3 (41:55):
I don't know if that's considered white collar.

Speaker 1 (41:57):
No, that makes sense. That makes sense. So starting with
the companies that really were not trying to decrease their productivity,
they were hoping in four days that workers could do
just about as much. How are they able to make
that change? Like what did they take off their place
to keep employees productive?

Speaker 2 (42:10):
The biggest things, the bread and butter of what they
were taught was meetings and focused times. So those are
really key. But the process was a kind of employee
empowered work reorganization. Let's say you have a team, they
get together and they might do like a very intensive
scrutiny of everything that they do, all the documents they

(42:34):
have to fill out.

Speaker 3 (42:35):
You know, what are the steps.

Speaker 2 (42:36):
I remember talking to someone who did accounting in a firm,
like every step of approval of an invoice, you know,
and figure out where the bottlenecks were. I call that
in the book process engineering. That comes from manufacturing, where
you're looking at all your steps, but you can do
that in offices too.

Speaker 3 (42:52):
But then you have some other kinds of things.

Speaker 2 (42:54):
Like at Kickstarter, which is a tech firm, one of
the things I learned is that the senior leadership team
realized that it had to make changes in how it
gave instructions to its development teams. So once a new
product some some instructions, the development team goes down a road,
it gets to a fork in the road, very common
in software development. They don't know what the leadership perverts.

(43:18):
They'd go off on one and then the leadership looks
at it. No, no, we really wanted the others. So
what the leadership had to do is figure out how
to decide what they want earlier and give more detailed
instructions to the team and then give the team more autonomy.
And that point about more upfront investment came up in

(43:40):
some other contexts. So for example, where you have customer
service in IT companies providing internet service to rural areas
and they got a huge new contract at the same
time they started the four day week. And when I
went back to talk to them at six months, you know,
they tell me they'd just gotten this big contract. We
didn't know that when we when they started, Well, how

(44:03):
did you make it work? I mean it seems like
it would be impossible, And they said no, Actually, the
four day week made upon possible. So they had a
massive increase in demand. Well how could that be?

Speaker 3 (44:13):
Number one?

Speaker 2 (44:13):
They said it stopped people from getting burned out so
they could keep working hard. But the other big thing
was it forced them to document what they were doing.
So whenever a customer service complaint came in, they weren't
doing the documentation. So the next time the same one
comes in, somebody has to reinvent the wheel. If you
document upfront, I mean, it's a basic principle of customer service, right,

(44:38):
But unless you put in that upfront time, you may
just be constantly trying to keep your head above water
and not do it. And that's something that I talked
to a number of people about lose, like the things
that seemed obvious that they should have done, or like
why do you have so many dysfunctional meetings, or why
don't you give people more focused time, and it was like, Oh,

(44:59):
we're just trying to keep our head above water. So
I liken it too, that thing about you get a
new piece of software and you just start using it
instead of like learn it to figure out how it
can help.

Speaker 1 (45:10):
It also seems like even though workers were kind of
in some ways having a higher pace at work because
they're kind of putting more work into the four days,
they actually enjoyed the busier pace more. And that seems
like in part because they were empowered during the busier pace,
but also because they had this lovely reward at the
end that they could look forward to, and that kind
of seemed to help a lot in terms of people's
happiness and sense of engagement too.

Speaker 2 (45:32):
Yeah, and I think that question of pace sort of differed.
I mean, if you look at our survey results we
ask about pace of work and intensity of work, it
doesn't go up by much. It does go up a
little bit. And I don't know if it's that people
just don't like what you're saying, they just don't feel it,
it doesn't feel too sped up, or it really if

(45:56):
that work reorganization really did take a lot of stuff
off their plates.

Speaker 3 (46:00):
But either way. The point is that it's working.

Speaker 1 (46:04):
So that's in the companies that expected the same level
of productivity across the four days, these one hundred eighty
one hundred companies. But let's talk about companies that we're
more on the one hundred eighty eighty right where they
really got into the four day work week thinking, you know,
there's not a lot of meetings we can cancel. People
are at the max pace they can be at. We're

(46:24):
just going to give them some time off. How did
the companies react to the time off in this case?
Did they see any benefits in what were they?

Speaker 2 (46:31):
I think in those cases they're two things. One is
you see improvements in product quality. So at the restaurant,
the level of service and the quality of what was
going on at the restaurants really improved a lot plots,
of course, not losing people. You do see the same

(46:53):
thing with the nurses. So these are the two sort
of purest cases of one hundred eighty eighties where the
nurses you get improvements and patient outcomes and you get
people stop quitting. One of the samples that I give
a lot of space two in the book is an
advertising team in Canada. It was I think a fifty

(47:16):
seven person team. During the pandemic, everybody was so stressed out.
They have very high rates of turnover in this industry,
maybe about thirty percent on average, is what the leader
of the team told me.

Speaker 3 (47:28):
Before the pandemic.

Speaker 2 (47:29):
She gave them three hours of time a week to
just take exercise, and then she figured. She was like,
oh my god, everybody is so stressed out with the pandemic.
What can I do to help them? And the obvious
thing was we just need time. This was at the
height of the pandemic and it was just really hard
for people to even get food and they had a
weight on. In Canada, the lines were really long, social

(47:51):
distancing in the groceries, and so she gave Friday afternoons off.
Someone came and said, you know, you already gave given
us three and then the four it's a four day week,
and she's like, okay, everybody has a four day week now.
But they had high turnover and after that nobody left
the team. What's fascinating about that story is this is

(48:14):
a very enterprising woman. She realized she could start to
monetize the team's stability, so she went to her finance
division say, okay, how much does it cost us to
lose a person? And it's a lot, and you know,
it was a big company, millions and millions of dollars.

(48:34):
And then she started talking to the clients and saying,
you know, I can promise you team's stability. Nobody is
going to leave for the course of this contract, and
if we achieve one percent turnover or something, we get
a bonus. The clients couldn't believe it because people are
always leaving and it creates a lot of wasted time hiring, onboarding, training,

(48:58):
exit interviews, all of that. And this came out in
another marketing agency, and what both of them experienced was
the ability to sell more business to exist clients because
they were providing a better service, so they didn't have
to be spending as much time just out there trying
to get new clients.

Speaker 1 (49:16):
Did you think you were going to see this many
companies who wanted to stick with it when you first
started the trial.

Speaker 2 (49:21):
We've been surprised at how positive the results are. I
guess it would be a way of saying that I
think we were pretty sure we'd get nice employee benefits.

Speaker 3 (49:29):
But what really.

Speaker 2 (49:31):
Surprised me is that if we had better measurements, I
could have done the one hundred eighty one hundred and
twenty five.

Speaker 3 (49:41):
Right.

Speaker 2 (49:42):
The companies who report much higher productivity, and there are
a lot of them, a lot I never expected that.
I figure the main thing is to just keep up
where you are, and then you get all these employee benefits,
so you have to be better off. You're no worse
on the productivity, and you're better off on this other stuff.

Speaker 3 (50:00):
But it's a real business strategy for many.

Speaker 2 (50:03):
It's actually something that's going to be really help your company,
as opposed to something you'll just be okay if you
do it.

Speaker 1 (50:11):
Do you think we're in for a change? You know?
I guess when we changed the five day work week,
that was a huge transformation. It felt like no one
could possibly have us do this. And now a five
day work week just seems normal. Do you think in
fifty years or so, the four day work week will
be the normal?

Speaker 3 (50:26):
Definitely.

Speaker 2 (50:27):
I think we're going to be close to that in
ten Really, AI is going to make it a lot
easier to reduce work time, and I think there's momentum
here right now. We're in a little bit of the
companies are scared right now because there's a lot of
political turmoil. They don't know what AI is going to bring,

(50:47):
they don't know how the tariffs are going to affect
the economy, and it's just a period of a lot
of uncertainty. I think it's part of why they're calling
people back into the workplace, which they haven't actually been
able to do.

Speaker 3 (50:58):
For the most part.

Speaker 2 (50:59):
Those numbers of remote work are really holding steady. But
I feel that the pandemic transformed the four day week
into common sense. And what I hear from some of
these folks who interact with customers is that when they
tell their customers about it, instead of the customers freaking

(51:22):
out that they're not going to be able to contact
them on the off day, they're sending back messages with
all caps and tons of exclamation marks, saying, Oh, I'm
so excited for you, goo, I wish I had that.
When you talk to people about it, now it seems
realistic in a way that pre pandemic it seemed like, Oh,

(51:42):
we could never have that, but I would love it,
but that's not possible.

Speaker 1 (51:45):
And now it just seems possible. We're just moving towards
the new era of.

Speaker 3 (51:49):
Work weeks it does seem possible.

Speaker 1 (51:51):
So imagine a lot of people who are hearing about
the benefits of this, who are themselves employees but might
not be employees at a place that is amenable to
a four day work week, are thinking, oh my gosh,
this sounds amazing. Any advice for them about how to
make this a reality in their own workplace or things
that they should be thinking about about how to change
their pace of work.

Speaker 3 (52:09):
That's a great question.

Speaker 2 (52:10):
I do have some discussion at the end of the
book about how to do it, but I think there
are resources online also how to talk to your boss
about a four day week. But I think the first
thing to do, like well, of course, read my book,
but also get educated on now the growing amount of
evidence about the benefits of a four day week. Start

(52:32):
a conversation at your workplace, whether it's first with your
boss or maybe with some co workers. Don't assume that
it's a non starter. Don't assume that it's impossible where
you work. Survey data that I talk about in the
book shows that something like close to a third of
all senior executives have been saying they're interested in a

(52:54):
four day week, that it's coming or they're open to it.
So there's just been a lot of increased openness at
higher levels of management about it. And I think sort
of trying to go about it in you know, in
all kinds of workplaces, is is a lot more viable now,
trying to start that conversation.

Speaker 3 (53:13):
If you have a boss you.

Speaker 2 (53:14):
Can talk to, you know, who might be willing ask
them to send me an email and all.

Speaker 1 (53:19):
Oh gosh, you're gonna you're gonna have rip in box
with every every person listening to this.

Speaker 2 (53:24):
You know, I hear from employers on a regular basis
and they say, you know, I'd be happy to come
and talk to your team. I think it's it's really
viable pretty much everywhere, and there are plenty of other
people like me. There's an organization called workfor dot org,
which is mostly volunteers working in different communities to bring

(53:45):
groups of companies together to talk about it, creating what
we call communities of practice. So you could try and
do that just lots of way I think get the
conversation going. The more people learn about it and think
about it, the more open they are to trying it.

Speaker 1 (54:01):
You talked about all these emotional behavioral benefits of this
four day work week. I'm curious if that applies to
people who are working remotely too. How much of it
is just kind of taking that full day off of work,
and how much of it is not having to go
to the office, not having to do the commute and
so on.

Speaker 2 (54:16):
Yeah, that's a great question. So some people do reference
their commutes and so forth. But a quarter of our
sample is fully remote. We only have five or six
percent who are fully in person, so most are hybrid.
There's no difference in anything across these modalities in terms

(54:36):
of these findings. So yeah, it works for all those modalities.
Here's another surprising thing. It also works across all the
sort of socio demographic categories that we look at, whether
we're talking age, gender, race and ethnicity, parental status, disability status,
great improvements for people with disabilities, managers, non managers, education levels,

(55:01):
et cetera. I mean, very very similar well being impacts
across all those groups. So it really is, you know,
four for all. I think it really works for everyone.

Speaker 1 (55:14):
Well that's a pretty ringing endorsement to end on the
four day week works for everyone. If Juliette's research has
got you thinking about how transformative an extra day off
each week could be for you, then you should check
out her new book, Four Days a Week, The Life
Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, improving well being, and
working Smarter. Juliette's book is packed with insights and it

(55:35):
just might be the perfect gift to give your boss.
Next time on the Happiness Lab, we'll hear about another
of my favorite books of twenty twenty five. It's from
an expert on decision making who has some important advice
on how to make choices that more closely match our values.
All that next time on the Happiness Lab with me
Doctor Laurie Santos