Four-Day Workweek Transcript

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

It is Wednesday, which means most of us are halfway through our workweek. There are millions of Americans who work untraditional hours, but on the whole, U.S. employees are at it Monday through Friday. And that schedule comes with a soundtrack.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "9 TO 5")

DOLLY PARTON: (Singing) Working 9 to 5, what a way to make a living.

MARTIN: But wait. What if it didn't have to be this way? What if instead of punching a clock for 40 hours, five days a week, you only had to work 32 hours, four days a week? In some ways, the shorter workweek could feel more intense - same work, less time to do it.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "9 TO 5")

PARTON: (Singing) They just use your mind, and they never give you credit.

MARTIN: But then it's over, and you, the employee, get more of your non-working life back. We're continuing our series on how our work lives have changed since the pandemic. And today we are examining the four-day workweek. A lot of employers in white-collar industries are rethinking their employment practices now. Do workers really need to be in the office all the time? Can work be done more efficiently from home? And some are actually experimenting with shorter weeks. Tech companies like Kickstarter and Buffer have entered pilot programs on this. California even tried to introduce a bill that would require large businesses to pay employees overtime if they worked more than 32 hours a week, although that has been shelved for the moment.

JULIET SCHOR: There are many people who are spending more time at the office than they need to, and if work were organized more efficiently, they could get it done in a shorter period of time, go home and have a better life.

MARTIN: This is Juliet Schor. She's an economist and author of the book "The Overworked American." What was your first job, Juliet?

SCHOR: I did dishwashing at college. I guess that's the closest. Then I went to Williams College. That was my first real job.

MARTIN: As a teacher, what are the expectations about work in higher education - how many hours you put in?

SCHOR: The culture was one where new faculty were in their offices all the time, pretty much. And my friends were other people in the department. And I spent long, long hours in the office.

MARTIN: Which is a thing Juliet Schor says Americans shouldn't have to do. And she's made the issue a big part of her life's work. Juliet is helping lead a set of trials in several different countries, including here in the U.S., where companies try out the four-day workweek for six months. Twenty-two American companies have already enrolled in a trial this year. Seventy companies in the U.K. have done so, as well.

SCHOR: If you look at the companies that are pioneering the four-day week, tech is very much at the forefront. The companies who are doing this and who are joining the trials that I'm researching are finding that they can reorganize work in ways that allows people to do as much in four days as they were doing in five. White-collar work is the sort of dominant work. And we're also seeing this in nonprofits, which is pretty interesting. But as the trials grow, we're finding new industries coming in - so a restaurant chain in the U.S. trial, health care institutions, we're starting to see, other kinds of service organizations.

MARTIN: Juliet Schor says she has three objectives in these trials. The first is to show how a four-day workweek helps employees.

SCHOR: There's a growing body of research showing people are less stressed, have better well-being, less burnout, they can sleep more - very important - and have more energy, better job satisfaction, etc. And also that - sort of social impacts of that - they have more time for family and community. The second is that it's feasible for the companies. For some, it will improve their productivity, profitability, revenue, etc. For others, it may just be a neutral change but one that makes their employees better off. And, you know, in the long run, the companies will benefit from that. And then the third impact - the one that has sort of less evidence to date at the company level, but which is very important - is impacts on carbon emissions. If people are commuting one fewer day a week, that's going to have a big impact on transportation emissions.

MARTIN: I imagine, though, you have employers coming to you and saying there's just no way we are going to be able to afford this, that it's not actually going to cut our costs, but potentially we could end up having to pay more. You have to onboard more employees to cover all those new shifts.

SCHOR: There's some interesting experiments from Sweden with health care workers, nurses in particular, who were given six-hour days because there's a lot of stress and burnout in nursing. And what these experiments showed is that the nurses getting the six-hour days, as we would expect, were more productive, they were happier, but the care facilities had to hire people for those extra hours. But what they found was, although there was a small increase in costs, a lot of those additional salaries were offset by lower health-care costs and lower unemployment for their existing workforces. The other thing in health care, of course, is mistakes, so that when you've got tired and stressed employees, you're more likely to get mistakes. So there are ways to make up the costs other than just asking employees to fit all their work into 80% of the time, which is what you're seeing in the white-collar context.

MARTIN: So right there, you heard Schor acknowledge that there are some challenges with a four-day workweek. White-collar industries basically have to ask their employees to finish the same amount of work, but in less time.

LADONNA SPICER: It's a lot busier, obviously, when you're trying to do five days of work in four days.

MARTIN: This is LaDonna Spicer.

SPICER: And I'm the director of the project management office here at Health Wise.

MARTIN: Health Wise is a company in Boise, Idaho, that produces health education materials for hospitals, providers and health plans. The company experimented with four-day workweeks last year, and they made it permanent in February. LaDonna says it has made her way more efficient.

SPICER: You do really have to think through how long your meetings need to be, and this is something we've done a lot of already, is be really well prepared for meetings, so it takes some thoughtful preparation to really be able to optimize your work.

MARTIN: We talked to the CEO of Health Wise, Adam Husney, and he said cutting back to four workdays has been good for business.

ADAM HUSNEY: Our revenues went up this year more than we had budgeted. Our attrition rate has gone down, too. I think we've lost one person in the past three months. We've delivered on products on time or ahead of where we have done. The things we are able to measure have all been positive.

MARTIN: And LaDonna gets an extra day for all the life that happens outside of work, like hanging with her grandnephew at the pool.

SPICER: Do you want me to hold on to that for you?

MARTIN: A trip to the eye doctor.

SPICER: Hi. I came in Friday to pick my glasses up and...

MARTIN: Even a physical therapy appointment.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Then, we'll start on this right side, so we'll start with some traction...

SPICER: OK.

MARTIN: But four days a week is not realistic for other companies. We called up a manufacturing plant in the Northeast that makes steel products. The floor manager who answered the phone told us he didn't have time to grab one of his bosses to speak on tape, but before he hung up, he said they are so slammed because of supply chain shortages and backlogged orders that there's no way they could make a four-day workweek happen. We heard this from HR professionals and other experts, too. There's too much work, and we don't have enough employees as it is. And even if you can make it work, they say it would be a scheduling nightmare.

LINDSAY TJEPKEMA: The idea of the four-day workweek started bubbling up a few months ago. I mean, you saw it, I saw it, the whole world started to see it become a thing.

MARTIN: This is Lindsay Tjepkema. She's the CEO of a marketing technology company called Casted.

TJEPKEMA: And I couldn't really put my finger on why it was bothering me so much, because I wanted a four-day workweek. I wanted to give my team a four-day workweek. But I just - I couldn't shake the feeling that it just didn't land with me. I was like, this isn't going to work. It just doesn't make sense.

MARTIN: Lindsay told me that Fridays off is an exciting bumper sticker of an idea, but it's not all it's made out to be when it comes to making her employees' lives better.

TJEPKEMA: Real flexibility is being able to say, hey, I want to start my workday late, or I want to cut out early on Wednesdays for kid reasons, for friend reasons, for personal reasons, for pet reasons. I want to teach a yoga class during the lunch break, you know, five days a week - whatever it may be, that's flexibility. So if I go and mandate that flexibility at our company means you get Fridays off, that's not flexibility. That's mandating a day off.

MARTIN: The trials Juliet Schor is helping lead are still going on, so there isn't enough data to draw conclusions about how much companies can actually save or how much better employee performance and satisfaction are because of a four-day workweek. That won't happen for months. And of course, we have to remember that the economy is sort of in a bad way right now. Inflation rates are crippling. Interest rates have gone way up as a result. And some top American CEOs are bracing for a recession. Despite all of that, though, Juliet Schor is convinced that the four-day workweek has irreversible momentum.

SCHOR: If you think about things like those nine-day schedules where they get a Friday off every other week, or Fridays off in the summer, early closings in the summer - Friday just gradually becoming a day in which people are sort of less plugged into their job and doing less work - one of the things we know is that once people have something like this, it's very hard to take it away.

MARTIN: That's definitely true for LaDonna Spicer. She's been working a four-day week since this past February. And when we asked her if she'd be willing to give that up for a different job somewhere else, she sort of laughed and said her life has changed with this new schedule. She has more of it now, and she is not so ready to give that up.

To be eligible for this extra credit opportunity, please listen to the following story from NPR (or read the transcript) and respond to the items below. Additionally, you will need to respond to a classmate's post. You will need to write 500 words in total to be able to fully respond to the items below.

1. How does the four-day workweek discussed in the story relate to what we are covering in Week 1? Specificallyconnect the four-day workweek discussion to one of the Week 1 topics (Job Performance, Organizational Commitment, Job Satisfaction). You may touch on more than one of these topics or dive deeper into one that you find the most interesting. You must use proper terminology and you will need to provide in-text citations to support your connections.

2. You have been asked to consult for Corpus Christi Cash, a wealth management firm, that is considering migrating to a four-day workweek. What is your recommendation to them? Why/why not? You must support your position with evidence and cite your sources (both in-text and full reference citations). For example, a response of "...I think this will increase employee engagement and organizational productivity because people will be happier..." is unacceptable.

3. Regardless of your recommendation in #2, would you like to be:

1. an employee at an organization with a four-day workweek policy? Why or why not?
2. a manager at an organization with a four-day workweek policy? Why or why not?