The Decline of the 9-to-5 Workday and Rise of the 4-Day Workweek

The 9-to-5 workday originated in the 1800s from the American Labor unions who were trying to protect workers rights. Back then, manufacturing employees were working about 100 hours each week. Then in the 1920s, the Ford Motor Company founder Henry Ford introduced a 40-hour workweek. In 1938, The Fair Labor Standards Act was passed by Congress to limit the workweek to 44 hours as a way to prevent factory workers from getting exploited. Then in 1940, Congress amended the Fair Labor Standards Act, limiting it to a 40-hour workweek.

Fast forward to today, where workers are getting exploited again as technology has stretched the workday with pay remaining constant. A Gallup study found that full-time workers in the U.S. now work 47-hour workweeks and 40 percent say they work over 50-hour workweeks. People are working outside of the office, at night, on weekends and even on vacations. I always say that not having your phone is the new vacation because the second you use your phone, you're on the hook, literally! In a study by Future Workplace and Randstad, we found that over half of workers respond to business messages on vacation. That's why back in 2011 I wrote an article for TIME Magazine called "The Beginning of the End of the 9-to-5 Workday", explaining that the demand for workplace flexibility would soon topple the standard workday established in 1940.

The expanded workday is also driven by "hustle culture" led by prominent CEOs that we admire like Tesla's Elon Musk. In 2018, Musk tweeted a Wall Street Journal article with the headline, "Tesla Is the Hot Spot for Young Job Seekers" and then he responded saying, "There are way easier places to work, but nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week." Amazon also has a culture that promotes burnout to a point where last year an investigator discovered that warehouse staff working 10-hour shifts were not only constantly monitored by supervisors but didn't have enough time to go to the bathroom so they had to urinate in bottles instead. This year, the World Health Organization recognized burnout as an "occupational phenomenon", a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. Additional research captured in the Harvard Business Review found that burnout can lead to many health problems including poor sleep, heavy drinking, depression, memory loss and even heart disease. When Future Workplace and Kronos studied burnout, we found that almost all HR leaders admit that it is sabotaging workplace retention and almost half say that burnout is responsible for up to half of their annual turnover.

Workers are pushing back against the burnout epidemic by demanding more flexibility. In fact, a global study I worked on with Randstad found that Gen Z and Millennial workers choose flexibility over healthcare coverage, even though the cost of that coverage has surged in the past decade by 71 percent on premiums. When I spoke to Richard Branson several years back, he recognized this shift by saying "There should be no difference between somebody's life at home and somebody's life at work." What he means is that there is no 9-to-5 workday and that the focus should be on the work itself not where, when and how the work is done. Over the course of leading more than fifty research studies over the past seven years, one of the biggest themes has always been flexibility. Professionals today expect flexibility and it continues to factor more and more into their decision to not only work at a company but remain at that company. A new study by Zapier found that one-fourth of the U.S. workforce would actually quit their job if their company didn't offer flexible or telecommuting options. The word "flexibility" is actually broader than most people realize as it includes telecommuting, flexible schedules, job sharing, flexible attire (i.e. casual vs. business clothing) and even a flexible office space (i.e. the ability to work in the cafeteria vs. a lounge vs. a cubicle, etc.). Since flexibility is very personal, people naturally want to have their own version custom to their unique situation. Some might want a flexible schedule because it allows them to drop their children off at school, while others want to telecommute to save money and because they work more effectively in complete isolation.

The latest sensation when it comes to flexibility is the 4-day workweek. I was first interested in the 4-day workweek after reading about Perpetual Guardian's experiment. In 2018, the New Zealand based financial firm launched an eight-week trial with 240 staff members to test a 30-hour workweek without reducing pay. The result was that over three-fourths said they had better work life balance, their stress levels decreased by 7 percent, while commitment and empowerment greatly improved. I was very inspired by the success of their 4-day workweek program so Future Workplace and Kronos decided to interview 3,000 workers globally to see if everyone desires a 4-day workweek. What we found was that nearly half of workers say it should take less than five hours each day to do their work if they are uninterrupted and 72 percent would work four days or less each week if pay remained constant.

All of the media surrounding the study and the experiment inspired other companies to test 4-day workweeks. In April 2018, advertising agency Grey announced they were offering a 4-day workweek option in exchange for a 15 percent pay reduction and in March 2019, Shake Shack announced they were doing a trial for their hourly workers. More recently, Microsoft Japan introduced the "Work Life Choice Challenge" giving employees a 4-day workweek, which resulted in productivity increasing by almost 40 percent. The reason why so many media outlets covered the story is because Japan has a burnout culture called "Karoshi", where employees literally commit suicide from excessive work hours. Once this story broke, the Kronos study was covered in The New York Times and I talked about it on NPR's "All Things Considered". Then Marketplace Radio conducted a poll and found that two-thirds of people prefer a 4-day workweek over the standard 8-hour day, 5-day workweek.

Only a handful of companies have implemented a 4-day workweek because it's more than a company issue, it's a political and cultural one. For mass acceptance and adoption of a 4-day workweek the government has to step in and pass a law. And, that's already starting to happen. The UK's Labour Party wants to introduce a 4-day workweek for the entire country since workers in the UK work more hours than any other European country. The countries where workers spend the fewest amount of hours working include the Netherlands (29 hours/week), Denmark (32 hours/week) and Germany (34 hours/week). Still, there are no set amount of days in those countries, the focus is more on hours instead of what day people have off. One of the big issues companies have with the 4-day workweek is that employee scheduling will be inconsistent. If one employee takes Monday's off while another takes Wednesday's it will be extremely hard to keep tabs on everyone. Still, with a tight U.S. labor market, low unemployment rate and millions of unfilled jobs, a 4-day workweek could be a key employee benefit that may attract the best and brightest workers. Only time will tell if the 4-day workweek will be a fad or globally accepted.

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