The History And Future Of The Workweek: What's In Store For Us?

The evolution of the workweek is a perennial topic of interest and debate. Broadly speaking, it seems like a no-brainer: promoting a healthy work-life balance leads to less burnout, which in turn leads to many other benefits such as improved productivity, healthier lifestyles, and more effective work.

So why the debate?

Well... it's pretty hard to get companies to change their ways. And the shorter the workweek becomes, the larger the impact on a business' bottom line. In fact, some research suggests that a shorter workweek could actually make us less productive. But that doesn't mean the shorter workweek is a bad idea. We just need to be smart about how we go about implementing it.

The History of the Work Week

The workweek as we know it is actually a relatively recent invention. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, most people worked whatever hours were necessary to get their jobs done. This could be a few hours a day or several days in a row, depending on the season and the type of work being done.

With the rise of industrialization, however, came the rise of the nine-to-five workday. This was largely driven by factory workers who needed to be on site during specific hours in order to operate machinery. But over time, this model spread to other sectors as well, becoming the standard for most office workers.

The timeline below shows the key dates that led to the work standards we know today, which began in the 19th century.

• 1817:?Activists and labor union groups fought for improved working conditions after the Industrial Revolution, when people were regularly working 80 to 100 hour weeks.
• 1866:?The National Labor Union petitioned Congress to pass a law making the eight-hour workday mandatory. Even though the law wasn’t passed, it boosted public backing for the change.
• 1869:?President Ulysses S. Grant released a proclamation to affirm eight-hour workdays for government employees which encouraged private-sector workers to demand the same rights.
• 1886: The enactment of an eight-hour workday law by the Illinois Legislature spurred employers' refusal to comply, leading to a large-scale workers' strike in Chicago. The strikes culminated in a bombing that killed a dozen people or more, an event now known as the Haymarket Riot. In many nations, the first of May is now observed as a public holiday in memory of the Riot.
• 1926:?Henry Ford came up with the 40-hour work week after realizing that working more only resulted in a slight, short-lived productivity boost.
• 1938: Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which required employers to pay employees overtime for any hours worked over 44 hours per week. The act was amended two years later, reducing the maximum work week to 40 hours.
• 1940: 40 hours became the legally mandated work week in the United States.

Can the perfect workweek standardization be designed?

There are a multitude of factors to take into account when trying to establish standardization, such as the type of company, its size, goals, and location. However, just as startups need to constantly test their thesis, talk to prospective customers, refine, iterate and repeat, the same needs to happen for the workweek (but CAREFULLY)…

Lets look at some of the options that have been tested...

Flextime, which allows employees to design their work schedules, has the advantage of being truly customized and creates a good work-life balance. However, it can be difficult to manage and can create scheduling conflicts given the diversity in everyone's schedules.

You also have a compressed work week where three day weekends are still prioritized without sacrificing the 40-hour work-week that companies fear tampering with given its potentially massive impact on business productivity. However, you then have to work 10 hours a day, which might be counter-productive for many industries, not to mention the significant number of people who have after-work obligations like caring for children, relatives, or pets.

Further, you can pull a Bolt and go for a 32-hour (4 day) work week which definitely seems like the best of both worlds but depending on the company and its goals, just might not be enough time to get necessary work done. In addition, there is a potential business disadvantage in our highly competitive capitalistic market where everyone is racing to reach the next milestone faster, without sacrificing customer experience. For example, does a company only offer 4 days of customer support when their incumbents offer 5 or more? And will doing so create an intense amount of customer service backlog the following week, creating stress and limiting the amount of available resources for other tasks needed to move the company forward?

Final Thoughts

Thankfully, we have several companies experimenting. Perhaps we will find that the best work-week standardization is actually no standardization.

Even better, a world where EVERYONE in the organization gets to 'vote' on the work-week they believe will enable sustainability & healthy growth for the company, its stakeholders, and themselves. This would also require the company's leaders to prioritize culture especially as the organization scales so that alignment around the work-week is not fragmented and is instead, a more obvious decision.

Another way of establishing the work-week could be having it shift in direct proportion to the OKRs/KPIs set for that week, month, or quarter.

This could also happen on a departmental level, where one month the CS department might have agreed on a more aggressive set of OKRs/KPIs that would necessitate a 5-day, 40-hour work week. Meanwhile, an engineering department might have OKRs/KPIs they feel confident they can comfortably achieve in a 4-day, 32-hour work week. Ryan Breslow said it best during the recent Forbes 30 Under 30 annual summit in Detroit...

"All I care about is impact to the business... I don't care if you're working 2 hours a week or 200, just tell me how you've impacted the business."

Ultimately the answer to all of this lies in finding that perfect overlap of whats best for the company AND its employees.

I am curious to know what others think about this matter. What do you think the work-week should look like and what should be the foundation that it is based on?

Thank you for reading.