Is it time to end the 40-hour work week?

When I worked for Nike, one of its benefits included “summer hours,” where employees could leave at noon on Friday during the weeks between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

I remember feeling very rested going into the weekend rather than spending Friday evening recovering from a tiring week. I also worked extra productively to ensure no work or meetings overflowed past noon on Friday, and that made me feel extra joyous in that I’d earned that extra half day off.

Those memories came to mind as I read about Perpetual Guardian, a New Zealand firm that ran a 2-month experiment in letting its employees work four days a week while being paid for five. During the experiment, employees:

• reported higher productivity, a 24% increase in work-life balance and came back to work more energized.
• managed their time more efficiently by cutting the number and duration of meetings.

Other such experiments have yielded similar results.

Shorter hours are conducive to productivity since human productivity has shown to have an inverse relationship to time:

• According to a 2016 survey of 1,989 UK office workers, over the course of an 8-hour workday, the average worker only does real work for 2 hours and 53 minutes - don’t judge, that is better than Peter Gibbons.
• Some research has found people can only concentrate for about 20 minutes at a time while another found that people struggled to stay on task for more than 10 seconds. This is exacerbated by the intrusive omnipresence of digital distractions in our lives.
• Toward the end of the day, performance begins to flatline or even worsen, according to K. Anders Ericsson, an expert on the psychology of work.
• There is copious historical evidence, ranging from Charles Darwin to mathematician Henri Poincare that shows how work quality improves when we avoid overtaxing our minds.

TL;DR: Is it time to reduce our work-week so that we can work better and live better?

I am all for a shorter a work week, especially since decades of growing productivity have not resulted in wages growing. Still, I am somewhat skeptical that the shorter work week will catch on across the board beyond the aforementioned experiments.

It is possible, and even likely, that the workers at Perpetual Guardian were aware that they were being observed as the 4-days-per-week strategy was being evaluated. Just as employees work harder during recessions to protect their jobs, these employees could have improved their work practices so as not to be seen as slackers.

More logistically, in larger businesses, managing varying schedules across various groups can be time-consuming and expensive. If one team works 4 days a week, while another works all 5 days but fewer hours, coordinating work can become difficult.

Another limitation of the Guardian experiment is that it does not adequately reflect human nature, both for the employer and the employee.

Guardian founder Andrew Barnes said, “A contract should be about an agreed level of productivity.” He added, “If you deliver that in less time, why should I cut your pay?”

If I were such an overachieving worker, however, it is just as likely that I might make the case that I was performing above my pay grade and make a case for a promotion. My employer might counter that I am probably not being challenged enough for my pay grade.

This speaks to the role work plays in our lives, a phenomenon Lynn Stuart Parramore, the director of the New Economic Dialogue Project at AlterNet, calls the “cult of over work.”

In our capitalist and aspirational society, our identity and our value in the eyes of society at large and our family in particular, is attached to what we do for a living and our progress in that endeavor.

A few weeks ago, I took my parents to Las Vegas in what will probably be their last trip there. We stayed in a fountain-view room at the Bellagio. My parents were elated to watch the iconic fountains from our room, and their joy soared along with the fountains and the accompanying musical notes.

The last time we were in Vegas, we stayed at Harrah’s, a much cheaper facility and watched the fountains from the street. In the eyes of my parents, I had made it in the professional world, which in turn helped me make it into the Bellagio.

Ever since I have moved to Silicon Valley, any visits by friends and family from the Pacific Northwest are replete with questions around how exactly I made my career a success at Netflix and Google.

It was hard for me to not feel validated for all the ladder-climbing in that moment.

What we do, and where we do it, defines us and completes us in the eyes of others, and we in turn try to fit our profile in that reflection.

Amity Shlaes, a board chair of the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation argues that far from wanting more time away from work, Americans would work longer if our progressive tax code did not punish success. She submits that high tax rates, rather than a desire to smell the flowers, account for Europeans working fewer hours.

The cult of work is so strong that comedian Bill Maher, channeling his nemesis and then candidate Trump, advocated building a wall between our work life and our home life so that after we worked for a living, we could actually do some living.

NOTE: Video is NSFW and takes liberties with the truth about life at tech companies

Of course, there are dissenters whose arguments are equally appealing to me.

The aforementioned Mr. Barnes surmises that the shortened work week cut his company’s electricity bills by 20%. Extrapolating further, he wagers that this could mean fewer cars on the road and less congestion.

This is backed up by Anna Coote, head of social policy at the New Economics Foundation in London. Ms. Coote states that more time spent at work leaves less time for other facts of life, leading to consumption-driven choices like using cars instead of public transport or biking. She also posits that for all the criticism hurled at the European tax code, their economies are robust and currencies stronger even with shorter work weeks.

If I had to pick, especially as I get older, time with my family is more important rather than chasing shifting and transient definitions of success and their material artifacts. However, there would need to be several societal and economic changes before these options are structurally ubiquitous.

Until then, we will remain in a two-tiered economy where apart from income inequality, we have inequality in the quality of life where some of us can vote with our feet for better work-life balance while the rest will start at screens while life passes us by.