Thread by @annehelen

Wrote about the great promise of the four day work week — and the difficulty of wrapping our heads around the fact that less work leads to better work:

annehelen.substack.com/p/whos-afraid-…

I first started reporting on the 4-Day Week pre-pandemic, wrote a whole feature and filed it, and then...the pandemic hit, and writing anything about work felt very besides the point. Fascinating that the (enduring) pandemic --> huge bloom of writing about work/the office

I was initially compelled by what a very staid, old fashioned New Zealand trust company was doing with the four day week — the CEO basically did it purely for productivity reasons (he saw that it was stuck; read an Economist article, convinced the company to do a pilot)

After 2 months of the Four Day Week:
-Productivity went up 20%
- “Work-life” balance scores rose from 54% to 78%.

After making the change permanent:
- Overall revenue went up 6%
- Profitability went up 12.5%.

annehelen.substack.com/p/whos-afraid-…

About a month into the pandemic, when it became clear WFH was going to last months/years, @buffer surveyed workers re: what would make it easier:

12% wanted more paid time off
24% preferred reduced work hours
40% wanted to try a four-day week

So they launched a pilot program

Productivity wasn't the point, but it still soared.

Actual coding days went down (3.4 to 2.7 for product; 3.2 to 2.9 for mobile/infrastructure), but “productive impact,” aka how much they were actually getting done, increased significantly—and for infrastructure/mobile, doubled

These are all encouraging numbers for people in traditional office/knowledge work jobs, but this past week, the results of a sprawling study of reduced hours in Iceland *in all sorts of jobs, including employees working irregular shift work* were released: en.alda.is/wp-content/upl…

This report is long-ish but very readable; the most striking part is that Iceland realized that they were a rich and economically equitable country like their Nordic neighbors & it made zero sense that their status quo was working far more hours and still have lower productivity

The pilot program, which extended to one percent of Iceland's total population, started with child services — because those jobs had the highest amount of stress/burnout — and expanded to care workers, the police force, maintenance/construction.

The results of the program were so straightforward — no decrease in level of service, increase in quality of life, decrease in stress — that unions have successfully used them to win reduced hours for **86%** of Iceland's working population. EIGHTY SIX PERCENT

From a participant in the pilot program: “This [reduction in hours] shows increased respect for the individual. That we are not just machines that just work … all day. Then sleep & get back to work. [But that] we are persons with desires and private lives, families and hobbies.”

There is nothing "natural" about the 40 hour week. The amount that humans are expected to work has expanded and contracted at various points over history; just because 40 hours was the norm doesn't mean it has to continue to be the norm

If your boss is afraid of the four day work week, what they’re really afraid of is change. Change in the rhythms of work, but also change in the long-held ethos that more work is always better:

annehelen.substack.com/p/whos-afraid-…

They might even say that they like the idea, but it would never work for them and their scenario. Oftentimes, that reticence is about public perception: working fewer hours is still equated w/laziness, or w/some other vague notions of radicalism. It doesn't have to be this way!

As an exec at Unilever put it: “We believe the old ways of working are outdated and no longer fit our purpose.”

annehelen.substack.com/p/whos-afraid-…

Fielding a lot of "this will never work with my profession" responses — I always find it fascinating that the first reaction is so often why a four day week can't work, instead of thinking through how it could