Among the ideas brought to light this fall during the United Auto Workers strike was something many deemed an “audacious” demand: Shortening the workweek.
It’s a discussion that has been entertained far more overseas than it has in the U.S., where the 40-hour workweek has been enshrined since 1938 through the Fair Labor Standards Act and therefore accepted as national standard for 85 years.
France has been operating on 35-hour workweeks since the early 2000s. Today 86% of Iceland’s workforce has moved to, or has the right to move to, a 32-hour week, according to the BBC. This year the organization 4 Day Week Global was named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential Companies for the work it’s doing to help companies worldwide pilot four-day workweeks. A total of 41 American and Canadian companies have participated in six-month trials through 4 Day Week Global, the firm reports, and so far none have turned back.
In April 2022 Mike Neuendorfer, CEO of the Ohio-based manufacturing company Advanced RV, moved all of his employees to 32-hour workweeks without cutting their pay. “It just seemed like the most significant thing I could do as a business owner and manager,” Neuendorfer told NPR in an interview last month.
Shorter work hours translate to health benefits including stress reduction, improved happiness, fewer sick days and more time for employees to engage in habits like exercising and cooking healthy meals, says Matthew Stollak, associate professor of business administration at St. Norbert College. But as the way we work has changed, Stollak adds, considerations around the 40-hour workweek should also include discussions about the modern-day ubiquity of work tasks, understanding “what is compensable time” and quantifying how many hours white-collar workers truly put in.
For example, Stollak says: “If I’m home at 9 p.m. and suddenly get an email from my boss, then technically I am on work hours when I respond. Should it be measured by the minute? That would drive HR professionals crazy.”
For 4 Day Week Global’s founders, the goal is to shift away from tracking hours and minutes on a timesheet and toward measuring work in terms of productivity and output. But when it comes to many modern American jobs, Stollak advises, that’s not always a simple thing.
“Once we started to see manufacturing leave the U.S. and we saw a shift to the service or knowledge economy, we shifted from tangible objective measures of performance to much more heavily subjective measures,” Stollak says. “Is it number of phone calls made? Number of words typed per minute? Number of entries in a data set? That may be one way to monitor it, but it may have nothing to do with what that person is actually doing on the job.”
Stollak says the pandemic-related surge of hybrid and flexible schedules, including schedules tailored more to employees’ circadian rhythms and commute routes, has further muddied the waters for employers who are compelled by a “need to monitor” — “If I don’t see my employee sitting at their desk, are they really working?”
Bill Fournet, a leadership consultant and CEO of Oklahoma-based The Persimmon Group, says alternative work arrangements have added “an additional level of overwhelm” for employers in the last three years.
“Everybody’s on different work schedules,” Fournet says. “And that’s adding a whole other level of complication, because I’ve got to know: Are you in the office right now? Are you at home? That’s the new level of overwhelm that’s wearing people’s brains out.”
Ultimately, Stollak and Fournet agree, the modern workplace will demand that managers think differently about work hours and productivity. And while a formal adoption of reduced work hours doesn’t appear imminent in the U.S., employers are embracing flexible and hybrid work schedules. Some, Stollak adds, are starting to consider benefits like unlimited PTO or sabbaticals to attract workers.
But in a country where one of HR managers’ biggest challenges can sometimes be getting their employees to even use earned vacation hours, the idea of “working less” could be a tough sell.
“We truly don’t check out from work for a whole host of reasons,” Stollak says. “We still check emails. There’s a great fear of coming back and needing a ‘vacation from your vacation.’ Or if the organization doesn’t fall apart in my two-week absence, do they even need me?”
But attitudes can and will change, experts say. And generational differences, coupled with the ever-growing U.S. labor shortage, will help shape the future of work hours.
“We have a lot fewer younger workers coming up; if they’re smart, they know they’re in the driver’s seat in terms of negotiating salary, the type of work they want to do and how long they’re going to do it,” Stollak says. “Are employers going to be flexible enough to say, ‘OK, here’s the tradeoff we need to make to get the talent we want?’”
