- Former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang told Business Insider that the US is over from running a four-day workday to better meet American workers.
- As health experts project that life as we know it may not return until next year, Yang told Business Insider in an interview that a four-day workday could be more than ever.
- “It would help us get away from this hamster wheel where we are at the moment, where we are all kind of racing against the clock in service of this like giant machine for efficient capital,” Yang said. “And the race drives us all crazy.”
- “All the key drivers that will make your business a more successful business will improve as a result of this strategy,” Andrew Barnes, co-founder of the non-profit platform 4 Day Week Global, told Business Insider.
- Two founders of the company attested to Barnes’ assessment, saying that not only will the company take advantage of the policy, but employees will experience a better work-life balance as a result.
- Visit the Business Insider website for more stories.
The coronavirus pandemic has forced some Americans to adapt to a lifestyle within the confines of their own homes.
Because many employees (other than those who consider themselves essential) work remotely, companies try to adapt their offices with safety precautions in mind – even if they themselves intend to open them completely.
Former Democratic presidential candidate and entrepreneur Andrew Yang first pushed for the idea of implementing a four-day workday in May to better meet working Americans in this time of uncertainty, citing the benefits of time and mental health that employees can have unpacking from a shorter workweek.
There is no single overarching definition for a four-day workday. The Washington Post notes: “There are different models for the short week, some of which predict the same progress in fewer hours, while others simply suggest longer hours spread over fewer days.” Some see the benefit of a three-day weekend, while others mean a one-day weekend is abolished.
For his part, Yang previously tweeted: “3-day weekends are better than 2-day weekends.”
As health experts project that life as we knew it might not be back next year, Yang said in an interview with Business Insider that a four-day workday could be more than ever.
“It would help to get us away from this hamster wheel where we are at the moment, where we are all kind of racing against the clock in the service of this gigantic machine for capital efficiency,” Yang said. “And the race drives us all crazy.”
One survey found that many Americans agree – according to a June survey by The Harris Poll, 82% of committed Americans prefer a shorter workweek, even if it means longer workdays.
The Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern at the World Economic Forum in Davos, January 2019.
REUTERS / Arnd Wiegmann / File photo
The policy has become so popular in Finland that Prime Minister Sanna Marin has called on the labor force across the country to introduce a shorter working week, in which employees would work only six hours a day, four days a week. In New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has proposed the policy as part of an economic recovery test of the coronavirus pandemic.
Andrew Barnes, CEO of Perpetual Guardian, introduced in 2018 a four-day workday to his company in New Zealand.
Barnes is also the co-founder of the non-profit platform 4 Day Week Global and author of “The 4 Day Week.” He explained that “stress levels drop, creativity goes up, [and] team cohesion goes up ”after the implementation of the policy.
“It’s also part of what makes it so difficult for so many workers to find a place in our workforce, because our whole culture is so efficiently obsessed that we replace workers with machines and software and math,” said Yang of the American labor. “So, for me, a four-day workday is too late. It would be very useful for all of us.”
Microsoft experimented last year with a four-day workday at one of its Japanese subsidiaries in an effort to better recognize work-life balance, and the tech giant saw labor productivity jump 40% as a result of closing its offices each Friday in August, compared to the previous year.
“All the key drivers that will make your business a more successful business will improve as a result of this strategy,” Barnes told Business Insider. “So actually, if you want to have a successful business, not doing this is actually the bigger problem.”
“The world has now said, ‘Actually, we have this amazing experiment called COVID-19,'” he added. “We wonder how the world will work forward and take shape. Your biggest risk right now is not to move forward, because to get ahead of the curve, you had to introduce something like that.”
Barnes, who is also an entrepreneur himself, explained that having a four-day workday is not necessarily equivalent to a three-day weekend. Instead, he said it should function to meet the time constraints of individual employees while working towards the goal of accomplishing the tasks at the company.
“In our company, some people will take a day off. Some people will take two and a half days. Some people will work five days, but they will work compressed hours,” he said. “So what we’re talking about is a reduction in the workweek. Not everyone comes out with a three-day weekend. For some people it is, but for many people, the last thing they want is a three-day weekend. “
Since the beginning of the pandemic, entrepreneur Robert Yuen, co-founder of software firm Monogram, said the shorter workweek has “become even more valuable than it has ever been.”
Yuen has had a four-day workweek policy with the company since 2016. In addition to the productivity benefits of the policy, Yuen told Business Insider that working from home has blurred the line on work-life balance and that implementing a workday for four days could go to ways to recover that.
“When you work from home, there’s a bit less of a barrier between when to stop and when to start,” he said. “It’s just a little bit of a duel between work-and-life separation, simply because you no longer navigate to the office, and your office can be your bedroom, or your office can now be your kitchen.”
“So I think of course most people now actually work more than they used to,” he said. “Having a truly dedicated mental break to kind of relax and recharge is even more central today than it ever was.”
After pursuing the policy for the past four years, Yuen said he was “experimenting and trying different ways to serve the 40-hour workweek,” finally finding a system that works best for his business.
“The first approach was to take off on Friday nights, which I think is the natural way to think, like, ‘Oh, we have a Friday night off and have a long weekend every weekend,'” he said. “Well, we’re really learned that that was not super ideal for productivity, as a three-day weekend is just a really long time away from work, which made Monday a lot harder to get back into rhythm. “
“We’ve finally landed in a really ideal situation … where we’re taking off on Wednesday – get two days off on Monday and Tuesday, Wednesday off, and then Thursday, Friday,” Yuen said, adding that the company also finally got its week off. shortened to a 32-hour workweek.
Although it has worked well for his company, Yuen said he acknowledged that having such a policy is not a “one-shoe-fits-all” scenario.
As with the coronavirus pandemic, which brought in sharp relief, jobs can be done at home and those who cannot – health care, the service industry, the gig economy, retail – the four-day workday is likely to have limitations of the sector.
“I think [shortened workweek] absolutely affects if you are in a sector that is hourly and you pay by the hour, and then suddenly you lose eight hours of pay that you would normally get, “said Yuen. I can see that these types of industries have a struggle with executing a four-day workday. I think we need to go from case to case, company to company, and sector by sector to determine if this type of work fits. “
Art Shectman, president and founder of Elephant Ventures, a software and computer technology company, began the four-day trial period in early August.
In the few short weeks since trying the shorter work week in which Friday is the designated day, Shectman said he found that working longer days to make Friday hours has removed this “guilt and anxiety” from working remotely. , where he would have to take time off work to do things at home, such as taking care of his 9-year-old twin girls.
JGalione / Getty Images
“There’s like this cycle of guilt to punish time out and the fear that the day will happen without you, while you take the time to take care of everything you need to do,” he told Business Insider. “If you get rid of that anxiety lust and debt lust later in the day, you get to stay in that productivity zone for the rest of the day.”
“And so, from a moral and mental-tax standpoint of just accommodating everything that normally happens with trying to work from home, it has been fantastic,” he added.
Charlotte Lockhart, co-founder of “4 Day Week Global” stressed that “as employers, we need to remember that we are borrowing people from their lives.”
“What we learned was that different people want to turn off different types of time, and therefore we need to create a lifestyle that allows them to work productively, yet have appropriate time, because our ability to work from home is not different. is. ” t necessarily uniform, “she told Business Insider.
Yang brought back the models of British economist John Maynard Keynes, who in 1930 predicted that technological change and the great levels of wealth generated by this time would lead to a 15-hour workweek.
“He was correct about the level of wealth, but apparently wrong about our working weeks, which have become longer, not shorter,” Yang said. “That it’s past time that we’re in the right direction and running a four-day workweek, which would help us all.”
