Experiments worldwide have tried to prove the benefit of working fewer hours, in the name of improving work-life balance. Can we get it down to a day a week?

Pedro_P

▼ If you’ve got a full-time job, chances are you’re working eight hours or more a day, probably Monday to Friday.
Of course, many of us work a lot more – Elon Musk said in a recent  New York Times profilethat he clocks up to 120 a week, pretty much obliterating any opportunity he has for work-life balance.
There aren’t many upsides to putting in so much time at the office: plenty of studies from around the world suggest longer working hours make us unhappierand less productive.
So in an effort to improve workers’ work-life balance, companies and governments around the world are experimenting with cutting working hours. It’s a move that attracts huge interest – a recent trial from New Zealand generated international headlines by cutting the work week from five days to four.
But why stop at four days? Why can’t we all work three, two, or even half a day each week? Is there a sweet spot where it doesn’t pay to work fewer hours?
Four-day experiment
Perpetual Guardian is the New Zealand-based trust and wills firm that experimented with removing an entire day from the working  week.
Here’s how it worked: for two weeks in May, the company asked its 240 office workers to work four eight-hour days instead of five. (The workers were paid for five days.) Researchers from the University of Auckland and the Auckland University of Technology surveyed the employees afterwards. The result: 24% said their work-life balance had improved, and 7% saw reduced stress. Meanwhile, company leadership reported no drop in productivity.
Customer service even improved, says Jarrod Haar, a human resources and management professor at Auckland University of Technology who helped oversee the study. “When they rolled this out, the boss said if they can’t maintain 100% productivity, or thereabouts, in the four days, then back to normal it would go. So, staff have the motivation.”
This kind of experiment isn’t just taking place in the South Pacific, however.
In 2016, Reykjavik city government in Iceland revealed the results of a year-long study that cut around half a workday each week for full-time employees at some municipal offices. The experiment found that both costs and productivity  remained the same, despite less time spent in the office.
Sweden did something similar, with a handful of trials involving a range of employers, from start-ups to nursing homes – most prominently at Svartedalen, an elderly care facility that launched a 32-hour work week.
In Japan, where there’s a word for “ death by overworking,” the government has introduced a  measure called “Shining  Mondays”– in which companies can give employees the opportunity to come into work late one Monday a month.
Improving work-life balance  saves companies money because happy employees are less likely to quit, says Jan Emmanuel De Neve, an associate professor of economics and strategy at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School. In his research, he has found work-life balance sits at the top of priorities for life satisfaction, even ahead of whether or not people find their jobs interesting.
“You want people to stay, because [employee] turnover is incredibly costly,” says De Neve, who is also an associate editor of the World Happiness Report. He also points out that in 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes predictedthat we should all  eventually be working just 15  hours a week, due to better  technology and productivity gains.
Which raises the question…
How low can you go?
Just how shortcouldwe make the work week? What about four hours a week? (▪ ▪ ▪)

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soothsayer

yes. It does work to have fewer work days to improve work life balance. It is more relaxing and gets one to do some out of the box thinking

kkh

working lesser hours a day in India might not be the best option, thanks to the n no. of smoke breaks/bio breaks/coffee breaks/gossips that employees generally take in an Indian office. Thought the flip side being even after this Indians are considered to be more efficient in terms of knowledge and cost per resource than the original businesses outsourcing work to India

leesam3

But I guess cutting work hours or days is not possible for all types of jobs.