Remember when science fiction promised us we’d all be working less and less in the future? Sure, that one worked out about as well as the flying cars. (Mind you, it also debunks the endless, “Robots is gonna terk er jerbs!” fear-mongering, so, potayto, potahto.)
But, as some creative employers are showing, just because we’re still working a 40-hour week, doesn’t mean it has to be a nine-to-five, five days a week.
What staffing shortage? One Miami Chick-fil-A owner-operator has been deluged with applications after switching his staff to a three-day, 14-hour-per-day workweek.
So, that’s still a 40-hour week, but with four-day “weekends”.
Justin Lindsey was looking for a novel way to reward workers who were “literally working 70 hours a week, week in and week out”, he recently told QSR magazine.
The popular franchise was profitable and sales were robust but that was coming at the expense of staff burnout.
Burned-out staff are almost certainly likely to be less productive, on the whole. And more likely to quit – with high staff turnover being a pain in the arse for everyone.
It’s not the first case of an business trading off longer working days for more days off in between. But many of those have tended to be in the resources rather than the service industries.
In his restaurant’s case, Lindsey said the three-day workweek allows his staff to plan lives outside of work in advance.
“I think people want to work in this industry,” Lindsey said in the report. “But they want some things to change, and I think that’s what this has shown – is that there are things that if we change it for the better, we’re going to make a lasting impact.” Lindsey could not be reached for comment by CNN.
A three-day workweek is still very rare, but the buzz around a four-day week has been gaining momentum.
Of course, people still have to pay the bills.
In a six-month pilot program in the UK, 3,300 workers across 70 companies agreed to work 80 per cent of their usual weekly hours in exchange for promising to maintain 100 per cent of their productivity. Their pay was unchanged. At the end of this month, the companies will decide whether to keep the program.
A similar test in Iceland was successful. And when Microsoft tried a shorter workweek in Japan in 2019, it found productivity increased up by almost 40 per cent.
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Other experiments with working weeks during the pandemic have been less successful. Work from home, of course, was only an option for white-collar workers. While working from home is often more productive, there are some important caveats.
Interestingly, working from home was more productive before the pandemic than during. In fact, some studies found that people who worked from home during the pandemic were less productive than those who did not.
This suggests that the wholesale rush from the office simply wasn’t planned well, and that working from home isn’t for everybody. Nearly half of employees reported struggling with concentration and distraction. Access to important office equipment and sensitive company documents were also cited by a significant percentage.
