Society is evolving and so is the workplace. It’s time to stop laboring over jobs for 40 hours a week.
As Americans, 40-hour work weeks are the standard if not the minimum amount of time spent on the job. With the majority of daytime hours spent at the office, we often leave family time and household duties for the leftover scraps of time in the evenings. Sometimes, the typical American lifestyle leaves me to wonder if we work to live or live to work.
In some ways, the pandemic improved the lack of work/life balance. In the long run, however, I think it’s safe to say that the effects of a global shutdown disrupted that balance even further. No longer could people leave their work at the office, because their home became their office. Work life permeated home life, and families became separated not just by the walls of their homes, but the different headspaces they began to live in as well. Now that we’ve allowed work into our homes, it’s begun to take root. Early morning and even weekend Zoom calls have brought the office to employees wherever they are… oh, joy.
Does increasing time on the job lead to increased productivity? Would decreasing the hours spent working have any effects on productivity? These are the questions that leaders in countries like the United Kingdom, Sweden and Spain have asked, and the results of their trials would shock workaholics everywhere. In fact, 95% of U.K. companies who participated in the trial have found that working for four days instead of five has had no negative impacts on productivity and has even led to better collaboration among employees. These results lead me to wonder about the other ways in which we could be intentional about spending our time and perhaps reassess whether we truly value quality over quantity.
The weekend as we know it wasn’t always two days of rest. Originally, it was just Sunday to allow people to go to church and perhaps do their laundry. When factory employees began skipping work on Mondays, or “keeping Saint Monday,” the weekend was extended back into half of Saturday in hopes of improving productivity. Henry Ford pioneered the two-day weekend with his implementation of the 40-hour work week. While this creation has tokenized the American worklife, I think that the evolution of our economy beyond assembly line labor would justify a shift. Our modern commerce system seems to have secrets from even the most expert economists, as if we’ve poured so much of ourselves into it that it now has a mind of its own. Since it’s no longer a machine with gears that we have to manually turn, then is it necessary to actively contribute to our economy for 40 hours a week, if we’re even contributing at all? And even if we are, why must we live so far outside of ourselves and give so much to a system that has nothing to do with basic human nature and needs? Humans created the system of commerce thousands of years ago in order to make their lives easier, not to create a new life entirely.
A four-day work week might allow people to take up a hobby, something only known to retirees and children. Nowadays, a full-time employee with a hobby might even be called a Renaissance Man (or Woman). So much of modern life is focused on productivity, achieving career goals and fulfilling the expectations of having a family while retaining sanity and maybe even being happy. Is simply striving for happiness considered to be admirable… would it even be considered a valid goal? I think that experimenting with a four-day work week would be valuable in determining where our priorities lie in our modern society and perhaps even shifting those priorities towards existing as humans rather than employees. Then, perhaps we could stop living to work and start working to live.
