Work Less, Do More: Demystifying The Four Day Work Week with Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Dr Alex Soojung-Kim Pang - Author and Global Program Director of 4 Day Week Global
Welcome to the We are Human Leaders podcast, today we are discussing the 4 Day Work Week with Alex Soojung-Kim Pang.
Imagine a career that adds years to your life. This is exactly the work Alex and his team are doing at 4 Day Work Week Global - they’re helping people and organizations create a million years of free time.
As an individual the four day working week gives you back around 10 weeks every calendar year - imagine how you could spend that time
In this conversation we debunk the long-held view that to achieve more we need to work longer.
Alex gives us the data from global companies through to health-care institutions and local pest control businesses that show a shorter working week, can in fact lead to more productive outcomes as an organization, and greatly benefit the lives of employees.
Alex Soonjung-Kim Pang is the program manager at 4 Day Week Global, he’s the Author of SHORTER: WORK BETTER, SMARTER AND LESS-- HERE'S HOW, REST: WHY YOU GET MORE DONE WHEN YOU WORK LESS and the newly published Work Less, Do more: Designing the Four Day Week.
Find all of Alexs' recent publications here:
Work Less, Do More: Designing the Four Day Week available here.
Shorter: How Working Less Will Revolutionise the Way Your Company Gets Things Done. Penguin Business, 2020.
“UAE Joins the Global Movement for a Shorter Workweek,” Gulf News (12 December 2021).
“How to Rest Well,” Psyche (November 2021).
“Why We Need to Consider Switching to a 4-Day Workweek — Now,” TED Ideas (July 2021).
“How Better Routines Create Happier Workers,” Financial Times, 28 September 2020.
“Surprising COVID-19 Side Effect: More Companies Adopt the 4-day Workweek,” Fast Company, 19 August 2020.
“To Safely Reopen, Make the Workweek Shorter. Then Keep It Shorter,” The Atlantic, April 30, 2020.
“It’s Time to End 9-5 Office Hours,” The Guardian, 10 March 2020.
“Shorter Hours Make Stronger Businesses,” Wall Street Journal, 27 February 2020.
“Why Companies Should Say Goodbye to the 996 Work Culture, and Hello to 4-day Weeks,” South China Morning Post, 20 April 2019.
Connect with Alex and his work here www.strategy.rest via LinkedIn or Twitter at @askpang
For accessible access, view the podcast with closed captions below and access the full conversation transcript.
Episode Transcript:
Spk0 Alexis Zahner Spk1 Dr Alex Soojung-Kim Pang Spk2 Sally Clarke
[00:00:09] spk_0: Welcome back to the We are Human Leaders podcast. I'm Alexis Zahner and together with my co-host Sally Clarke. Today, we're discussing a four day work week with Alex Soojung-Kim Pang. Imagine a career that adds years to your life. This is exactly the work that Alex and his team are doing at the four day work week Global. They're helping people and organizations create a million years of free time as an individual. The four day working week gives you back around 10 weeks every calendar year. Imagine how you could spend that time in this conversation. We debunk the long held view that to achieve more, we have to work longer. Alex gives us the data from global companies through to healthcare institutions and local pest control businesses that show a shorter working week, in fact, leads to more productive outcomes for an organization and greatly benefits the lives of employees. Alex Suhong Kim Pang is the program manager at the four day work week Global. He's an author of shorter work, better, smarter and less. Here's how and rest why you get more done when you work less and the soon to be published, work less do more designing the four day work week. We are so excited for you to learn alongside us. Now, let's dive in. Welcome to the We are Human Leaders podcast, Alex. It's an absolute pleasure to have you with us today. And before we dive a little bit more into your work, we'd love to begin with getting to know you more. So, could you tell us a little bit about your own personal journey and how you've come to do the important work that you're currently doing? Well?
[00:01:51] spk_1: Thanks for having me on and for calling it important work. So as for, you know, why it is that I do it, my work with companies and now some governments interested in shortening working hours, really sort of grew out of a project I did a few years ago, which was a book about the hidden role of rest in the lives of really creative and prolific people, right? We tend to think these days of successful people, highly creative ones as you know, folks who are obsessed who are working all the time, the kind of sort of Elon Musk model as one that is both sort of necessary to do good work. And, you know, almost a sort of inevitable consequence of one's sort of passion and dedication and the argument that I made in that book was that in fact, when you look at the daily lives of some of history's most important thinkers, writers, composers, et cetera. It turns out that they did what we would regard as work for far fewer hours than sort of, than we think today are necessary for accomplishing things like, you know, sort of writing famous operas or, or, or of the origin of species. And that there is a body of work in neuroscience and the psychology of creativity that explains why crafting days in which you balance periods of deep focused work and periods of rest turn out to be more sustainable or of more generative and create more time for insight. What was missing from that book though was an explanation of how of how people who don't have a lot of control over their schedule could sort of work this into their lives or how organizations could do it. And so I kind of got tired of not being able to provide as good an explanation as I wanted for those kinds of questions and started looking for answers, looking for companies or practices in the business world or elsewhere that I could point to as illustrations of how to bring rest into everyone's working life. That's when I discovered companies that had moved to four day weeks or other kinds of shorter work weeks. And I was finding them in all sorts of industries, in software startups, financial services, Michelin star restaurants, some factories. So they were in industries where overwork is the norm and burn out as a kind of occupational hazard and long hours are just taken for granted as kind of price of admission. And they also were located all over the world, you know, not just in Nordic countries where you have sort of great regard for work life balance, but also in North America, Australia, Japan and Korea, two countries whose languages have their own words for working yourself to death. And so this convinced me that this was actually an emerging phenomenon that wasn't really aware of itself, but whose story needed to be told. And so that was the origin of sort of my interest in the four day week and sort of my first book about it, which publication of which eventually led to my joining Four Day Week Global, which, you know, which is a nonprofit started by Andrew Barnes and Charlotte Lockhart in New Zealand. And Andrew's book came out literally within a couple of weeks of mine. So we have appeared on lots of things together and knew each other and, and eventually decided, you know, it was, each of us had been working on our own and decided that or if we really ought to join forces. And so it was a bit like for me when the guitarist Joe Walsh joined the Eagles, each one of them had had pretty good careers up until that point. But once they united, they recorded Hotel California, you know, the best selling album of all time. So my hope is that we'll sort of do something like that. So that's the back story to why I do what I do and how I got here. Thanks so
[00:05:39] spk_2: much for that, Alex. I love that metaphor. I think that idea of, you know, great musicians coming together to make something greater than the, some of the parts is a really beautiful way of putting it and also speaks to the sort of the collaborative nature of this kind of, you know, work to make work more effective and more fulfilling, more meaningful for people and allowing us to work fewer hours. I'm curious, what is it? Do you think about the for week that makes it the kind of go to modality that we think of when we think about reducing work hours?
[00:06:10] spk_1: Well, I think that it is an incredibly clear goal. Number one, everyone can appreciate in about two seconds, the value of having a three day weekend, every weekend forever. Right. Number one, I think also that when you get into it, you realize both that it is sort of bold and has great benefits, but is also more attainable than you might imagine in that, you know, we've had decades of technologies and or that have made us more productive in certain or certain things have helped us automate some kinds of tasks that used to be used to require a lot of labor. But researchers tell us that we still lose something like 2 to 3 hours of productive time every day to overly long meetings, to tech driven distraction or to just poorly designed processes. And so in a sense, the four day week has already arrived and it's just that it's buried underneath this outmoded stuff. So if you can clear that away, then you actually can go a long way to doing in four days what you currently do in five. It's also important for two other reasons. I think number one that it offers a single solution to a whole bunch of problems in the workplace. You know, I never like to sound like one of those internet ads. This, you know, try this one weird trick to become a billionaire or whatever. However, you know, when you look at challenges around sort of burnout work life balance, sort of sustainability of companies or the challenges that working parents, particularly women face in maintaining their careers. But also having families, all of these challenges turn out to be sort of addressable with the four day week. And so rather than having to implement a bunch of different somewhat piecemeal solutions that try to address each of these problems, the four day week is a way of helping us work better in ways that address them all. The second important thing about it is that it is a collective solution, not an individual one. All too often. We have looked at the problems that people have with work with burnout with work, not being as meaningful as we want it to be et cetera and said uh of the problem, the solution to the problem is mindfulness classes or, you know, yoga or something else. In other words, the solution lies within you because in a way, the problem lies with you too. One of the things with the four day week is that it recognizes that these actually are structural problems that require structural solutions that everybody works on together. And I think that that represents really powerful change in the way that we think about what's wrong with work today and importantly how we fix it. So, and I think finally that, you know, in the sort of post COVID era or, you know, probably the pre whatever next pandemic era that we all recognize that it's possible to change how we work faster and more profoundly than we ever thought possible in January 2020. And I think that lots of companies who come to us have had that experience and they want to build on it or they want to do it in a proactive way that makes everyone's lives better that gives employees and companies greater resilience and maybe sort of makes them sort of more capable of dealing with uncertainties in the business world of the future. So for all of those reasons, I think that the four day week, that is why sort of the four day weeks moment sort of has arrived.
[00:09:46] spk_2: Yeah, that makes so much sense as a burnout researcher, I'm nodding away, you know, really knowing that, you know, those systemic causes which are often sort of seem quite nebulous and complex and therefore it's easier and very attractive. I think for a lot of organizations and leaders to simply say, just download another, you know, meditation app and become more resilient and soldier on. So I think it's a really wonderful, you know, potentially very powerful framework for organizations to use to really sort of, you know, see through that transformation. And I know in your book, in shorter, you refer to Parkinson's Law, sort of as it, you know, works in the workplace. So I was wondering if you could sort of explain to us briefly what that is and why it's become so normalized,
[00:10:25] spk_1: right? So Parkinson's law was coined by sort of organizational scholar named Cyril Northrop Parkinson and I want to say the 19 fifties. And the essential idea is that work expands to fill the time you give to it. So Parkinson particularly was interested in sort of organizations and bureaucracies and how it is that large bureaucracies almost sort of generate enough work internally to keep themselves busy. And, but the observation I think is one that really resonated with lots of people or the idea of it. And I think it rings true both in the sense that not just that as people, you know, knowing that we have X amount of time to do a task often means that we spend that much time or possibly a tiny bit more. But also that, you know, organizations when they know that they have people available for sort of eight hours a day, tend to generate eight hours worth of work for them. Rather than think in terms of, we have to get these things done. What's the most efficient way in order to do it? And in a way or a part of what you're doing with the four day week is trying to implement a bunch of daily practices that move you away from thinking in a Parkinson's law sort of way that you've probably, you've grown up in and getting you to think more, you know, not in terms of how much time you have for tasks, but thinking much more in terms of how effectively you can do these more generally looking at your work and work process at an individual and a team level and asking what parts of this work can we automate what things can we sort of script or, you know, ideally what things can we just disregard because they really don't add the value that or perhaps they used to. And so as a kind of sort of tool for prying open the black box or, you know, everyday working lives and asking questions about why do we really do things this way and can we do them differently? I think the four day week offers are of a terrific utility that
[00:12:32] spk_0: resonates Alex, especially as someone who has held many different roles in the past and certainly has found myself, you know, in the eight hour work day structure on a salary looking for things to do to fill my time. Um, I'm sure I'm not the only one listening who's been, you know, on that sort of structure in an organization where it's a salary, there's X amount of hours expected. So you're just filling your hours with those things. And I appreciate this sort of more path goal process to understanding, you know, what's the quickest way to get the outcome that we need and what are the priorities? Because I think so many organizations, you know, do fail to understand what are the most important tasks that their employees need to be doing and how is the quickest way or the most effective way rather to get those done? So I think in terms of outcomes for an organization as well, shifting that way of thinking helps us make sure that we're really delivering on the most important things for the business every day as well and just really cutting the fluff by the sounds of things.
[00:13:29] spk_1: Yeah. You know, and I think also that, you know, very quickly, one of the things about the four day week is that, you know, all too often we approach sort of efficiency or productivity goal as kind of ends in themselves, sort of that are maybe some abstract way can sort of make work better or that, you know, can improve a company's balance sheet down the line. And so the things that you're asked to do don't necessarily translate very directly into sort of either into benefits in your daily life and your daily work. The great thing about the four day week is that it's an incredibly clear incentive with an incredibly clear reward, right? Either at the end of the day, Thursday, everybody, you know, has done the work necessary so that everyone can have a three day weekend or you haven't. And so the feedback is super fast, it's super clear and it provides a really great incentive for doing these things that otherwise are kind of, yeah, you know, they're nice to have, you can see sort of as homo economicus, why maximizing your utility is a good thing. But the four day week really brings it home and gives you a great reason for doing
[00:14:33] spk_0: it. Yeah. Absolutely. And it's obviously very clear that people are motivated by getting some of their own time back for personal pursuits, which leads me into my next question. And that's really around the cost of a four day working week. And certainly I would imagine for a lot of businesses, there's this feeling that, uh you know, I'm paying someone to work five days, but they're only working four that's costing perhaps my business money. But you've described this as one of the most inexpensive process improvement strategies that a company can deploy. Can you explain a little bit more for us why that might be
[00:15:04] spk_1: sure companies spend virtually no money when they do these trials for a couple of reasons. You know, number one is that generally, you know, lots of them already have collaboration tools or other sort of technologies that if they simply use more effectively can go from being kind of sources of distraction to or of tools for augmenting people's abilities of and using their time more effectively. The second thing is that even under the right conditions, even if you've got sort of hourly workers, or you're, let's say a hospital and you need people 24 7, the gains that you get from having a stabler workforce having much lower turnover, not having to hire temp workers at five X. The normal rate when someone calls in sick or someone quits and having better outcomes, you know, because you're fully staffed means that there are places that, you know, before they move to a four day week or some other shorter work week for shift workers are spending, you know, six figures on temp agencies and job ads. And then after that, the spending goes down to zero. And so it turns out in those circumstances or the programs pay for themselves. And then finally in professional services like law firms where the billable hour reigns supreme, the places that have tried a four day week report that they've been able to make it work because while in theory, you have fewer hours per week for billing, because everyone works together in order to reduce the amount of time that you're charging to non billable administrative stuff that goes, there's an incentive to drive that down. But also it means that people are, are, people can work more effectively because they're better rested after three days and you're much less likely to get into the situation of having one partner who is, you know, the critical person on, you know, with two of your really big clients, who's the expert on telecommunications law in the Nordics who burns out and has to take off six months. And all of a sudden, you know, you're not able to serve those clients. And so by kind of creating more stable work, working and billing conditions, you further are able to sort of recover income that you might lose to those sorts of emergencies. And so for all of those reasons, it turns out that, you know, while at the face of it, you imagine that a four day week is going to cost you money, right? It turns out that either of the direct costs of implementing it are much lower and the kind of systemic savings that you get turn out in many cases to be substantial enough or to make it viable. It's
[00:17:41] spk_2: fascinating, Alex, I think particularly as a former lawyer and currently working with a couple of law firms here in the Netherlands around burnout. It's really interesting to think of that concept of the loss of resource that happens when someone burns out as a result of overwork. And you know, that that's a really fantastic way. I think of seeing that we can actually create a much more sustainable work environment for individuals, but also for the team for the firm more broadly. And I'd love to sort of for a moment, sort of get a little bit more granular on the process of implementation a four day work week. And it's wondering if you can explain for us sort of what it really takes to ensure that shifting structurally to working shorter hours, for example, a four day week, you know what we need to do to make sure that that's a win for everyone, whether that's within a team or within a small organization, for
[00:18:26] spk_1: example. Sure. So at four week global, we divide the whole thing up into two major parts, right? There's a planning phase that goes for a few weeks or a couple of months depending upon how big and complex the organization is and then trial itself where you're sort of road testing the four day week, I think of it, you know, being in Silicon Valley, I translate it into kind of design thinking, right? One of them, you know, the first is a sort of iteration kind of phase. And then the second is prototyping where you're actually putting the thing in people's hands, seeing what works, fixing, what doesn't trying to, you know, rapidly iterate and create better versions. So that at the end of the trial, in this case, you have a four day week that really works for your organization. So in the planning phase, it's about kind of doing strategy and policy stuff, right? Thinking through, you know, what could go wrong, you know, how you design around that, thinking about how you sort of present it to or to clients or the public so that they see it as a win for them thinking through or to policy things. And then also, you know, a lot of detail and then getting people involved in thinking about how they can redesign their jobs, right? How you can make meetings better, how you can use technology to improve your capacity to focus rather than keep you in a state of perpetual distraction, how you can redesign the workday itself to give everybody time for deep focused work time together, you know, so that the place doesn't turn into a kind of Dickensian workhouse and also, you know, sort of enough time for clients or exploratory work or of deep thinking that doesn't pay off immediately, but could be really important in the long run. I think in kind of cultural terms, a couple other things that are really important are number one, you got to recognize that even while this the the mandate for the four day week comes from the top because it's often, you know, the founder who recognizes, if I don't make some changes, I'm gonna burn out in the next six months. Who wants this as much as anybody? The real work of implementing it comes from sort of the bottom up, you know, no boss, no matter how good they are, knows everyone's job well enough to redesign it for them. But the four day week offers an opportunity for people who have some experience in their industry, who probably have a kind of list of things I would do differently if I was in charge of this industry because I have experience and we do these stupid things for no good reason. Gives them a chance actually to put some of those things into practice and to see if they work or not and if they do to share them with others so that, you know, they can turn from private practices into social norms, the places that make this work. Therefore also recognize that this is very much a collective collaborative enterprise. It's not something that management does for you. It's something that everybody has to work together equally in order to make a success. So it's really important early on to design processes so that you have accountability so that, you know, you can't have free writers who, you know, are basically betting that all of my colleagues really want the four day week. And they want it enough so that I can sluff off and they'll, you know, sort of, they'll do some of my work. And it also, I think having leadership that is willing to trust people enough to try a whole bunch of new things, recognizing that some of them aren't going to succeed immediately. But even the failures can be things that you can learn from and you can build on. And I think if you have those, that combination of the kind of practical elements, sort of good planning as well as sort of the trial. And if you've got those kind of cultural and normative things and that attitude toward leadership, put all those things together. And I think the four day week becomes something that is sort of really viable, you know, both in the near term the trial, but also will be sustainable over the long
[00:22:14] spk_0: run. It certainly does sound like it would be a transformative experience for organizations in many ways, Alex and I can't help but pause and appreciate the notion that employees are really an active participant in understanding their jobs and where they can help to co-sign your job in a more effective way. And the reason for me, this also feels really important is as a female. Certainly it feels as though we do face more challenges to showing up to work every day. You already mentioned, you know, working mothers and things like this as well. And this cosign process of the planning processing phase before the trial phase feels like it would really illuminate to other employees within the organization. Some of those additional challenges that certain employees may face that perhaps we're not even aware of as well. And I wonder if that is a, I guess, happy byproduct if you will, this sort of that illumination of the different challenges that we each face coming to work every day from that sort of equity sense as
[00:23:10] spk_1: well. I think that's absolutely right. You know, certainly one of the things that the pandemic has done is reveal all kinds of structural inequalities that have been around for a long time. But which we sort of tended not to sort of pay as much attention to as sort of as we should have. I think it's also the case that one of the most important things I personally have learned sort of studying four day week companies is that we call certain jobs, you know, or to creative work or knowledge work. But really, basically every job that can be automated can be done, really simply sort of has been automated. And what that means is that whether you are line cook or you are a nurse's assistant or, you know, for that matter, you're a patent attorney. You know, there is no work any longer that does not require creativity, judgment, decision making that cannot benefit from or autonomy from which you can, you know, there is no job that you can't learn how to get better at over time or that you can't do better by sort of being able to work better with your colleagues. In other words, all work now is creative and knowledge work. And sort of that's why you've got restaurants or, or of factories or care homes that have implemented the four day week successfully. So now, you know, and then as for the, you know, the gender dimension, I think that the four day week has been great for everyone, but it's transformational for sort of working mothers for a couple reasons. You know, number one is that, you know, I mean, it does offer genuinely sort of more time in a way that does not require making the sorts of tradeoffs that all too often. You see, you know, in places offering flexible work, right, flexible work is a misnomer, flexible work is rearranging your schedule to suit the demands, not just of your employer, but your school, you know, or of the sports team, et cetera, you are creating flexibility that you then give to someone else. Whereas the great thing about the four day week is that number one, everybody is working together in order to make it happen. It's not that, you know, there's no lingering suspicion that one person is leaving early to pick up kids, but you know, maybe they're leaving work on the table, everybody's got to cooperate in order to make this work. And so what all too often is a kind of zero sum game in flexible work offices, becomes a win, win in four day week offices. You know, another thing that we see is, you know, does seem to provide more time for parenting or self care or what have you. I recently went back and talked to some people I interviewed in shorter and several of them have had kids since then. And all of them say that this allows me to be, you know, a company founder or a head of design and be a parent and not feel like I'm, you know, working both of them at 50% but I can really do a good job with them both. And then finally, we're starting to see some evidence that there's some benefits in terms of hiring your listenership or, you know, probably is familiar with the fact that there are enormous numbers of working women who have significant experience who after having kids are not able to come back into the workforce at the levels that they had been previously. This is an enormous opportunity for four day week companies. And they see that. And indeed, you know, it's a way for small companies to hire people with levels of skill that they wouldn't be able to get otherwise. And for sort of those parents to come back into the workforce at level that recognizes their abilities. But in addition, and finally, companies tend to hire a little bit differently. It looks like, you know, there was one founder that said, you know, before we did a four day week, I absolutely tended to hire, you know, people who I knew could sleep under their desks, which basically meant I was hiring like 25 year old single men. Now, what I want is someone who can do the job in six hours who is empathetic and a team player but is also ruthless about their time, who can get the job done, focus do the next thing and then get out of there and who is it? Who has that combination of professional skill, of work experience and the soft skills necessary to like juggle five different things adequately and still, you know, get out on time. It's working moms. And so what normally is considered a liability in the job market being a parent is now something that signals a kind of competence that allows you to earn a premium. And I'm really curious to see if this holds, but if it does, that's a kind of flip that is really like transformative and has serious implications for the way in which economies are able to recognize harness and benefit from talent over the long run? Ok. End of rant for
[00:27:43] spk_0: those who can't actually see Sally and I as faces, we are sitting here with the biggest smiles on our faces, nodding our heads here to everything you've just said, 100 And one thing I just want to take that pause to really reflect on is the difference between the four day work week and flexible working. And I just appreciate that you mentioned that flexible working really does often feel like borrowed time. We feel like we're giving ourselves in this moment so that perhaps we can pick the kids up from school, but then have to go home and jump back on the computer and do something later. And the four day work week is really about reducing the overall time, not swapping from the morning to the afternoon. And I just think that's a really, really important moment to pause and reflect on because it really is offering a solution and as remote workers and as flexible workers ourselves, there is a guilt and a stress associated knowing that, oh, it's 10 in the morning. I'm not at work right now, but I probably still will be at nine PM at night because there's certain things that still have to happen. And there's a real emotional cost to that, I think, and a mental and perhaps physical cost to that, that sort of goes unnoticed because we think that flexible work is a solution to us, getting everything done. But we're still having these long days or perhaps even more attached to our computers when we shouldn't be.
[00:28:57] spk_1: Yeah. No, I'm beginning to feel like, I mean, there's a great body of work about both the upsides and the downsides of flexibility. There is a sort of, you know, a professor in Kent called Heng Cheng who's written a fantastic book called The Flexibility Paradox, which explains why it is that flexibility ends up sometimes sort of tying workers up in ways that sort of they don't expect and that work and that run counter to sort of the intentions of sort of flexibility. But, you know, I think that the more we learn about sort of the subtler costs of it, more things like a four day week look attractive, even though they don't necessarily offer the prospect of being able to always let you go to soccer practice or what have you. And indeed, there's what I'm hearing is that broadly speaking, men are spending more time on housework and childcare and mothers are spending more time on themselves or with each other when they have more time. Exactly. So, and I think that we can all decide for ourselves whether having a Friday off is great because it, it means we can have more time with the kids or Fridays are great because it means we can, you know, leave the kids in school or child care and have the day to ourselves either way though each one can be a win depending upon where you are in your life and what works for you. And
[00:30:15] spk_2: I also love that. I heard you say, you know, it shifts the hiring perspective as well, Alex because I think that's a really interesting one as well that rather than just looking to hire sort of, uh, capital that can be exploited, we're actually looking for people who are good at setting boundaries and to probably have a fairly good self care regime already implemented. And I think shifting the dial there to, you know, allow that to be actually a very attractive thing in the market, you know, for people to be developing. I think that's a pretty huge shift as well.
[00:30:44] spk_1: No, I think that the and when you sort of company founders who sort of move to four day weeks or other advocates within organizations, definitely see this as a kind of platform for encouraging people to develop sort of a set of practices or set of skills that are sustainable in which everyone supports everyone. You know, it's not the case that you have to kind of sneak out in order to go to your yoga class, but rather you're all working together in order to make everyone's lives better. And I think in terms of sort of thinking about hiring about career development, about sort of talent development that, you know, it's very much a move out of a mode of success for the company requires either weaponizing sort of workers idealism or of appealing to their ambition or satisfying their greed. And unfortunately, this means that there are some places that are really good at doing one of those three where the four day week is less likely to take off. We haven't seen hedge funds do it, for example. But I think sort of it does offer, I think a clear model for places that recognize the value of people, the value of talent and experience a way of cultivating those things and keeping them. So, in more far sighted companies, I think that actually turns out to be one of the biggest uh biggest appeals of the four day week.
[00:32:08] spk_0: Yeah, it's brilliant, Alex. There's so much that I would like to dive into more there and I just want to touch on. Obviously, there's been a lot in the media recently around the trials that happened in the UK around the four day work week. I'm personally based in Australia and there's certainly a lot of media around this here as well. There's also some political parties floating the idea of this becoming perhaps part of legislation. And I'd just love to know you've already spoken a lot about some of the key outcomes that the organizations you've worked with and you've seen have derived from the four day work week. But I'd love to know if you could sort of from these broader work week trials. What are some of those key data points or insights that have come out of these trials?
[00:32:47] spk_1: Well, more than 90% of companies that completed the trial have decided to either extend it or make it permanent. Yeah, you know, some companies will sort of make it kind of semi permanent. They sort of move in with the four day week rather than get married to it, I guess. And the idea being we'll review it every year and if business is going well, we'll keep it. But if there's, you know, sort of, if things go off the rails then we'll change. Some of the other surprising things for me were people are sleeping more, they're sleeping an average of an hour per night more than they had been previously, which over the long run is huge in terms of health out, you know, just long term health, in terms of longevity, reduced odds of sort of chronic illnesses, dementia, et cetera. You know, the number of sick days declined substantially. I don't have the number right in front of me, but it was a lot. And I think that tells us both that people have more time to take care of themselves, but also sort of more time simply to rest and recover. And I think that, you know, one of the other surprising things is that stress levels go down and you might imagine that if you're trying to compress the work day, get more done in less time, then that's gonna stress people out. But in fact, that seems not to be the case, I think mainly because the four day week is in sort of gives people sort of more control over how they structure their work days and is essentially a kind of long experiment in what sociologists call job crafting, right? Sort of doing the sort of work necessary to figure out what makes your work sort of valuable and meaningful. And there's a big difference between working more intensively when you are more in control of that versus working more intensively because the boss demands it, right? And you don't experience the one as stressful in the way that you experience the other. So I think all of those are promising or heartening. And then we are seeing a lot of other data that confirms things that we've been told anecdotally, right about sort of improvements in healthy habits, more time for family volunteering, feeling more time for professional development. And you know, the final thing is that that companies report maybe a modest increase in revenues or profitability. But you know, the important lesson there being they're not going down, right? Or of even as the amount of time that people are spending at work, work declines. So I think that all of that illus tells us more than we knew before or confirms things that we had seen about sort of the benefits for both individuals and order for organizations and for the viability of this from a business perspective. And I think points to some very promising long term benefits in terms of sort of health wellness, longevity of careers and sustainability of enterprises,
[00:35:41] spk_2: incredible results there, Alex and it's so awesome to see that the, you know, there's so much data coming out that really does sort of validate this on so many different levels from business perspective, as well as individuals. You know, it really is so many wins one thing and I'm kind of coming up with this theory as I'm saying, it, so bear with me for a second. But you know what I heard you say there was, you know, a little bit about the sense of I think autonomy that people can feel because they've had a real contribution to how they're working to how their job is designed in the context of a four day week. I'm wondering in the recent burnout research that we did, I did with my colleague last year, you know, we saw that people were, you know, seeking flexibility as something that they wanted from their employer. And I'm wondering if the concept of flex flexibility gives us this sort of false notion of autonomy. We think it's giving us control over our hours where as you described earlier, it's actually flexibility that we then give back to the organization that we give elsewhere. Whereas in the four day week, because people are able to core to really feel, you know, invested in the way their job is designed how they're spending their time. It's a genuine sense of autonomy. I imagine.
[00:36:45] spk_1: I agree with that statement so much. I'm gonna go back and record it and use it as a blurb in sort of our own social media stuff. No, I couldn't have put it better. And I think every one of those points is exactly right. That when you get on the hood of flexibility, you recognize that really it is a set of, sort of tradeoffs that come with unanticipated or unintended consequences, that sort of put a burden on individuals while claiming to be a solution that they really should, you know, for which they really should be grateful. And I think that also ends up sort of further tying us to the schedules of these greedy institutions and sort of blaming us if things don't go. Right. Right. Or of this is sort of we have to engage in this sort of flexibility so that other institutions don't have to change and that ultimately is unfair and unsustainable. And I think one of the things we saw during the pandemic was just the enormous amount of work that parents have to put in to creating this like daily schedules that actually hold together and that there's a lot of invisible labor that goes into that. And that's where a lot of flexibility goes. And I think it will be better for everybody. If we recognized that we all have these problems, we all face these challenges. They all exist because we still have workplaces that assume that your time belongs to them, that being able to work remotely means being able to work at all hours having to also, you know, raise kids as if you don't work well, work like you don't have kids to do both to some unspoken yet impossibly high standard. And then sort of to be blamed personally, if you're not able to make all of that appear completely seamless and effortless, turns out that's not a terribly good system. And, you know, we had for a while, sort of an opportunity to see that and to see that we can construct something better. And, and I think the four day week is a better route to constructing something better rather than giving people more flexibility so that they can, you know, sort of prop up institutions that feel like it's an incredible inconvenience if they have to change. Um And
[00:39:12] spk_0: then you just alluded to it so well there, Alex, it's such an end and boundary list system, the flexibility.
[00:39:18] spk_1: It's, yes, the phrase Greedy Institutions is one that like, I think of probably 10 times a day. Yeah.
[00:39:25] spk_0: Yeah, we couldn't agree more. Now, I know that we've prepared some rapid fire statements here and we'd love to get into them. They're really looking at debunking some of the thoughts. I think that those still skeptical around this concept might have and I'm gonna throw the cell here to run us through these statements. What we'd love to hear from you, Alex is we're gonna hit you with a statement and we'd love to just know your straight off the cuff answer that you might give to a skeptical leader who might be thinking this way or, or asking these
[00:39:55] spk_2: questions. And I have to say we started with about 20 of these and you've already worked through probably, I'd say a solid 18 at this point. So I'm gonna narrow it down to really the sort of key
[00:40:04] spk_1: ones. Yeah. I'm glad to hear there's a virtue to running on or of so finally at long last 100%.
[00:40:12] spk_2: Yeah. So I think I'm particularly asking this on behalf of my, my core researcher, Doctor John Chan, just around the four day work week is potentially classist. It will potentially create class a system where elite people get to work four days and the rest have to slog it out.
[00:40:28] spk_1: Mhm. You know, I would say tell it to the pest control workers and sort of line books for whom it's already a reality. I mean, I think that there are, of course, we should never underestimate the ability of elites to capture benefits for themselves and no one else. However, it is by no means inevitable. That or the four day week, it becomes something that is only for the privileged.
[00:40:53] spk_2: Awesome. So if implemented the across the board, the four day week will exacerbate labor shortages in roles like health, retail and hospitality. I think
[00:41:02] spk_1: we have to ask is the solution sort of, does it look like the solution to those labor shortages to increase working hours. Right. Is the problem right now with like with the NHS that junior doctors and nurses shifts are too short. No, I mean, I think in the short run there absolutely are things that we have to manage in a transition to a shorter work week. But the fundamental reality is that these are long term systemic problems that we're trying to solve. Not like short term seasonal labor issues that we're facing, we need to own up to that and we need to act accordingly.
[00:41:36] spk_2: So it's pretty clear for someone going from a five day week to a four day week, same salary. That's clear. What about people who earn an hourly wage? How does it work for them?
[00:41:45] spk_1: Their hourly wages go up. So places like care homes, restaurants, et cetera, either you are bumping up their hourly wage or creating an incentive structure so that, you know, you work six hours shift rather than eight hours and you meet certain performance criteria. And then at the end of the week, you essentially get an eight hour bonus and the numbers work out because of the savings in and lower turnover, no temporary worker spending, et cetera. So, you know, bottom line is it can be made to work for hourly workers and you know, people who build as well as people who bill by the
[00:42:17] spk_2: hour. Fantastic. Look, I honestly, I think I'm gonna leave it there because everything else that I'm looking at you have absolutely nailed already. I really appreciate it. I think there's also, I mean, a lot more we could talk through, but I'd really recommend to everyone of course, that you read shorter to get a deeper picture on a lot of these kind of questions as well.
[00:42:34] spk_1: Fantastic, Alex.
[00:42:36] spk_0: Thank you so much. And we'd love to know just as a parting note if you could. What can a leader who is listening right now do to start their journey towards structurally reduced working hours for their team or for their organization?
[00:42:49] spk_1: So I think that other than visiting four day week dot com and sort of learning about us and sort of how we work and what we do with you. You know, I think the first thing to do is to think about, do you have a team who you can work with, who will support this? Right? I think that every place that pulls this off has a CEO with a vision but also has a couple people heads of hr or of, you know, director of engineering, you know, like a small circle of people with whom they can plan this out, you know, and pull it off. Four day week companies are a little bit like one last job movies, you know, where you got to steal 60 cars tonight or if they're gonna kill your brother or something. And those movies, I mean, the thing about those movies is that, you know, you've always got the one central character who's got to do this impossible thing, but they always have a team of people who they have to, you know, usually pull together, you know, and it's like the multi ethnic gender diverse crew of the computer hacker and the master of disguise and the con artist and the safe Cracker. Right? And then you've got the kind of training montage of figuring out how to, how to pull it off. Four D V companies are the same, right? You need someone who can think about like the hr implications, but someone who can also think about. All right, you know, we've got these agile processes with a two week schedule, right? How can we change this to accommodate eight working days rather than 10 and no CEO is gonna be able to do that, but they're gonna be able to enable it. So I think having a team that makes that possible is really important. And then I think that the final thing is that there are now tons of companies that already have done this. And so you probably have 1000 and one questions about not just is it viable kind of in the general sense, but for a company my size in my industry are there places that have, you know, that have made it work and the answer probably is yes. And so I think that finding those can provide you both with a greater sense of security that this can work. But also point you to some of the kinds of challenges and solutions that, you know, can really help you get started of your own planet. So that's what I would do. And
[00:44:57] spk_0: thankfully, it's completely legal and sounds much easier than pulling off a high stocks that go into that.
[00:45:05] spk_2: And, and how exciting was it that we've reached a point where there is this kind of, you know, these people, these organizations leading the field, there is something to follow. There are lessons that we can learn from. That's a really exciting point to be at Alex. Thank you so much for your time. I've been a long time fan. It's been a huge thrill for me to get to speak to you. Really delighted to have spent this time with you together here on uh we are human leaders today.
[00:45:27] spk_1: You bet this has been a real pleasure. I appreciate it.
[00:45:35] spk_0: Thanks for joining us for this conversation with Alex Soojung-Kim Pang on the We are Human Leaders podcast to connect with Alex. Find links to his research and books and the four day work week Global Learn More on our show notes at w w w dot We are human leaders dot com. Alex's latest book Work Less, Do More. Designing. The four day work week is available from April 2023 we can't wait to read it. Thanks for being part of this. Conversation and we'll see you next time.