Juliet Schor (3:09)

I'm Juliette Schorr and I'm the author of four Days a Week, a book on companies that are giving their employees four eight hour days with no reduction in pay.

Podcast Host (3:20)

Juliette is an economist and sociologist at Boston College. Her new book explains all the reasons we should cut down our standard work week. She also addresses lots of the old arguments that have always been made to keep Americans from having more free time. Remember, of course, that 100 years ago there was no such thing as a weekend. Six day work weeks were the norm. Activists back then pushed for less time on the job, but employers wouldn't have it. A five day workweek would destroy the economy. Employers argued less time at work would increase the price of goods in stores. It'd make workers decadent and lazy. It would disadvantage people who wanted to get ahead in their careers and would hurt workers who were happy to work long hours. But labor unions countered that companies could find clever ways to maintain productivity and that workers with more free time would spend more money and actually boost the economy. Eventually, a few companies decided to try out this radical idea and they kinda liked it. Now, decades later, the five day work.

Dr. Laurie Santos (4:18)

Week ain't so radical.

Podcast Host (4:20)

In four days a week, Julia argues that it's now time that we reduce work hours again. Lots of people disagree and for exactly the same reasons that folks used over 100 years ago. But could those reasons now be just as wrong as they were before? I begin my chat with Juliet by asking her how she stumbled on this area of study in the first place.

Juliet Schor (4:41)

Well, without dating myself too much, I did start studying this when I was an assistant professor back in the 1980s. And then I went to the data and was very shocked to find that rather than working hours declining as they had been for 75, 85 years, beginning somewhere in the 60s, that sort of stalled out. Then through the 70s, 80s, working hours were were rising in America. And so I wrote a book called the Overworked the Unexpected Decline of Leisure. At that time, I tried to get some companies to reduce their working hours without reductions in pay and, you know, do some studies of actual interventions. And in the end, none of Those conversations that I was having worked out. And when the pandemic hit, I was getting more and more invitations, typically from Europe, to talk about reducing work time. And after one of those talks, a man approached me and said he was organizing a trial of private sector employers in Ireland and they were going to go to a 32 hour workweek, no reduction in pay, and they were going to be helped to figure out how to keep their productivity up, even in four days, and would I do the research. And that is what led to studying hundreds of companies. I think more than 400 have gone through these pilot programs or trials. Over 11,000 employees have been part of this research. So it's been very exciting.

Dr. Laurie Santos (6:08)

And so I want to go back to how you were thinking about work back in the day, because, I don't know, it seems striking to me that it was 40 years ago that you wrote this book called the overworked American in 1992. It seems like people weren't talking about that as much back then, is that right?

Juliet Schor (6:23)

Well, it actually, it's funny, it sort of has gone through some ups and downs. So at the time I published that book, as you say, 1992, literally the week that my book came out, a prominent Japanese politician came out and said Americans are lazy. And that created a whole big news thing around my book. So it got a lot of attention. And there was kind of widespread agreement that we were too stressed, people were too busy, we didn't have enough time for families. And another interesting thing about it was it sort of went across the political spectrum because kind of everybody was agreeing Americans are working too hard. But by the end of the decade, I would say we'd sort of switched into, we can call it austerity mode or scarcity mode. Two things happen. One is this idea that we're getting poorer, the country's de industrializing, et cetera, we need to work harder. So that became more prominent and then among the constituency who would have typically been more attuned to shorter work hours. And here I'm thinking about unions or sort of left liberal economist types and so forth. They were just increasingly concerned about inequality, which of course is understandable, but it kind of pushed work time off the table. So then there was a long period where there was just no traction for the issue. And then the pandemic hit and that changed everything.

Dr. Laurie Santos (7:58)

It also seems like in the intervening years between 1992 and the pandemic, things that you saw as bad in the early 90s were only getting worse. What are some of the symptoms of our overwork getting worse, especially in the US in the last few decades.

Juliet Schor (8:12)

Well, I think we've got two things. One is hours of work were creeping up. You have the introduction of technology which expanded the day for many people, even if it wasn't showing up in their official working hours. So if your workplace, your boss could contact you outside of work hours now with a smartphone or with email, there was that always on problem. And another dimension of this, which has been documented by my collaborators Phyllis Moen, Erin Kelly and others, they wrote a really great book called Overload about a big software firm. And what happened was as the many of these American companies started outsourcing work to other countries far away, the workday expanded because there were teams in India and Korea. And so the people in the US had to be communicating with those people. And the workday really was stretching. And then the other thing that happened is on the home front, a phenomenon that sociologists have called intensive parenting. The continual escalation of what is expected from parents and the amount of time that they have to parent and the pressures on parents and the growing competitiveness in the college admission and the labor market and so forth, that creates a lot of anxiety for parents and the scheduling of children and all of that. So you have those two forces, you know, and of course they combine into ever greater time squeeze. That's the term I have historically used. It's a really high pressure situation for many American families.

Dr. Laurie Santos (9:57)

So that raises a question of why Americans are so overworked. And I think that culturally we have this one explanation which is like, well, it's always been that way, right? The United States is a culture of the Protestant work ethic. We're always working so hard. Talk to me about why. Historically there's reason to question that view.

Juliet Schor (10:13)

Yeah, I mean, that is the most common view. And one of the reasons I, I really think it's important to argue against it is that view thinks there's no way we can reduce working hours. But if you look historically, what you see is that the US was the world leader in work time reduction until, you know, sometime after the second world War. So we were the first to get a five day week. We had lower working hours than many countries. And part of it's that we were wealthier. You know, we had a successful rapid industrialization and we had labor unions that pushed for shorter hours and so forth. And then we start to diverge. Pretty much around the 70s and 80s is when you see big divergence with Europe. They were on a path of work time Reduction, that work time reduction path started in about 1870. Before that, by the way, and this is interesting if we talk about AI or some other things. The first industrial revolution led to big increases in people's hours of work through the 19th century up until that last quarter. And then you start to go in the other direction. That's the peak of work in all of human history. That's the peak of work hours. So the idea that this is deep in our culture from, you know, the Protestant settlers and all of that, it just doesn't make sense. It's a pretty recent phenomenon of the US becoming, you know, a long hours country.

Dr. Laurie Santos (11:40)

And just to put that in perspective, I mean, that seems like we had decades and decades where the move was reducing work hours. We were going down and down and down. And then something shifted, like in the post war, maybe 1970s, where we started to go up again. So this idea that it all has always been that way is just because we've forgotten our history of a few decades ago.

Juliet Schor (11:59)

Yeah, I mean, it's part of the myth that capitalism reduced us from toil. Because that myth forgets that long period from, you know, starting the 18th century through to the later part of the 19th in which the development of a capitalist economy and industrial economy led to big increases in hours of work. So there's myopia there, right? There's that kind of looking at the wrong point in history and drawing the wrong conclusion from it. Whether we're talking about failing to look at 1770.

Dr. Laurie Santos (12:28)

I think we also have some mistaken notions that are coming up more recently. You talked in the book about this idea of the ideal worker norm. What's that? And how, how has it made our normal work hours today even worse?

Juliet Schor (12:40)

It's the idea that the ideal worker is the one who puts the job first, always, and family or a person's own passions and activities and so forth come second. So in practice, that ideal worker norm is one in which the person is available 247 and in which they don't have family or other outside obligations that prevent them from giving all to the firm. And it's been identified, identified by people who are looking at gender issues in the workplace. And if the ideal worker is the person who has someone at home taking care of the family, there's gender inequality there because women are disproportionately the ones doing that. And so it privileges the men who have a support system. And once you get into a dual earner family situation or a single parent family where there is no person back there, Supporting the worker is really key to understanding those high levels of stress, burnout, family and work life conflict. I had a little anecdote. There was an excerpt of my book published in the Wall Street Journal and I got it kind of eventually he did agree that his email was hostile from a guy who talked about how he'd worked, I don't remember, 60 or 70 hours a week. And you know, that this four day week idea was terrible. And he'd put all this time in, everybody else should be doing that today and so forth. And then he talked about his wonderful sweetheart of 55 years who was doing.

Dr. Laurie Santos (14:16)

All the emotional labor in the background. Right.

Juliet Schor (14:18)

And not just. And I said, and I bet that person was a big part of why you were able to work 70 hours a week because she was taking care of your kids and so forth. I mean, we're talking about a traditional guy. He didn't actually come back on that because I think it was true.

Dr. Laurie Santos (14:37)

And so we were talking about how, you know, things changed in the 90s and people weren't really talking about this. But then March of 2020 hit. Explain how the conversation changed during the pandemic.

Juliet Schor (14:48)

So things started happening in terms of workplace dynamics. Number one, lots of stress among the workforce, some of it unrelated to what was going on inside the workplace. Like kids at home having to be schooled, people just really anxious about the disease, their loved ones dying and so on and so forth. But then within the workplace, also a lot of stress. So we have highly stressed employees. Number two, we have companies, employers who never thought work from home could work and suddenly everything's okay, work from home is working. And so their minds are kind of opening up a little bit. Not all of them, but many of them to like other kinds, changes that might be viable. This is one of the things I've heard from, you know, some of the employers who transitioned to a four day week. Like we didn't think work from home could work, but it did. And so then we thought we'd give this a chance. And then the other really big thing was the great resignation. And even before the peak of it, you have companies that are experiencing high levels of quits and feeling like they've got to do something. And understanding that that stress that I started with is key to. So you have quite a few who sort of said, we gotta do something. Let's try the four day week as a way of keeping employees and dealing with all that stress. So I think those are the big changes in terms of what sort of triggered it. And Then once we started getting results and more and more evidence, there were, there were case studies before our research, so individual companies had done it and so you had a little bit of interest in it, but it was sort of bubbling along at very, very low levels of take up until you get groups of companies doing it. And we had lots of publicity about the great results we were getting.

Dr. Laurie Santos (16:43)

And so it seems like there were these massive changes that happened during the pandemic. But it seems like these trends have continued post pandemic too, right? Not just like people actually quitting their jobs, but this idea of quiet quitting or even folks who aren't quiet quitting. I think what that productivity expert Cal Newport calls the great exhaustion. It just seems like the stress that we experienced during the pandemic has not gone away. And if has gotten worse, you know, it seems like people are really questioning their life choices.

Juliet Schor (17:10)

Yeah, well, it's come down from the absolute peak, but it's still really high. So you're right that it's gotten worse, I think compared to pre pandemic. So there are still high levels of quits in unfilled position. The stress levels are very high. That exhaustion is very high. Yes. We haven't returned to a. The baseline was tough anyway. There was already a lot of exhaustion, stress burnout. But we haven't gotten back to that. And you can look at, I mean that's global. Gallup does ongoing studies of things like stress and various types of employee engagement. The quiet quitting, the loud quitting. Are people thriving? Are they struggling? Are they, you know, and it's just really high levels of distress on all of their metrics.

Dr. Laurie Santos (17:59)

So one of the reasons I love your book so much is that it's pushing for what might seem like a radical solution. What is this radical solution?

Juliet Schor (18:06)

So the radical solution is a four day week, not four tens. Often when people hear four day week, they immediately go to four tens. These are four eight hour days. So it's a 32 hour work week, no reduction in pay. So people get their hundred percent of pay, they're working 32 hours. And what most, although no, not all. And we can talk about the differences, the ones who do and don't. Most of these companies are expecting 100% of people's productivity in those four days. So they're not expecting to lose productivity or production or output or revenue in that time. There are some that are in a different category. So that first model of maintaining all the productivity, the entrepreneur who, who did this at his company and then started the NGO four Day Week Global that organized these trials that I was doing the research from, calls it the 180, 100 model. 100% of the money, 80% of the time, 100% of the production or the output. There's also an 180, 80 model I talk about, I mean that's my terminology. But basically companies where people are so overworked they're leaving at such high rates that the company just gives them a break and it turns out to work, they save a lot of money because people stop leaving.

Dr. Laurie Santos (19:28)

So people only working 32 hours a week. How novel is this idea? I mean, before you started thinking about it, were there any companies that were already trying it out?

Juliet Schor (19:37)

I don't think most of them were on that 180, 100 model. There were four day week companies. I mean, I co founded an NGO back in the 1990s that was called the center for a New American Dream. And part of the new American dream was working less. So our folks were all on a four day work week from day one. And so there are places that were on four day, increasingly you had a number of companies that were on those nine day fortnight schedule. So one week, five the next week, four back and forth. The four day weeks. Like at our organization, we didn't explicitly say we had 80% salary, but you know, we tended to be a little bit on the lower side with salary. And so I think until this movement, the more dominant idea was that there'd be some trade off of income. Whereas this model is saying, no, you can get everything done in four days and therefore there shouldn't be a reduction in income because you're just as productive to some extent. I think this has to do with the fact that there was increasing discussion in the media of white collar workers kind of having, you know, what we would call kind of low intensity work, right, that there was slack in their work day or work week that could be engineered out or that there were, the companies were spending a lot of time that wasn't very productive. The, you know, poster child for that being meetings, like so many meetings that people had to go to and keeping them from doing their work. And if they could just, you know, have a more functional meetings culture, maybe they could get everything done in four days.

Dr. Laurie Santos (21:13)

And so you had this radical idea, you know, there's been some kind of interest in it, but you really decided to test whether this was possible. So tell me the story of how the four day work week tests came about.

Juliet Schor (21:25)

So during the pandemic, I was giving talks on shorter work time. And I was approached by a man named Joe o' Connor who said he was organizing a trial of private sector companies who were going to do six months on this 100, 800 model of giving a 32 hour workweek with no reduction in pay. But the trial was going to be preceded by two months of coaching, onboarding, mentoring to help companies figure out how to get 100% of their output or productivity in those four days. Now one of the interesting things about O' Connor was that he actually worked for a union, the largest public sector union, maybe the largest union in Ireland, it's called Forsa. And they had sort of released some of his time to organize this trial because they wanted to argue for shorter work time for their members. But they felt unless there was private sector proof of concept, they weren't going to get it because it would just look, I mean he haven't said this but you know, maybe lazy public sector workers or something. So, so that's how it came about. He knew my work, he asked if I would lead the research for this. But very quickly Joe teamed up with this group, Four Day Week Global, the entrepreneur from New Zealand who co founded it, Andrew Barnes and his wife Charlotte Lockhart. And we began organizing a North American trial and then a large British. And so it was the start of a year in which every two months we had another trial, groups of companies, Starting with the UK trial being the largest, I think there were 70 companies in all. So they asked me to do the research. We sort of set up as an independent research team and we developed a protocol with employee surveys before and after, with getting administrative data from the companies and then where we had capacity, doing interviews with people, sometimes before and after and occasionally just, you know, mid, mid point after. So we have hundreds and hundreds of interviews also with employees at, you know, various levels of the corporations or the organizations.

Dr. Laurie Santos (23:41)

And what was really the goal to find out with, with kind of all this data you're collecting?

Juliet Schor (23:45)

So what, what happened when you go to a four day week? We had a lot of access to employees. So one of the big questions is what about their stress, their burnout levels, their work, family conflict, their emotions, their satisfaction with their job and whether they're thinking about leaving, how much is a four day week worth to them? But also what are they saying about their productivity and how they're working? And people were worried there'd be less socializing in the workplace and that might have a bad impact or what's happening to people's creativity. And so we collected data on all all of these things. Are they just getting a second job or what about their work intensity? I mean, the whole theory of this was to organize work and get rid of things that take a lot of time and don't yield much value. But what if it was just a speed up? I mean, people still might like it, but it's a very different thing than saying there's scope to reorganize work to get rid of a lot of wasteful things. You can have a whole day back each week from that and no loss of productivity.

Podcast Host (24:45)

It's time for a quick break, but we'll be back soon to hear whether cutting a day from the work week had employees signing up for second jobs or stressing out trying to cram everything into shorter hours. The Happiness Lab will be back in a moment.

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Podcast Host (28:03)

Before the break, economist Juliet Schor explained all the fears employers had about giving their workers an extra day off each week. Would cutting 8 hours out cause a bunch of unfortunate blowbacks? Would workers feel more stressed out and less creative? Would they waste the gift of extra time by just going out and getting a second job?

Juliet Schor (28:21)

The interesting thing is we didn't see those blowbacks. No increase in second job holding, almost no increase in work intensity, just a smidgen higher in workload. But really wonderful big increases in all those well being indicators. Like 69% of people who go through these trials have lower levels of burnout in six months than they did at the baseline. But the thing that was most surprising to us, I think was this huge jump in self reported productivity. People just, you know, felt so much better about their jobs and their performance in their jobs and that turned out to be so big in sort of understanding the, you know, the whole story of what was happening.

Dr. Laurie Santos (29:00)

The first kinds of effects you tested were the change for employees. What did you find?

Juliet Schor (29:06)

So we find significant improvements in well being across the board. So we measure people, we have these 20 well being measures that they fill out before the trial starts. Interesting. Even in three months you see significant increases. Then we also surveyed at 12 months and for a while we were surveying at 24 months. So basically every well being indicator increases significantly, some with quite large increases. But we're talking burnout, stress, fatigue, anxiety, physical health, mental health, sleep levels, sleep problems, people exercise more, they score higher on various types of satisfaction, satisfaction with time. Especially in some cases you see a big increase in satisfaction, say with relationships with the restaurant workers who'd been working 55 hours before the trial. Now they, they got down to about 45 hours. But their satisfaction with their relationships went way up because they just were able to be at home way more than they were.

Dr. Laurie Santos (30:12)

One of the things I was shocked by in your book was just the words that you talked about people using. Give me a sense of just like how profound this change was for the employees.

Juliet Schor (30:21)

I think life changing. I mean, some people would say game changing, but life changing, transformational. Best thing ever. Very superlative even. I always think about this. One comment I read is a person just complaining about everything. My job, there's too much to do in four days and nobody else can do it. And I don't, you know, this and that and, and then at the end the person says, but of course this is so much better than a five day week.

Dr. Laurie Santos (30:50)

So good, so good.

Podcast Host (30:51)

I mean, and, and the reasons for.

Dr. Laurie Santos (30:53)

Better were kind of surprising. And some of the changes really were emotional changes like what people talked about in terms of their stress and burnout.

Podcast Host (31:00)

But I was also shocked to see.

Dr. Laurie Santos (31:01)

That you also saw a behavioral changes like just people were using their time differently. Give me a sense of what some of those behavioral changes were.

Juliet Schor (31:09)

So we did at the three month point, we did what's called a time diaries. We wanted to see how people were spending that off day. The thing that people spent most time on was leisure activities and hobbies. They just were able to get into things that they loved or just relaxing in ways that they loved. You know, some might have joined a chorus or a theater group, but then others it's, I can have a pedicure without guilt or I go visit my grandmother every Friday. Gym is a big one. Doing more exercise, which we know is so key to people's well being and happiness. I mean, the other thing is sleeping more or catching up. You know, part of what that having that extra day does is it makes the other days less frenetic, especially where we talk to some of the really senior people who just, you know, have overwhelming workloads. So they were able to shift some of that to the Friday and then that would free up other parts of their week. So they just had a much more, they could catch up. They didn't have to catch up on Sundays. Right.

Dr. Laurie Santos (32:11)

And what's so remarkable about some of these changes is that so many companies have been trying to figure out a mechanism to help their employees feel less stressed. Right. So so many companies bring in, you know, wellness apps or meditation classes.

Podcast Host (32:24)

And you know, while those techniques tend.

Dr. Laurie Santos (32:26)

To work, the research shows My understanding of the literature in companies is that by and large those kinds of things have mostly been a failure. They don't move the needle that much. But the, but this kind of intervention is moving the needle a lot, right? People are sleeping more and exercising more and saying that they have transformationally less stress. I mean, why do you think the four day work week works so much better than some of these other techniques?

Juliet Schor (32:48)

So I think there are two reasons. One is it's big. I remember I once I was having migraines and I went to the doctor and the doctor prescribed that I go buy an aquarium so I could look at the fish and relax. I mean, anyway, that created a lot of stress for me because then I had to buy the aquarium and keep them fish alive and whatever. And there's a sense in which some of those wellness things, you know, they just require people to perform and do things. That just puts one more thing on their plate. Now they may work for some, but also, as you say, they are, they're small things. So number one is a huge block of time. And number two, it gives people what they need, which is people are time stressed and those things don't give them more time. In fact, they take time to do so. That's number one. But I think there's another really important thing. They don't get at the underlying sources of the stress. Part of which is those excessive work time. And in the past we've had individual accommodations to people. So you might go on a part time schedule and give up that income or whatever and then you'd have a stigma, you would stop progressing in your career and so forth, where you get the whole organizational changes. This is really important. Everybody changes. We have measures now in our surveys of the sense to which people believe that at their company you have to be an ideal worker in order to succeed. And that falls with the four day week. Because the whole culture changes. Nobody's being penalized for taking that time off. We think about, oh, we just gave our employees unlimited paid time off, you know, but people can't take it because they're worried about the stigma or because it doesn't transform their workload. Here the whole company got together and figured out how to take stuff off people's plate and give them the time back. And it's just such a different thing. One is to put it onto the individual, oh, you're stressed. Well, the problem is you don't do enough yoga or you're not mindful. No, the problem is you've organized a workplace that is too demanding.

Dr. Laurie Santos (34:57)

And so so many of these positive changes came about. And the other cool thing about your book is that it looked at the sort of pathways towards these positive changes. Right. Kind of where they came from. And one pathway is one that we've talked about a lot. Right outside of work, people are doing different things. They're exercising, they're sleeping more, they're seeing their grandma, they're having more time for their family. But I think I was shocked by in your book is that there's a second pathway to get towards these positive changes and that are. That's the set of changes that employees are experiencing during the workday. Talk about what's happening there to change how employees are feeling and how stressed they feel.

Juliet Schor (35:32)

Yeah, that pathway, which is the transformation of people's work experience from the 5 to 4, was not necessarily something that we had anticipated. But what happens is that people feel so much more productive at work. They feel on top of their work. Instead of things like coming to the middle of the week, that hump day, they call Wednesday the hump day and feeling like, oh my God, I can't get through the week. So already feeling stressed. Or so called Sunday scaries. Really dreading going back to work. Instead, what people tell us is they feel refreshed and ready to get back in. And when they come back in, they use terminology like my whole self is there. I'm energized to be back. I'm excited about the work. They have energy levels and motivation and it shows up in their self reports of productivity and workability. We ask them your current workability compared to your lifetime best. But the other thing is that because they feel so much more competent and on top of their work, they score higher on the smart working scale. So they feel competent and smart, efficient. And that just makes people feel good. Why who we are at work is. It's a big part of our well being and it's also a big part of how we spend our time. We spend a lot of time at work. So feeling good about what we're doing rather than sort of ending the day feeling drained and horrible and that it's just. It really improves their emotional and physical. They say it improves. You know, I think it improves people's physical well being as well.

Dr. Laurie Santos (37:13)

I love this result about what's happening inside work so much because I think a thing that people don't realize about burnout, and this comes from the work of Christina Maslach is that one of the main symptoms of burnout is what she calls a Sense of personal ineffectiveness. You feel like even if you were doing your job perfectly, it kind of wouldn't matter or would feel sort of crappy. It wouldn't be worth it. And it seems like what you're intervening on with the four day work week is you get people to feel like they're effective at work and what happens is the opposite of all the emotions that come with burnout. You feel kind of excited to be on your job. You feel feel agency, you feel intentional. And those things just contribute to people's happiness, I think in lots of ways that we don't really expect.

Juliet Schor (37:51)

Yeah, that seems so right to me. And then the other piece of it I would add is they also feel more loyal to their jobs. They value their jobs more. I mean, this gets to why people in four day week companies don't quit. They almost never quit. They're just so much more positive about their work. It's not a source that's draining them, it's a source that they're getting energy from.

Dr. Laurie Santos (38:15)

So it seems like people really enjoyed this. They got a lot of out of this, emotionally, behaviorally. Did you get a sense of how many employees wanted to keep this new policy in place? How many were like, yes, let's keep going with this trial.

Juliet Schor (38:28)

Yes, it's about 94, 95%. When we ask which you prefer and then so we asked which they prefer and then we asked them if they were going to another job, if it were a five day week job, what would their salary requirements be? Because if they prefer this, maybe they would want more money to go to a five day. And there's pretty significant salary increases required all the way up to the 13% who say, no amount of money could induce me to take a five day.

Dr. Laurie Santos (39:01)

I'm never giving this up. No matter how much you a lot.

Juliet Schor (39:03)

Are in that 25 to 50% increase in salary. That's a lot of increase.

Podcast Host (39:08)

So most workers really value a four day week and would even need a substantial pay rise to go back to the old system. But are there any benefits for companies to offer shorter weeks? We'll have the surprising answer to that question when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment.

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Podcast Host (42:29)

Here'S a no brainer question for you. Would you like a big reduction in your working hours with no corresponding cuts to your pay? That sounds like a great deal. Unless you're an employer paying the same money just for your staff to stay home. That sounds terrible, but economist Juliet Shore has found that bosses also see the.

Dr. Laurie Santos (42:47)

Benefit of a reduced work week.

Juliet Schor (42:49)

So the model is called the 180, 100 model. It was invented or conceptualized by Andrew Barnes, who was the New Zealand entrepreneur who did this at his company. He actually asked his employees to sign a contract saying that if they got a four day week with no reduction in pay, they would do 100% of the work that they were currently doing. That was the dominant model based on the idea that there were enough ways that companies could save time through looking at things they were doing that were wasting time. Meetings being really key. There, like excessive numbers of meetings, too many people at them, meetings that went on too long, et cetera, creating focus time for people where they could just put head down and get a lot done and not be distracted by constant interruptions. There's a whole science of work interruptions which shows that it's very bad for people, it's stressful, but also obviously it's going to interrupt their productivity to other kinds of things where they brought in speakers who talked about how they'd done this in their own companies and figured out they were spending a lot of time doing things that weren't yielding much value. So kind of getting intentional about what you do. What these companies did to reorganize work and make it possible to get everything done in four days really varied. Like at the brewery, we studied, they did time and motion studies for all the tasks. There are many tasks that go into brewing a lot of cleaning equipment and, you know, waiting around. They figured out how much time each task could take. They sequence them differently so they could slot shorter tasks into things that took a long time, but that had sort of dead time in the middle and so forth. So that's one model that was probably the dominant model. But one of the things I realized as I was doing interviews for my book and as I was also looking at other data and just hearing companies talk about what was going on, was there was another model which was based less on sort of meetings and time saving and more on keeping people from leaving. And that you had a whole group of companies who were experiencing high levels of quits, which are very costly, or high levels of burnout, which even if they didn't lead to quits, were just leading to, you know, not good outcomes. Some of these were basically saying to me, we just gave people a break. Most of the companies was that 180, 100. But as I was analyzing the data and doing interviews and so forth for the book, I realized you had a group of companies that I called 180, 80 people get 100% of the money. They only have to work 80% of the time and they're not expected to do more than 80% of the work. So they work at their normal pace on those four days, but they get an extra day. And those companies are the ones where work intensity is very high. In other words, we gave them a day off and we, we didn't really change that much about what was happening on the other four days. They didn't have a lot of meetings, they didn't have slack time. People were running really fast. And I call this the paradox of intensity because that first group are sort of low intensity workplaces, but these others are really high intensity. And what was happening in the healthcare organizations and in the restaurant chain that I looked into, you know, kitchens run really efficiently in restaurants. They're not sitting around having meetings. There you watch a kitchen out of, you know, a good restaurant, you're like, woo. They're really, they're moving and they're really burned out at the end of the day or the end of the week. And so they're just, nope, you got an extra day off. You're still going to do things pretty much the same way on the first four days. Same thing with some of the nurses studies. So the nurses studies were nurse managers. So these are a lot of the entry level nurses are on three 12 hour shifts. So it's the four day week is not so relevant for them. But you have these nurse managers working five days with really long hours and they burning out a lot. And they're the most experienced and responsible. You know, they're running things. A couple of these hospitals just said you're on four days now. So you had people rescinding their resignations when they got that news. And they don't leave, patient outcomes improve. In both of these cases, they figured out how to adjust their divisions of labor. In the restaurant they hired a few people, but the cost they said was really minimal compared to the benefits. In the nurses studies they tended not to actually hire new people. They just changed responsibilities and they gave people that third full day off where they could just decompress and rest and just had really, really strong results.

Dr. Laurie Santos (47:54)

Give me a sense of the kinds of companies that joined this trial.

Juliet Schor (47:56)

Well, we have all kinds of companies in these studies. So we have some restaurants, brewery, there are healthcare, so there's manufacturing. We have an RV customization manufacturing plant, a company that makes skateboards. But most of them are white collar. So the large number are white collar. The biggest group are professional services. So there are a lot in graphic design or pr, marketing, advertising. We have lawyers, architects, finance. So there are banks, a lot of tech firms. There are a lot of social services. There are also some local governments and we're seeing more and more local governments.

Dr. Laurie Santos (48:40)

So it seems like it was really broad. This was trying to ask whether the four day work week worked across all kinds of forms.

Juliet Schor (48:46)

It does, but here are the caveats. Number one, these are mostly small firms. The biggest firm that really did it for a lot of employees was a 5,000 person kind of a social services healthcare firm in the UK which started with a thousand of its 5,000 employees. And then after the success of the trial, they've been rolling it out to all of them. But a lot of them are in the, you know, sort of one to 500 person range or the, even the 25 to 50, you know. And then we have a big clump of really little firms do under 20 person. So we don't have a giant firm that has transitioned everybody yet. I think the giant firms are going to do it. They're going to start with some divisions. We are very overwhelmingly white collar though. But a range of white collar, if you count, I don't know, social service workers. If you're a Head Start teacher or a, you know, a residential counselor in a facility for young people. I don't know if that's considered white collar.

Dr. Laurie Santos (49:49)

No, that makes sense. That makes sense. So starting with the companies that really were not trying to decrease their productivity, they were hoping in four days that workers could do just about as much. How were they able to make that change? Like what did they take off their plate to keep employees productive?

Juliet Schor (50:02)

The biggest things, the bread and butter of what they were taught was meetings and focus time. So those are really key. But the process was a kind of employee empowered work reorganization. Let's say you have a team, they get together and they might do like a very intensive scrutiny of everything that they do, all the documents they have to fill out, you know, what are the steps. I remember talking to someone who did accounting in a firm, like every step of approval of an invoice, you know, and figure out where the bottlenecks were. I call that in the book process engineering. That comes from manufacturing, where you're looking at all your steps. But you can do that in offices too. But then you have some other kinds of things like at Kickstarter, which is a tech firm. One of the things I learned is that the senior leadership team realized that it had to make changes in how it gave instructions to its development teams. So wants a new product, gives them some instructions, the development team goes down a road, it gets to a fork in the road. Very common in software development. They don't know what the leadership prefers. They go off on one and then the leadership looks at it. No, no, we really wanted the other. So what the leadership had to do is figure out how to decide what they want earlier and give more detailed instructions to the team and then give the team more autonomy. And that point about more upfront investment came up in some other contexts. So, for example, where you have customer service in IT companies providing Internet service to rural areas and they got a huge new contract at the same time they started the four day week. And when I went back to talk to them at six months, you know, they tell me they just gotten this big contract. We didn't know that when we, when they started. Well, how did you make it work? I mean, it seems like it would be impossible. And they said no, actually the four day week made it possible. So they had a massive increase in demand. Well, how could that be? Number one, they said it stopped people from getting burned out so they could keep working hard during. But the other big thing was it forced them to document what they were doing. So whenever a customer service complaint came in, they weren't doing the documentation. So the next time the same one comes in, somebody has to reinvent the wheel. If you document up front, I mean, it's a basic principle of customer service. Right? But unless you put in that upfront time, you may just be constantly trying to keep your head above water and not do it. And that's something that I talked to a number of people about, Lou. Like the things that seemed obvious that they should have done, or like, why do you have so many dysfunctional meetings? Or why don't you give people more focus time? And it was like, oh, we're just trying to keep our head above water. Or so I liken it to that thing about you get a new piece of software and you just start using it instead of like learn it to figure out how it can help.

Dr. Laurie Santos (53:02)

It also seems like even though workers were kind of in some ways having a higher pace at work because they're kind of putting more work into the four days, they actually enjoyed the busier pace more. And that seems like in part because they were empowered during the busier pace, but also because they had this lovely reward at the end that they could look forward to and that that kind of seemed to help A lot. In terms of people's happiness and sense of engagement too.

Juliet Schor (53:24)

Yeah. And I think that question of pace sort of differed. I mean, if you look at our survey results, we ask about pace of work and intensity of work, it doesn't go up by much. It does go up a little bit. And I don't know if it's that people just don't like what you're saying. They just don't feel it, it doesn't feel too sped up or it really, if that work reorganization really did take a lot of stuff off their plates. But either way, the point is that it's working.

Dr. Laurie Santos (53:55)

So that's in the companies that expected the same level of productivity across the four days. These 180, 100 companies. But let's talk about companies that were more on the 180, 80. Right. Where they really got into the four day work week thinking, you know, there's not a lot of meetings we can cancel. People are at at the max pace they can be at. We're just going to give them some time off. How did the companies react to the time off in this case? Did they see any benefits and what were they?

Juliet Schor (54:23)

I think in those cases there are two things. One is you see improvements in product quality. So at the restaurant, the level of service and the quality of what was going on at the restaurants really improved a lot. Plus, of course, not losing people. You do see the same thing with the nurses. So These are the two sort of purest cases of 180 80s where the nurses, you get improvements in patient outcomes and you get people stop quitting. One of the examples that I give a lot of space to in the book is an advertising team in Canada. It was, I think, a 57 person team during the pandemic. Everybody was so stressed out. They have very high rates of turnover in this industry, maybe about 30% on average is what the leader of the team told me before the pandemic. She gave them three hours of time a week to just take exercise. And then she was like, oh my God, everybody is so stressed out with the pandemic. What can I do to help them? And the obvious thing was we just need time. And this was at the height of the pandemic and it was just really hard for people to even get food and they had to wait on. In Canada the lines were really long, social distancing in the groceries. And so she gave Friday afternoons off. Someone came and said, you know, you already given us three. And then the four, it's a four day week. And she's like, okay, everybody has a four day week now. But they had high turnover and after that nobody left the team. What's fascinating about that story is this is a very enterprising woman. She realized she could start to monetize the team's stability. So she went to her finance division, say, okay, how much does it cost us to lose a person? And it's a lot. And you know, it was a big company, millions and millions of dollars. And then she started talking to the clients and saying, you know, I can promise you team stability. Nobody is going to leave over the course of this contract and if we achieve 1% turnover or something, we get a bonus. The clients couldn't believe it because people are always leaving and it creates a lot of wasted time. Hiring, onboarding, training, exit interviews, all of that. And this came out in another marketing agency. And what both of them experienced was the ability to sell more business to existing clients because they were providing a better service. So they didn't have to be spending as much time just out there trying to get new clients.

Dr. Laurie Santos (57:08)

Did you think you were going to see this many companies who wanted to stick with it when you first started the trial?

Juliet Schor (57:13)

We've been surprised at how positive the results are. I guess would be a way of saying that I think we were pretty sure we'd get nice employee benefits. But what really surprised me is that if we had better measurements, I could have done the 180, 125. Right. The companies who report much higher productivity and there are a lot of them, a lot. I never expected that. I figure the main thing is to just keep up, up where you are and then you get all these employee benefits. So you have to be better off. You're no worse on the productivity and you're better off on this other stuff. But it's a real business strategy. For many, it's actually something that's going to be really help your company as opposed to something that you'll just be okay if you do it.

Dr. Laurie Santos (58:03)

Do you think we're in for a change? You know, I guess when we changed to the five day work week, that was a huge transformation. It felt like no one could possibly have us do this. And now a five day work week just seems normal. Do you think in 50 years or so the four day work week will be the norm?

Juliet Schor (58:18)

Definitely. I think we're going to be close to that in 10.

Dr. Laurie Santos (58:22)

Really.

Juliet Schor (58:23)

AI is going to make it a lot easier to reduce work time and I think there's momentum here. Right now we're in a Little bit of a. The companies are scared right now because there's a lot of political turmoil. They don't know what AI is going to bring, they don't know how the tariffs are going to affect the economy. And it's just a period of a lot of uncertainty. I think it's part of why they're calling people back into the workplace, which they haven't actually been able to do for the most part. Those numbers of remote work are really holding steady. But I feel that the pandemic transformed the four day week into common sense. And what I hear from some of these folks who interact with customers is that when they tell their customers about it, instead of the customers freaking out that they're not going to be able to contact them on the off day, they're sending back messages with all caps and tons of exclamation marks saying oh I'm so excited for your. You go I wish I had that. When you talk to people about it now, it seems realistic in a way that pre pandemic it seemed like oh we could never have that. I would love it but that that's not possible.

Dr. Laurie Santos (59:37)

And now it just seems possible we're just moving towards the new era of work weeks.

Juliet Schor (59:42)

It does seem possible.

Dr. Laurie Santos (59:43)

So imagine a lot of people who are hearing about the benefits of this, who are themselves employees but might not be employees at a place that is amenable to a four day workweek are thinking oh my gosh, this sounds amazing. Any advice for them about how to make this a reality in their own workplace or things that they should be thinking about about how to change their pace of work?

Juliet Schor (60:01)

That's a great question. I do have some discussion at the end of the book about how to do it, but I think think there are resources online also how to talk to your boss about a four day week. But I think the first thing to do like well of course read my book but also get educated on now the growing amount of evidence about the benefits of a four day week. Start a conversation at your workplace, whether it's first with your boss or maybe with some co workers. Don't assume that it's, it's a non starter, don't assume that it's impossible where you work. Survey data that I talk about in the book shows that something like close to a third of all senior executives have been saying they're interested in a four day week, that it's coming or they're open to it. So there's just been a lot of increased openness at higher levels of Management about it. And I think sort of trying to go about it in, you know, in all kinds of workplaces is, is a lot more viable now trying to start that conversation. If you have a boss you can talk to, you know, who might be willing, ask them to send me an.

Dr. Laurie Santos (61:10)

Email and I'll, oh gosh, you're gonna, you're gonna have RIP inbox with every, every person listening to this.

Juliet Schor (61:16)

You know, I hear from employers on a regular basis and I say, you know, I'd be happy to come and talk to your team. I think it's, it's really viable pretty much everywhere. And there are plenty of other people like me. There's an organization called workfor.org which is mostly volunteers working in different communities to bring groups of companies together to talk about it, creating what we call communities of practice. So you could try and do that just lots of ways, I think, get the conversation going. The more people learn about it and think about it, the more open they are to trying it.

Dr. Laurie Santos (61:53)

You talked about all these emotional behavioral benefits of this four day work week week. I'm curious if that applies to people who are working remotely too. You know, how much of it is just kind of taking that full day off of work and how much of it is not having to go to the office, not having to do the commute and so on?

Juliet Schor (62:07)

Yeah, that's a great question. So some people do reference their commutes and so forth, but a quarter of our sample is fully remote. We only have 5 or 6% who are fully in person. So most are hybrid. There's no difference in anything across these modalities in terms of these findings. So yeah, it works for all those modalities. Here's another surprising thing. It also works across all the sort of sociodemographic categories that we look at, whether we're talking age, gender, race and ethnicity, parental status, disability status, great improvements for people with disabilities, managers, non managers, education levels, et cetera. I mean very, very similar, well being impacts across all those groups. So it really is, you know, four for all. I think it really works for everyone.

Podcast Host (63:06)

Well, that's a pretty ringing endorsement to end on the four day week. Works for everyone. If Juliet's research has got you thinking.

Dr. Laurie Santos (63:13)

About how transformative and extra day I each week could be for you, then.

Podcast Host (63:16)

You should check out her new book, Four Days a the Life Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving well being and Working Smarter. Juliet's book is packed with insights and it just might be the perfect gift.

Dr. Laurie Santos (63:29)

To give your boss.

Podcast Host (63:30)

Next time on the Happiness Lab, we'll hear about another of my favorite books of 2025. It's from an expert on decision making who has some important advice on how to make choices that more closely match our values. All that next time on the Happiness lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.

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Dr. Laurie Santos (65:59)

This is an I Heart podcast.