Bloomberg News reports that it has been observed that employees who used to work the traditional five days a week after shifting to the new four days week schedule are enjoying more sleep.
The workers that migrated to 32-hour workweeks registered 7.58 hours/ night of sleep, nearly an hour more than when they were working a 40-hour workweek. This was found by leading researcher Juliet Schor, who is associated with Boston College as an economist and sociologist.
The researcher has been keeping track of more than 180 organizations across the globe as more and more companies are migrating to schedules truncated through the pilot program of six months.
The surveys by Schor of around 304 workers spread across 16 companies, of which three are US based, one in Australia, and as many as 12 are headquartered in Ireland. The surveys keep a tab on a set of global of a six-month trial organized by 4 Day Week Global, a non-profit organization. These measures are being taken as it is increasingly seen that employers across a host of industries have been pushed by the pandemic, which has caused companies to rethink their strategies about where and when work must be done.
Incorporating the Concept of Shortened Weekends
Bloomberg News reports that the approach to shortened workweeks is gaining prominence since the pandemic has upended schedules. During the pandemic, by working remotely, many workers have been introduced to the nuances of flexibility, improving their quality of life.
Hard-charging bosses ranging from Elon Musk from Tesla Inc. to Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase & Co want employees to come back to the schedules of the pre-pandemic, while the other high-profile voices are supporting shorter weekends.
Bloomberg News also reports that it has been observed that not every organization that embarks upon four-day trials completes them. This is because at least one out of 5 workers leave the program midway, mostly seen during the pre-planning phase. Christopher Barnes, who is a management professor associated with the University of Washington’s Michael G Foster School of Business, thinks that the four-day schedules reduce the restraints on the overall time, thereby reducing the instances when the worker has to shoot an email or might have to do their laundry at 10 pm.
Preliminary data from Schor shows that those workers on a four-day schedule in the survey saw improvement in several phases like productivity, overall well-being, life, and work satisfaction, and were able to strike a good life-work balance.
