www.fastcompany.com: I often think about the Maggie Smith line in Downton Abbey “What is a weekend?” Being a Countess, she didn’t know what a weekend was because she had no workweek. But there was a time in the not so distant past when working Americans also had never heard of a weekend for the opposite reason: They often worked six or seven days a week.
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I can definitely see where the person in this article is coming from. however a four-day weekend every week sounds literally heavenly. I agree with the fact that it would be an incredibly difficult change and would require lots of outside work and policy changes in order to complete that. But I do think it would be incredibly beneficial and very nice for people to have a four day work week. However, when they propose an alternate solution that is a 32 hour work week I think that is also a good solution. America is notoriously overworked, and we tend to burn out incredibly quickly, and choose to torture ourselves with the amount of work that we have to do. I think we need to focus more on mental health, and the realization of that, but we need to do this, without minimizing certain people, and ensuring that it is used in a fair and professional way. I am hoping that we see a better culture in the coming years, and just a better living culture in general.
The 4-day work week has been adopted by some companies and is highly populated in some countries (Norway, for example, has much lower working hours per week). I agree that there’s a lot of burnout in society across all industries, and I’m all in for supporting employers' physical and mental health, but I don’t know if a 32-hour workweek is the solution. We've been using the 5-day workweek for hundreds of years, and it is not something that can be changed easily. I don’t know if there’s any permanent solution to this problem, but it seems unrealistic to reduce working hours when the workload isn’t necessarily decreasing. In our industry, the biggest problem is that we constantly have new problems coming up that demand immediate fixing with a deadline. I don’t think problems with overhire or overtime will be solved with a 32-hour workweek unless we can figure out a way to make the deadline problem go away.
Many companies that have adopted 4 day work weeks, or something along the lines of shortening the average workweek have been studied and show trends of overall increased productivity and morale. While this article raises some interesting points, I don’t think this change would be all that radical. Many other countries have vastly different social ideas about work than us, and that is partly why I think Americans are so opposed to the change. America was built on this idea of hard work, and going above and beyond, and the American dream. So now that the cost of living is going up so much but wages are staying relatively the same, the general workforce is tired of companies wanting employees to be treating a job as anything more than a job. I think a four day work week (for the same pay they would have been getting before) would help people feel as though they are allowed to be a person outside of work and boost the overall quality and morale of work.
I have often wondered where the 40 hour five day a week work week came from. It is always fascinating to me to learn the history behind something that seems so normal and basic. I do wonder if a 4 day work week would make people more productive or not. While it would be nice, I think that there is a danger to that. I say that because right now people hate having to work Monday through Friday but that is because they have always done it. If it is shortened to 4 days a week 25-30 years from now people are going to want it to be shortened again because 4 days a week is too much. I would say a better option is to shorten hours and allow people to choose how they want to work those hours. Say if it is shortened to a 32 hour work week (which would be basically 4 days a week) then allow the workers to decide when they want to work their hours. If they want to break it up over 5 days or 4 days or however works best for them. I think that would allow people to feel more freedom in their schedule and maybe lead to a more effective work schedule. That would also allow the worker to basically take off any day throughout the week if they so choose rather than limiting it to just friday.
I think we live in a society that values the work that we do over the lives that we have and this makes it hard to move past just work, work, working. I’m not saying work is bad or anything, obviously it is necessary but we are attached to the idea that work comes first and you should always give it your all. People have been talking about a four-day workweek for years but this article brings in the new idea of still having five days but 32 hours as opposed to 40. This is appealing to me because it breaks the day into working five six-hour days rather than eight. This would give more time each day to do things rather than having to get everything done on a Friday. I also like that there is a movement to lower the maximum hours to 32 to help people get overtime. It was cool to learn the history behind breaks and weekends created by Henry Ford, I didn’t know that’s where this conversation began.
I fully agree with the premise of shifting a 40 hour work week to a 32 hour one. The article briefly touched on how the six to seven day work week was shifted in the early 20th century to the current five day work week, two day weekend structure we have, and how that was done for factory workers. I thought it was interesting that now is a great time for us to shift again, with the end of the covid-19 pandemic, because of how remote work got streamlined and a new discussion about work hours has become prevalent. Mainly for factory and blue collar workers, I didn't know until this article that current automakers are demanding a 32-hour work week in current contracts. I believe that people are just as productive on a four day work week, as people are able to allocate more energy and effort into the four days than trying to spread it over five.
This article was a very interesting read. Personally, I have actually never heard of the 32 hour work week, and had only heard of the four-day work week model. Obviously, like everybody else, I would absolutely love to have a three day weekend every single weekend, but I think that doing interesting things with dividing 32 hours out over five days of the week is an idea worth looking at and exploring. I think that the author explained a lot of their points super well. The 32 hour work week, spread out over five days, is such a massive benefit to working parents that honestly I think it’d be a great idea just for that. Child care is so expensive and difficult to get, that wouldn’t it be nice to help parents be able to spend more time with their kids? I think that personally, I would pick more evening free time over a three day weekend every weekend.
I feel that a 32 hour work week is a much more realistic solution. While it is still the same weekly hours, it allows for flexibility for each company and employee to make the decision on what is best for them. I had not even considered how beneficial this would be for parents with children in school. I agree wholeheartedly with the author that businesses need to be able to decide when they are open. The pharmacy I use here in Pittsburgh is only open Monday through Friday which makes it difficult for me and many other people to get there when we are also working or in school for those same hours. Learning that the average office worker is only productive about 2.5 hours a day is somewhat upsetting to me. While I wasn’t working an office job, I was working full time before coming to college and I swear I was more productive then that. Of course, this was for a job that I loved doing with a great boss and co-workers which made working enjoyable.
I think it's so funny how conversations about this topic always go in circles. I remember before COVID it was always work work work. Then when COVID hit I feel like we as a society re-evaluated how much the world revolved around work. Especially in America where everything is so centered around capitalism. It was a sort of wake-up call to everyone seeing how much work could actually be done from home and with much less hours. Now it's funny that nearly four years after the original outbreak now the talk is going back to prioritizing more work days. With my current college schedule, I really have a primarily four-day week, as I only have one class on Friday, and its wonderful. I love how my morning is work and the rest of the day feels like a re-set for the weekend. It allows me to do all of the things I need to do, like laundry, homework, and cleaning so I can really enjoy my weekend as days off.
This is an interesting topic, especially as I have heard of more and more schools surprisingly switching over to this schedule template. I can totally see how a four day work week would bee beneficial to mental health of employees, but there is the downside that productivity will take a hit with the lowering of hours. Of course, personal productivity will go up as workers are happier with their conditions, and the question is whether or not companies value that trade-off. The article does bring up an idea that with advancements in technology and therefore automation of tasks that workers may be able to do less work while the automated tasks run in the background, so this could make up that difference of 32 versus 40 hours of product or labor. The hardest part about this is that I feel payment should not be decreased much, if at all, but I understand how other people may say less work equals less pay. I think that this would be an interesting thing to consider moving forward when scheduling people, but will definitely need to look into it more to try and make sure the gains outweigh the losses, whatever those may be.
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