What is better? A work week of four or five days? Companies and governments around the world have been discussing this issue recently, following the crowded labor market and the amount of workers seeking more flexibility. A proposal by the California Legislature wants to reduce the state’s work week from 40 to 32 hours, in larger companies. By next weekend, the California Legislature’s Employment and Labor Committee is expected to decide whether to advance the bill. If passed, the bill could affect 2,000 companies.
A lot of employees will jump for joy at the possibility of having a longer weekend, and companies have recently started doing serious experiments on new schedules. Various companies from the online fundraising platform Kickstarter to Unilever in New Zealand are doing pilots for a short work week in order to test productivity and examine what problems arise in a short four-day work week.
“It’s not going to go away,” said Evan Lou, a member of the California Democratic Legislature and one of the bill’s authors. After the epidemic workers want more flexible schedules and there are companies competing for workers in the crowded labor market that are adapting to this demand, he told him.
California is home to some of the largest technology companies in the world and is the most populous state in the United States, with about 39 million inhabitants. Two-hour workers who are longer hours at work will be paid 150% for overtime.
Earlier this month the California Chamber of Commerce addressed the bill and said that if implemented, it would result in much higher transaction costs.
Requiring companies to pay the same amount of money for one less work day would not be welcomed said Nicholas Bloom, a professor of economics at Stanford University. “Jobs will move to Nevada or Oregon, and workers will not be able to get a pay raise for many years,” he said.
The four-day work week is a topic that has been discussed for months, and there are already companies and municipalities that define a work week of 32 as a full-time job. During the Great Depression, companies reduced the number of hours worked because there was so little work. When Richard Nixon was vice president of the United States, he estimated that Americans would at some point stop working five days a week.
Research: Mixed results
A study on the effectiveness of the shortened weeks found mixed results. Economic studies in Germany and France found that reducing the number of working hours did not increase the number of workers. On the other hand, a 2013 study on private companies in Belgium found that workers who worked 25 to 35 hours a week were more productive than those who worked more or less than that.
Many employers are not enthusiastic about the idea. A recent survey of 459 companies, mostly technology companies, found that 90% of companies did not plan to adopt a four-day work week, according to the research firm Sequoia, which conducted the study. In 2019, Microsoft discontinued an experiment in a four-day work week in Japan after five weeks.
Most tech workers say they work well over 40 hours a week, so reducing their hours to 32 can be complex, says Kyle Holm, who advises Sequoia to his clients on wages and benefits. Employees who receive a salary are usually not entitled to an increased pay for overtime.
According to him, many companies have already adapted themselves to the preferences of the employees by offering hybrid schedules in which the employees come to the offices only three times a week.
The idea of a four-day work week, unsurprisingly, is popular with employees. A survey of more than 1,000 people conducted by Qualtrics, a software software company in the cloud, found that 92% of people would support a four-day work week, and 37% of people would be willing to take a 5% pay cut for extra free time. Many also acknowledged the shortcomings of the idea and nearly three-quarters of respondents said they would work longer hours than that anyway.
Not easier
Buffer, a company that makes social media marketing software, adopted a four-day work week in 2020 after internal surveys showed employees wanted more time off work, said Nicole Miller, the company’s human resources manager. Buffer, which remotely employs a team of nearly 90 workers, did not reduce wages despite the change in hours.
The company tracked fertility indices and found that employees do more in less time, Miller said. For example, engineers wrote more lines of code in November 2020 working shorter weeks than they did in November 2019 in a five-day work week. During the short work week, Buffer employees are given the flexibility to work four longer days and reach 32 hours or five short days.
“It really makes those four days a little more intense,” Miller said. “There’s some misconception that it’s somehow easier or involves less stress.”