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Its annoying to feel like your boss is bad at their job. But it doesnt mean you have to quit.
Category:
E-Commerce
Juliet Schor is an economist and sociologist who specializes in the study of work. She is a professor of sociology at Boston College, having previously taught at Harvard for 17 years. Her previous books include the national bestseller The Overworked American. Juliet has received numerous awards for her research and writing and has had her work published in scores of magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and People magazine. She has also made several appearances on popular newscasts. Whats the big idea? For a while, the concept of a four-day workweek seemed aspirationalutopian, even. However, it is now more realistic than ever. Research increasingly shows that switching from five to four days is a win for employees and their entire company. Well-being increases (and stays that way), retention issues are solved, and heightened productivity replaces fatigue and stress. The benefits are so impressive that governments are getting involved in legislating fewer working hours. Times are changing, and modern life and modern business are better off on a four-day work schedule. Below, Juliet shares five key insights from her new book, Four Days a Week: The Life-Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving Well-Being, and Working Smarter. Listen to the audio versionread by Juliet herselfin the Next Big Idea App. 1. The four-day week is life-changing for employees Between dual-earner households, the faster pace and complexity of modern life, and intensifying job demands, weve heard over and over that two days is not enough to manage life admin, see family and friends, and recover from the workweek. Around the world, levels of stress, burnout, and disengagement remain historically high. Thats a big part of why we find that a third day off is transformational. Physical and mental health, sleep, fatigue, and anxiety all improve, according to survey and biometric data. Stress and burnout are reduced. People are happier and more engaged in their work. The obvious reason a four-day week is transformational is the ability to work less. In our statistical modeling, we found that the larger the working time reduction, the bigger the well-being impacts. People who manage to reduce their time by a full eight hours per week experience about twice the improvement in well-being. When we drill down to see what it is about working less that makes people so much better off, two factors emerge. About half the increase in well-being is due to behavioral changes outside of work, such as better sleep, more exercise, and less fatigue. The other half is that people register much higher levels of effectiveness and performance at work. 2. Working less boosts productivity We discovered that people are much more productive on a four-day week. They report being able to find more efficient ways to do things. People report that theyre no longer experiencing the Sunday Scaries, and they show up on Monday mornings feeling refreshed, rather than anxious. They feel more on top of their workloads and score higher on a work smart scale. They do a better job prioritizing whats important, spend less time spinning their wheels, and are more motivated to get through their to-do lists. These individual impacts collectively contribute to the organizations overall success. Companies tell us they are maintaining or increasing overall productivity when they switch to a four-day workweek. Thats counterintuitive if we assume that productivity mainly depends on how long we work. But there are several reasons for better performance. Staff are healthier, more energetic, and more loyal. Organizations become more intentional and invest in the upfront work that saves time in the long run. Customer-service-facing organizations in the tech world tell us they have finally gotten serious about documentation. Other companies report eliminating unnecessary forms or bottlenecks in approval processes. These are all examples of the forcing function of the four day week (4DW). It makes organizations do things they know will save time but have been too busy to accomplish. Organizations become more intentional and invest in the upfront work that saves time in the long run. The other major effect is that the four-day week stops resignations dead in their tracks. In one of our most successful cases, the manager explained that, on her team, turnover went from 30% a year to zero. That 30% turnover figure is common in her industry, and solving it avoided the wasted time of onboarding and training new people, which yielded a better product and higher sales. At a hospital we studied, the opportunity for overworked nurse managers to get a third day off led to many rescinded resignation letters. At a restaurant (another high-turnover industry) people also stopped quitting. A four-day-a-week job is much more valuable to people. About 15% of our sample says that no amount of money could induce them to return to a five-day schedule. Many more would require a significant pay increase to return. Thats why when people get a four-day week, they dont leave. 3. A whole organization transformation For years, companies have tried to address employee stress and burnout with individual solutions. Theyve tried flex time, scheduling accommodations, wellness classes, yoga, and mindfulness. The academic research shows that none of these works. Stress and disengagement have only gone up. Those on shorter schedules often suffer stigma or get paid less, but end up doing as much work as before. In contrast, reducing hours across the entire organization is a real solution. In the trials we studied, companies received two months of training on how to implement the 4DW before they began. How is making it work defined? Well, there is some variation across companies, but generally, its defined as doing five days work in four. Companies were coached on ways to get inefficient meeting cultures under control and to create focus time. They learned about new time-saving software or how to analyze their processes to eliminate wasted steps. They achieved success because it wasnt just on individuals, but everyone was pulling together to change the culture. That results in a true shift in work norms, shifting from the facetime/productivity theater model to one thats focused on results. 4. Almost all the companies who try it stick with it Our team wanted to know if the great results we saw would persist. So, we went back to the companies at one and two years in. We found that improvements in employee well-being were remarkably stable. Almost all the companies stayed on the four-day schedule. Perhaps more surprisingly, almost all the companies stayed on the four-day schedule. Some instituted a few tweaks to their programs, but only about 10% reverted to five days after a year. If we exclude those who never really gave it a try, its closer to 5%. Maintaining or raising productivity, improving product quality, reducing turnvers, and getting happier, more satisfied employees is a recipe for success. 5. The four-day week is coming It has been 85 years since the workweek was last reduced. Since the pandemic, pressure has been building, especially in the U.S., where working hours have been increasing. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that Fridays are evolving away from a standard workday. Working from home is accelerating this process. But its not just an organic evolution to the four-day week that were seeing. Governments are beginning to encourage or even legislate worktime reduction. The Polish government has just announced a pilot program similar to the ones weve been studying. This follows similar pilots by the governments of Spain, Scotland, Belgium, Portugal, and the Dominican Republic. The government of Tokyo has recently implemented a four-day workweek for all its employees. Spain has just legislated a reduction in the workweek for the entire country to 37.5 hours per week. Recently, two bills to run pilots were filed in New York state, making it the 11th state considering legislation. And a growing number of local governments are shifting to a four-day week for their employees, with some saving money in the process. AI will accelerate the shift to four days. As companies incorporate AI at a rapid clip, society is faced with a stark choice: Are we going to lay off millions of people? Thats a possible outcome with a technology that can replace so much human labor. But its not our only option. We could follow the path we took with the first industrial revolution. We can use that labor-saving technology to reduce working hours and keep employment high. Thats the path we shouldand I think willtake. I started researching worktime reduction many years ago. At the time, it was seen as aspirational, even utopian. But that has flipped, and now the four-day week has become common sense. It is also the smart option if we want to protect our economy, democracy, and society. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
Category:
E-Commerce
Maria was the CEO of a rapidly growing tech startup in the genomics space. She was curious, confident, open to new ideas, and comfortable being challenged by her teamall qualities that had helped her build the company from nothing into a 30-person organization with millions of dollars in venture capital funding and a consumer-facing product about to be released. And yet, even as things seemed to be going exceptionally well, key leaders were starting to leaveand the board brought me, a clinical psychologist-turned-entrepreneur-turned business coach, in to figure out why. What you sometimes find in situations like these is a leader with a difficult personalityrigid, cold, and just plain unpleasant to work for. Not here. Maria was warm, engaging, and personable. Her team loved talking to her. They just didnt love working for her. As it turned out, her confidencea critical quality for an entrepreneur to possess when breaking new ground and coming up against scores of obstacles and critics insisting something couldnt be donewas playing out in a way that was hurting the business. Shes curious until she isnt, one high-ranking team member told me. Everyone else might still have more questions, but she shuts down the conversation and insists we move on. Shes open to discussion right up until the point when she feels like shes made a decision, and then shes dismissive, arrogant, and impossible. She makes the rest of us feel stupid if we dont see things as quickly or as clearly as she does, and thats not an environment I want to work in. Shes brilliant, but I dread every meeting. I dont know what hes talking about, Maria told me when I presented her with the feedback. My ability to make decisions is a strength. And theyre good decisions! I dont see the point of going around in circles once I know the answer! When superstrengths become supernovas Maria was a classic example of an entrepreneur with a blindspot. She didnt see how her superstrengthconfidencehad tipped over to become arrogance, and that arrogance was holding her back. When I began as a coach and first started to hear people talk about strengths and weaknesses, I took the information at face value. If an executive was praised for their persistence, Id make a note of it, and look for other areas that might need to be addressed. After all, strengths are good, I reasoned. Its the weaknesses that we need to worry about. But after a little while, I started to notice a surprising pattern. The calm, unflappable CEOa huge strengthnever signaled when he was upset, causing people to have to guess what bothered him. The curious, out-of-the-box thinker seemed to always get easily distracted by something shiny and new. The friendly, sociable extrovert wasnt leaving people alone to do their work. Every strength had its corresponding weakness, and the challenge was to keep things balanced, not to tip too far in one direction or the other. Strengths are not unqualified positives. Instead, our difficulties often emerge from investing too heavily in our strengthsour superstrengths become supernovas, and transform into the qualities that most frustrate the people around us and get in the way of our success. And because our strengths are often the qualities we are most proud of, the things we like best in ourselves and have heard positive feedback about over the course of our lives, the idea that they can become our biggest weaknesses is a common blindspot. Most of us simply wont be able to see when its happening. How to keep yourself from tipping into disaster We cant change our traits. But once we become aware of our extreme qualities, we can adopt behaviors to keep them in check. First, we have to find the blindspots. What I tell my clients to do is ask themselves the top adjectives others use to describe them, and then reflect on what happens if you modify them with the word too. Are they too smart, too energetic, too selfless? And how might that be playing out in the workplace? For Maria, she acknowledged that perhaps she could be too confident sometimes, and was eventually able to see how that might make her team feel sidelined or ignored. She was never going to be able to slow down her decision-making, but what she could do is recognize when she had decided she had the answer, and stopped asking questions. That was her awareness trigger for when she was at-risk of appearing arrogant and dismissive. She could then change her behavior and communicate that she was nearing a decision but was still open to discussion. I think I know the answer, she could tell her team, but lets keep talking until were all on the same page. She might not think her mind was going to be changed, but more communication could uncover angles she was ignoring, and ensure her team feels heard and respected. Recognizing when our superstrength has tipped over the edge and we have gone too far is the new skill to develop. It starts with accepting that a strength will at times become a liability. With that awareness we will naturally think about tapping the breaks a bit when we spot we are expressing that strength. Next, we can become aware of other behaviors that accompany our over-indexed strength. For Maria, it was feelings of having the answer, being done, wanting to move on, and feeling irritated that others want to discuss some more. When those feelings appeared, she would then know she had moved into problem territory. In turn, following up with the actual behavior change to correct the situation was a rather small adjustment. The changes we need to make arent dramatic, just little tweaks to how we approach the world, informed by greater self-awareness. Yet these tweaks can have huge effects. The more deliberate we are about how we show up, the more strategic and effective we can be at keeping our superstrengths in check and avoiding deeper problems.
Category:
E-Commerce
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