Is A 4-Day Workweek The Future of Business?

As a result of these studies, The New York Times recently reported that companies from different countries decided to experiment by reducing the hours of their employees and seeing how it affected productivity. One firm in New Zealand decided to let its employee work four days while being paid for five. The result of this experiment found the change actually boosted productivity. Jarrod Haar, a human resources professor at Auckland University of Technology, said employees reported a 24 percent improvement in work-life balance, and came back to work energized after their days off. Haar shared, “Supervisors said staff were more creative, their attendance was better, they were on time, and they didn’t leave early or take long breaks. Their actual job performance didn’t change when doing it over four days instead of five.”

In Sweden, the city of Gothenburg mandated a six-hour day, and officials found employees completed the same amount of work or even more. How was that possible? As the above studies suggest, there’s a lot of fat that can be trimmed from most of our workdays, and these employees found it. “Workers said the change motivated them to find ways of increasing their productivity while in the office. Meetings were reduced from two hours to 30 minutes, and employees created signals for their colleagues that they needed time to work without distraction,” reports the New York Times.

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Brand strategy guru Sasha Strauss feels the tide is changing for Branding, “Brand strategy has never been timelier. Human behavior can no longer be predicted by generational classifications. Our existence has fundamentally changed, and so must the way we operate our businesses and communicate with our constituents.”

“We are all now perpetually connected. We scramble to block messages on our phones, TVs, and computers, but as software gets smarter and hardware gets harder to manipulate, our habitual tech handholding becomes a codependency,” says Strauss. “We are paralyzed when our tech fails because we can’t interface without it. Therefore organizations must be designed to naturally participate in this ecosystem, not stay out of it. Today’s adult never knew life without global private and public 24-hour communication. This sociological and psychological shift in human communication is profound and permanent and must alter how we run our businesses.”