Is the Four-Day WorkWeek for You?

The four-day workweek? In theory, anyway, It’s not ten hours a day, it’s eight, and businesses and a few governments in some countries are considering lowering their overtime threshold to 32 hours a week. What does this mean for your wallet?

America’s not a leader in progressive labor policies, so let us look to other countries like Iceland, the Netherlands, and Britain, which are experimenting with a four-day work week, taking the lead in the issue. What’s the likelihood that America will see the light and embrace it?

So what do workers gain from the four-day workweek? Consider these five benefits:

• An extra weekend day to enjoy
• More time off in general
• The same level of compensation
• Longer work life
• Reduced accidents while off work

Is Saturday a Weekend Day or a Chore Day?

On the labor side of the issue, many benefits are listed for workers. After all, two-day weekends are a bit tiny, as Saturday might be devoted to chores you failed to do during the week, and that leaves you with one lousy day free of the grind. Ordinary workers could benefit from a four-day work week in the most obvious way, an extra day off to relax and enjoy life!

30 percent Want More Time Off

Who wouldn’t want the four-day workweek if you can feel an improvement in your everyday life? Unfortunately, only some workers feel management would ever give them the time off they ask for it, but a significant percentage want more time off in general. And with the dominance of management models over labor politically, fewer companies want to give workers any say.

Same Level of Compensation

But the benefit of more time off might be a more significant motivation for the workers and, as a result, increase their productivity. It’s to the company’s benefit for everyone to regard the increased productivity of workers who increase their time off in their consideration.

Being productive in 32 hours at the same level as 40 hours also should result in the same level of compensation. That’s a key component in the ongoing experiments. Can a four-day workweek result in the same level of productivity and, therefore, the same wage for people stuck working a five-day workweek? Why would workers do the same amount of work for less pay?

Longer Careers

Employees would enjoy more excellent morale reflected in their loyalty to the company and their commitment to work for the company.

In addition, a reduction in hours may delay the retirement of older workers at retirement age, which spans eight years from 62 to 70. Workers approaching retirement could then delay retirement without sacrificing their health. A sense of physical hardship is one reason for early retirement today, but workers may delay retirement with reduced hours.

Fewer Accidents off the Job

Workers also experience a bump in quality of life at home because they get well-rested in a four day workweek.

The errors in the workplace also go home with workers when they’re not well rested. For example, errors behind the wheel while commuting to and from work and accidents at home are also attributed to workers who do not enjoy sufficient rest.

Consider the Benefit for Employers

The four-day workweek won’t makes sense to company management if they don’t see a benefit. Consider these five gains employers could realize:

• Increased Productivity
• Reduction of Human Error
• Worker retention and company loyalty increases appreciatively
• Reduction of overhead costs
• More job creation benefits the community

Understanding Increased Productivity

The increase in productivity may result more from omission than addition. A well-rested workforce commits fewer errors in their work time, increasing productivity enough to equal a forty-hour week advantage. That might mean counting the savings from lowering overhead when eliminating processes to address human error. Even if management had yet to understand the cause of worker error, they could hardly miss the effect of human error on productivity.

Reduce Human Error in the Workplace

Human error doesn’t just mean failures in the production line. For instance, cognitive errors occur when the workload increases, reducing productivity. When the pressure is on, mental errors arise. The cases of Forgetfulness during the day also result in productivity loss. For example, forgetting to staff during high-pressure times can affect productivity. Following company policies while not wholly understanding them also causes human errors and leads to production loss. Finally, lousy judgment can also lead to human error and can be worse when making a wrong decision while searching for a solution. This compounds the problem.

With a well-rested workforce, human errors are mitigated significantly.

As goes computers and technology in the workplace, as goes the rest of the workplace. Significant errors which occur in Information technology can create big problems in productivity. The mistakes that occur using computers have shut down entire systems. If productivity relies on security to be successful, the industry would have to eliminate the primary source of problems, human error. Workplace networking crashes are attributable to human error in almost sixty percent of the incidents. Human error is magnified whenever workers create, store, secure, and exchange electronic data.

Human error is a significant problem in the workplace. If you consider the details that often go into the work process, you’ll understand how vast the problem of human error is.

Reduction of Overhead Costs

To understand how to reduce overhead costs associated with human error, consider the steps a company takes to address human error, basically an overhead cost—creating systems that mitigate human error, paying for training to handle a human error, doing regular production audits to sniff out human error, and setting up endless meetings to correct proper communication failures that result in human error. All these costs may be eliminated or lessened with a four-day workweek.

Worker Retention and Company Loyalty Improve

Other benefits for employers include improving worker retention by offering a four-day workweek. A workforce who believes their employer wants a well-rested workforce may also enjoy increased morale and loyalty to the company.

Creating Jobs Benefits Community

In addition, economies that have trouble generating jobs for their constituents benefit from a shorter work week.

The four-day workweek may mean that companies can staff the same number of shifts by hiring more workers to fill the gaps left by workers switching to a four-day workweek. In such a scenario, productivity and company profits increase.

Jobs for the community mean a lot politically and can result in significant benefits given to companies by the communities they do business in.

Management needs to find ways to optimize workers’ efforts, so looking at motivated, well-rested workers as the most desirable kind of workers is essential. That’s the secret to success with giving workers the four-day work week: Get productivity out of people in 32 hours which equals their 40-hour output. Implementing a 32-hour work week would immediately reduce workplace error, so the overhead cost to address workplace error may become dramatically smaller. Workplace error can account for up to 100% of workplace loss of productivity due to accidents.

–Dan Erickson

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