A speaker explains their organization ran a 30-hour four-day workweek during COVID with no drop in output. They call it the inverse of Parkinson's Law: work shrinks to fit the time you give it, sharpening focus. European studies show 4-day and 5-day schedules produce similar results.
The 4-day workweek. Is this something that you've looked into?
We've studied that for a long time. And still to this day, to some extent, we have a 30-hour workweek. So during COVID we did that. And we found that it didn't impact productivity at all, you know, that people were just able to get the same amount of work done. You know, it's kind of like the reverse of Parkinson's Law, which says that work expands to the time allotted for it. Well, kind of the really the reverse of that, I call it Hayek's corollary, is that work contracts to the time allowed for it. If you've got less time, you just get focused faster and get it done. Now, obviously there's a law of diminishing returns, but there've been a lot of studies done, particularly in Europe on this, where there's been the same productivity at the 4-day workweek as the 5-day workweek.
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