The 4-Day Workweek: How To Do More With Less

The four Day Work Week How We Can Do More with Less hey everyone, this is Nir Eyal and welcome to the near and Far Podcast. And joining me today as always, is Nick Gray. Nick, how you doing?

I'm doing great. I'm excited to talk about this four day work week. I know for busy professionals and entrepreneurs it can feel like a seven day work week. So I'm excited to hear what this will be all about. Should I just get into it Nir? Should I start? Yeah, let's do it. Become Indistractable to Conquer the Paradigm Shift what would it look like if the world moved toward a four day work week? The organization Four Day Week Global did a six month study of 900 employees across 33 US and Irish businesses in 2022. The study was based on the 1080100 model. Employees received 100% of their pay for working 80% of the time at 100% of the productivity. Participating employees rated the four day workweek a 9.1 for out of 10, claiming it reduced their burnout and fatigue. Businesses said revenue increased and that attracting and retaining talent was easier. Yet acclimating to the new structure took some companies and employees several months. They struggled to figure out how to whittle down their hours yet still accomplish all tasks. More than one third of employees saw their workload intensify. Time magazine says 2023 could be the year of the four day work week. Maryland might pass a four day work week program that would run from mid 2023 through 2028, joining European governments that have tried it. But if the world is going to attempt this paradigm shift, we have to do our best to eliminate the obstacles. Companies and employees can use the methodology described in my book Indistractable to navigate the four day work week and overcome the modern affliction of wage slavery. Well, hello, My name is Nick Gray and I'll be reading Nir's latest article. Nir's going to join in maybe after the next section, maybe one or two more, but here's how it works. I read his articles and then Nir will comment on them later on. Nir is the best selling author of Hooked how to build habit forming products and also how to control your attention and choose your life. Let's go to the first paragraph. It's not business as usual. Moving to a 180100 model is more complex than telling everyone to stay home one day a week. Companies and employees must discuss how the four day work week will affect the day to day and strategize Accordingly, with planning, companies can avoid inviting disorganization and confusion that hurts their business and wreaks havoc on workplace culture. Team teams will need to coordinate schedules so they understand when everyone is available. Leadership will need to coordinate with employees to understand when everyone is working and enforce 48 hour days, not 10 hour ones here's a list of just some questions companies and employees should consider. Will there be fewer meetings? When will they occur? Will switching to a four day work week affect employees flexibility over when they show up to work? Or will flexibility remain the same as long as employees meet their goals? How will this affect work from home policies? Will employees be expected to answer emails and messages after hours? Will employees be able to choose any day off or will it be the same company wide? What will a company do to ensure customer service doesn't deteriorate? How might deadlines, expectations and support change to help employees handle their workload in fewer days? Indistractable can help companies set the stage to answer these questions. Adapt to the four day week by becoming indistractable, companies should establish a culture founded on psychological safety so employees can freely discuss the questions and concerns above. Psychological safety as defined by Amy Edmondson, an organizational behavioral scientist at Harvard, is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes. Consider creating a forum where stakeholders can voice concerns and use indistractable methods to ensure a seamless transition to the new structure. The four day work week is about creating a happier, more efficient work environment unless the cut from five days to four is strategic and it could lead to a dysfunctional environment. For example, employees wary that a four day workweek will come with implicit trade offs or consequences may feel they need to always be available to managers and coworkers even after hours. Moving away from a five day work week makes the norms of the workplace obsolete and managers and employees need to establish new ones. Here are the three steps to build psychological safety. Step one Frame the issue as a learning problem, not an execution problem. Step 2 Managers should acknowledge that no one, themselves included, is expected to have all the answers. Step 3 Managers should model curiosity and ask questions. Managers should seek feedback on new workplace norms using the indistractible model to help employees stay focused, fight distraction and operate at 100% productivity in four days.

Yeah, so just so I could jump in here real quick, Nick, I think the important thing around this article is not necessarily okay, everybody's going to have to adopt the four day work week from now on. I think that is going to be the future. I mean, if you look at the trend line, we see the workweek decreasing precipitously over the past 100 years, and I expect that trend to continue. But even if you're not saying, okay, let's go, we're all going to move to four day work weeks, what we can start looking at is how can we improve our workplace practices and culture by adopting some of these principles, starting with psychological safety. I think psychological safety is one of the most underrated and I think most important traits that we can look for in a workplace. And psychological safety, again, it's this term coined by Amy Edmondson at Harvard, is this idea that you can talk about your problems without fear of retribution, that you can voice concerns. And, and so if you can't voice those concerns, if you can't talk about your company problems, if you can't raise your hand and say, hey, I think we can do things a little better here, that is itself the problem. So whether it's struggling with distraction, whether it's harassment, whether it's the businesses failing, whatever those problems are, where we see organizations get stuck in a crappy company culture is where people cannot talk about the problem and they take all their problems and stuff them away in some closet. And I guarantee you, if you can't talk about one problem, there's all kinds of other problems you can't talk about either. So the idea here is to try and practice this idea of psychological safety. And so those three steps offered up of framing the issue as a learning problem, not an execution problem, it's about the whole idea around psychological safety is that in order to improve, we have to solicit feedback. And then managers acknowledging that they don't have to have all the answers that they want to learn. That's the whole point of getting people to tell you what they think. And then finally, managers should model curiosity and ask questions as opposed to coming with, hey, I have the magic solutions. All the time.

I'm thinking myself how I can use this on my team to learn to read some of the chapter together, maybe from indistractable using the indistractable model to. To think about how to create that psychological safety. And I had an instance where I had a team member who was dropping things and missing things. And I asked, how's everything going? And there were family problems at home. You know, she had a daughter who was really sick and that was really hard for her to manage both of her responsibilities. And I was like, oh my God, I'm so sorry. Family first. But how do I create the environment where she feels safe to speak up about those home issues first.

Right, right, absolutely. And that, that is the most important first rate. Because if you don't have that open line of communication, you can't spot these kind of troubles. Many of them are not that big of a deal when you catch them early, right. If you, if you hear about a problem that someone's having early enough, you can put in all kinds of contingencies, you can work around those problems. It's when things compound, right? These people start hiding these problems. They start figuring out all kinds of hackney solutions to try and keep people from knowing about these problems. And that's where you get into disaster, specifically around distraction. Right? When people feel like they can't work without distraction and despite the fact that that might be hurting their productivity, they'll come up with all kinds of crazy ways to look like they're doing work, even when they need some time to think in order to accommodate these expectations. Even though if they just raise the problem of hey, is it okay If I take 30 minutes of my day where I need to work with that distraction, where I need to be left alone? That would be much better. So making sure that you have that open line of communication early on by acknowledging that just raising problems, raising these concerns is a valuable trait. By the way, this is something that's great advice for parents as well. We want that open advice with our children so that they don't feel like they have to hide their problems. That's the worst thing that we can do, is to make people feel like they can't air these concerns, whether it's, you know, in the workplace or in the home.

That's neat to think about how it relates beyond the workplace into the home too. Next section. Master internal triggers. In the study from four day week, global stress decreased for 32% of employees. But 16% reported feeling more stressed. Perhaps achieving 100% productivity in less time was daunting for them. Or maybe not knowing the rules of the new work environment made them feel adrift. If your employees are feeling stress, worry, doubt or other negative feelings related to the four day work week, those internal triggers will drive them to distraction and decrease their productivity. They need to know what's expected of them to work successfully. If internal triggers are acknowledged and explored, employees will be better able to focus on traction rather than succumbing to distraction. Managers can resolve these issues by offering support and resources to help help employees handle their workload in fewer days. They can determine realistic deadlines and set expectations for availability during the four day work week.

This is super important. Sorry to interrupt you, but you know teaching folks and learning ourselves how to master these internal triggers is always the first step to becoming indistractable. We have to learn how to deal with these uncomfortable sensations. If we're causing more stress, then we know that what people will do with that increased stress is that many people will look for escape from that stress with guess what? More distraction. So we have to teach people these tools for deal with dealing with these internal triggers. If we don't master these internal triggers, they will become our masters.

Make Time for Traction Most time management concerns related to the four day work week can be assuaged with time boxing. By allocating specific periods to certain tasks, employees can see how much of their workload they can realistically fit into the four day work week. If it's a crunch, they can talk with managers about how to adapt their workload. Timeboxing is the first step of schedule syncing, which gives other transparency into how staff intends to spend their time. For example, rather than employees rejecting a task when their workload is heavy, they can schedule sync with teams and managers to prioritize the most critical tasks. Schedule syncing can be used company wide to address the crucial questions that of the four day work week, including changes to work from home and flexible work policies, meeting agendas and availability expectations. Like employees, customers must be clued into the company's new schedule. For example, does your company have a customer service team? If so, will customer services teams previously available to customers five days a week still have to work on the fifth day? If not, will the company outsource customer service for that day? Alternatively, how will the company notify customers of the new limited availability? I can't answer these questions for you, but if companies answer them using time boxing and schedule syncing give stakeholders the space to provide honest feedback and make changes accordingly, they can't go wrong.

So this schedule syncing technique, I know we've talked about it a few times, but it's incredibly important. Just to summarize, the schedule syncing idea is that after you've time boxed your calendar, you have this physical artifact. You can show them. You can either print it out or you can make it, you know, pull up on a screen. Here's how I intend to spend my time, boss. Help me make sure that my priorities are correct. So if there's all this stuff you need me to do, I put in as much as I can in my calendar. But here's this overflow list of stuff that I don't know where to put my calendar. Please help me prioritize. So by having that regular conversation with your manager, you're essentially managing your manager. You're helping them understand how you're spending your time and then they're giving you feedback based on what your priorities should be, because that is your manager's most important job, is helping you prioritize. So when we give people the psychological safety they need to voice these concerns, we help them master these internal triggers and then we help them make time for traction. This is how we can overcome any obstacle within the company or how we can execute change. Like this four day work week is by using these practices in coordination, by having that conversation of saying, hey, I want to give you full transparency about how I plan to spend my time. Help me understand if I'm not spending my time according to your priorities, so, so that I can make those changes now. And so that gives us all kinds of flexibility to do whatever we want within the company.

I like that. Hack back External triggers To protect timebox calendars and thwart distraction, companies can hack back meetings, emails, group chats and work interruptions. Setting etiquette guidelines for use, such as not sending emails or slack messages after hours or during specific periods of a workday, enable staff to relax off the clock and concentrate on focused work. The four day work week may be in our future and those who become indistractable will reap the benefits from the start. Nir, how do you think this applies to startups that feel the pressure or the grind to constantly keep up with their peers or the market that's rapidly changing?

You know, I think it's very specific to each and every company that I think that the idea that more hours yields better results has been thoroughly debunked. Right? That we know that there's a certain point where working more hours doesn't necessarily yield more results. In fact, many times it actually degrades results because the more people are burned out, the more tired they are, the worse their output is. And so you can actually create more work because people aren't working at their peak. We know this in the software business, you know, the number one source of bugs in software, and we know that every time there's a bug, then that requires all kinds of fixing. It requires a lot of money and time be spent for fixing past mistakes. The number one cause of those bugs is distraction is interruption. When somebody is doing something that requires a lot of focus and then we come up to them, we say, hey, I just need this One thing, can you send me that TPS report or I need you in a meeting right now? That takes their focus and concentration off the task at hand and that's when they make mistakes. So it's not necessarily true that more hours equals better results for many people. Especially when we think about how to attract top talent, we oftentimes might need to make certain accommodations. You know, for many people these days, having a home life is very, very important. So many people say, look, I would really trade money and prestige or whatever else, you know, we think of as traditional metrics for career success. I would trade that for more freedom, for more time with my family, for a three day weekend. And so the company that can adapt to those kind of requests from their employees in order to hire top talent and is going to succeed. So having that kind of flexibility, it's not about saying, oh, everybody in the world now needs to have a four day work week. There's definitely some companies where this would not work. Of course, the idea here is, can your company be flexible enough to change to potentially awesome ideas? Do you have the flexibility to adopt new and better ways of working? Because if you're stuck in the old way of working because you are unable to change, then the four hour, four day workweek is not the problem. There's all kinds of other problems that you can't adapt to either. And we've seen this time and time again, company culture that does not allow people to adapt gets disrupted. Right? So whether it's Kodak not being able to make the pivot into, into digital photography, or you know, the list of, you know, so many other companies that died because they could not adapt to a future that they could see coming. Right? BlackBerry knew that the smartphone was going to take over. How many companies have died because the company culture was too sclerotic? They could not change. And the reason they could not change was because they weren't following these principles that we just described in this article.

I like what you said about using it as an ability to attract some of the best candidates.

Yeah, that's one potential perk, right? A lot of companies, whether it's a startup or not, you know, if you have that potential perk of, hey, you know, here we have three day weekends across the board. That's very attractive. And how much money in salary would people be willing to give up for that extra day a week? Especially when you think about it from the company perspective, it turns out what we're finding with these four day work weeks is that company productivity stays the same or increases when people work fewer days per week. It sounds counterintuitive, but many of these studies are showing that this is the case.

That would be incredible.

Well, great.

Thank you everybody for tuning in. This is near and Far. You're listening to how to build habit forming Products and Indistractable. Nir wrote these two books, Hooked how to build habit forming Products and also how to control your attention and choose your life. You can sign up for his free newsletter@www.nearandfar.com. whether designing customer behaviors on your own habits, you'll benefit from understanding the research that near shares from user experience design, behavioral economics, and neuroscience. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next week.