Is a 4-Day Workweek viable? (feat. Joe Sanok)

Hi, I'm Susan Drum, and welcome to the enlightened executive where your personal evolution sparks your leadership evolution. Each episode we feature groundbreaking techniques and strategies to help you get the edge in personal and leadership effectiveness. Today we're focusing on the work week structure and productivity. And I'm excited to introduce my guest, Joe Senock. Joe is the author of five books, including his newest release, Thursday is the new how to work fewer hours, make more money and spend time doing what you want. It examines how the four day work week boosts creativity and productivity. Joe has been featured on Forbes and TedX, and he's host of the popular the practice of the practice podcast, which is recognized as one of the top 50 podcasts worldwide with over $100,000 downloads each month. Joe also helps entrepreneurs find innovative ways to start, grow and scale their business and is founder of the podcast Launch School. Well, welcome, Joe. I'm super excited to talk to you about the four day work week concept. We've heard about the four hour work week. We're going to talk about the four day work week and I can't wait to hear a little bit more. So why don't you share some about where the concept came from and, and the history of the work week.

Yeah. Thank you so much for having me, Susan. You know, sometimes when you write a book, you realize that there have been stepping stones to get you to a certain point. And other times it's more of a returning home. I remember my freshman orientation at college and, you know, I'm just about to graduate high school and they sit us all down and we're going to make our schedules and they say, all right, you've got to have, you know, some English and science. And they're kind of walking through it all. And I raised my hand and said, do I have to take classes on Friday? And the advisor said, no. Like, this is college. Do whatever you want. Make whatever schedule you think is best for you. So throughout all of college, all undergrad and grad school, I only had one class that was mandatory, that was on a Friday. The rest of the time I had a four day work week. And then my first job out of graduate school, I negotiated a four day workweek and then quickly got into the 50 plus hours a week that often happens. Uh, but then in 2015 when I launched my own business and was in charge of my schedule again, went back to that four day workweek. And so to really reflect back and say, this is something that's been inside of me that I've been experiencing, I'VE been teaching clients and, you know, teaching different executives to do and act within their businesses effectively, but hadn't really put it all together into a framework. It was all kind of upstairs. So it's really exciting to dive into some of the history around it. The second part of your question to really understand, like, where does this even come from, the way that we view time. So I went back a few thousand years to the Babylonians to find out that that's actually where the seven day week came from. The Babylonians just made it up. They looked up and they saw the sun and the moon and Earth. They saw Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter. And that's why they had the seven day week. It makes no sense other than the astronomy of the Babylonians. The Romans actually had a ten day week. The Egyptians had an eight day week. Even in the mid-1800s, the Russians tried a five day week. And so this ide idea of even the week itself, there's nothing in nature that points to seven days. We just made that up. Now in the late 1800s, early 1900s, the average person was working 10 to 14 hours a day, six to seven days a week. So it was a farmer's schedule, even if you live on the farm. And so when Henry Ford in 1926 enacted the 40 hour workweek, that was a huge step forward for the business evolution for people, but it was to sell more cars. He knew that people would not get a car and then try to drive to work for faster. He knew if they had a weekend that they would buy more cars so they could optimize that weekend. And it worked. He sold a ton of cars to his own Ford employees. So less than 100 years ago, we get the 40 hour workweek again. This thing that feels so solid, like we can't move away from that. Less than 100 years ago, it emerged. And then we started to see in the 80s and 90s, the history points to that Fridays actually start to move away from being a productive workday. We see the rise of casual Fridays. I'm sure you remember TGIF on TV with Urkel and Full House and all that. And then we start to see that it really becomes that day where somebody brings in cupcakes for someone that's having a baby. We do cheesy team building activities. It's moving more and more into the weekend. And really the pandemic was that final nail in the coffin for that industrialist mindset of the five day work week where we see that all the rules that we had assumed were there Were broken, changed, had to be flexible. And now as this hopefully post pandemic generation, we get to evaluate do we go back to that old way of thinking or do we reinvent things because we see the great resignation happening and people are saying, I can't go back to that old way. And so that's where we're seeing the four day workweek being one of those next steps in the business evolution.

Interesting. So I imagine some executives would say that sounds nice, but we also have to compete in the marketplace and there's so much to do. Even a 40 hour workweek would be nice. I'm working 60 hour work weeks. How could I possibly take Friday off? What would you say to that?

I would start with that the neuroscience actually shows that the less we work before we do a big project, usually the more creative and productive we are. And so we know this intuitively. When are your best ideas? It's not when you're stressed out and maxed out. And on that 49th hour of the week, it's maybe after you take a shower or you go for a walk, or you decide you're going to meditate, you get this flood of great ideas. And so the neuroscience really shows us that if we want a creative workforce, if we want a productive workforce, it usually starts with slowing down. And so that can be in the macro of a three day weekend or it can be in the micro. A University of Illinois study actually showed that we can completely eliminate vigilance decrement, vigilance. How? Well we pay attention to something decrement breaking down over time. And so really boring tasks, if you do it too long, you're worse at the end than you were at the beginning. But this University of Illinois study actually found that if you take a one minute break every 20 minutes, you're not looking at screens, you just stand up, move your body every 20 minutes, you can completely eliminate vigilance, decrement. And so there's all these things that are emerging in the research that push back on a lot of the assumptions that the industrialists handed us. So I would actually challenge a lot of those CEOs and C suite people to say the neuroscience is disproving a lot of these assumptions that we've had and there's better ways to do it. And we can then have more creativity and productivity than maybe we thought possible in fewer hours.

Yes. So here's an interesting point. I have been leading some workshops on building connectivity in an isolated workforce and talking about the great resignation and the number one fear that the Leaders I'm talking to have what might be driving the great resignation is burnout. When I ask them, is it low pay? Is it burnout? Is it health issues, family? It's burnout. And I think the zoom carousel, as you call it, just back to back, it's draining in a way that being in person is not as draining. And so we've accelerated that piece of productivity where we don't have commutes and we don't. But we're losing something in terms of the ability to restore and rejuvenate ourselves. So I hear you on that. So if you're, you know, on one hand, if you're an executive and you're really concerned about burnout, what are you really doing about it? And it sounds like you're suggesting you'd be far better off with a four day work week. Now, why a four day and not we should have, you know, afternoon siestas like the Spaniards.

Yeah, well, let me answer the last part of that question first. So I would say the four day workweek is more of a metaphor for our next step of not burning ourselves out like the industrialist wanted us to. They see us as an assembly line. They see us as you plug it in and it just keeps going. And we don't think that way about humans anywhere in our life. The school system still reflects that industrialist complex and that way of thinking. But if we go back to that idea of burnout for a long period of time, business leaders haven't necessarily thought through, what am I getting out of this particular role? Am I hiring them for 40 hours to just sit there? Is that the best key performance indicator we can have is they sit there for 40 hours, or is there something else? Do we even allow our staff to say, you know, I think this meeting that you just invited me to is ridiculous, I shouldn't be in it. I can do something more effective over here. Are there ways that staff can push back to say, I want to control my time in a way that still meets the KPIs, still meets what are the expectations of the particular job role? And maybe there's a different way of doing it. So there's so many different experiments that we're seeing be enacted and some very clear principles of how to walk through that in a large business so that you can discover for your business what that looks like. So maybe it may be an afternoon siesta, maybe maybe Wednesdays off. It could be a variety of different things, but we want to be able to walk through that experiment, to be able to Effectively look at what's happening and what's working.

Yeah. One experiment I heard of is even just changing the length of your meeting. Why do we have to make it 60 minutes? Why do we have to make it 30 minutes? You just end up filling the time. What if you did 25 minutes and 50 minute meetings so that you have 10 minutes to recover and you just made that a policy in your organization that you wrapped it up? Because I also find even when you make it 60 minutes, you're not doing a good job summarizing what the next steps are because you're running into the next meeting anyway. So maybe if you make it 45 minutes, it actually is 50, but at least you've got a summary of the next steps and clarity on what was the purpose of this meeting and be able to move forward. Right. So that's another place to look at assumptions.

Yeah. And do we even need to have this many meetings? Like what are we getting done? How are we preparing people for the meetings? Are just the key people coming to it? Or are we having ancillary people that really shouldn't be there? That's where, when we see businesses start to really walk through an experiment framework, they oftentimes will have a smaller group of five to six people that are of a similar job role. They sit down and they say, here's what we think for usually it's a quarter, so three months, what we want to try for a quarter. And they work with their supervisor. They say, okay, here's the limits we want to set. We want to do a four day work week for that time. We want to be done at three. We want to make sure we have fewer meetings. So they come up with the culture. And then from there they talk about what are they going to do to measure the effectiveness of this. So there's already job roles, tasks, things that are core to those jobs. So what are those things and how do we track those on a weekly basis in regards to whether they're up or they're down? So imagine a team says, we're going to take Fridays off. They have the support of their supervisors to do an experiment. Every Monday morning they come in, they have a conversation first. How did those boundaries go around our time away? So did we get an email at 9 o' clock at night from Jim from accounting? And you know, we all emailed and then Thursday morning I didn't email and I felt underprepared. I felt like you guys didn't follow the rules we set up. Well, maybe Jim gets a really Important email every Wednesday at 8:30 and he needs to pass that on. Okay, well then we set a new norm where we say, okay, everybody, at 9:00pm on Wednesdays, you need to check your email from Jim. Like don't get sucked in, but you need to, you need to read Jim's email on Wednesday evenings so that Thursday morning we can hit the ground running for our European group or whatever the thing is. So then you adjust over time. And that's the shift where it's evolutionary, where as people we're evolving, but then those organisms and those individual departments are evolving as well. And then you're looking at those KPIs over time. Are we up, are we down? How are we adjusting? And then we're going to look at the qualitative and quantitative every single month. So what are the actual numbers? We, you worked four days. What happened? But what are the qualitative things? I got to go to my son's baseball practice for the first time in forever. That just lit me up. We're in an age where the companies that can differentiate and can say, here's the selling point for working here are going to retain staff and attract staff in a different way than those that have the old industrialist mindset.

Yes, I couldn't agree more with you. And it's that experimentation and measurement of what has been the impact of that. And also looking at what is giving you energy during the day and what is draining your energy, as I mentioned, mentioned before, or how do you as a leader know, have you asked the questions, what type of projects made you want to jump out of bed in the morning and were exciting and what type of projects felt like they were draining your energy and why. And I better be asking those questions because if I'm not, you as my employee, could be experiencing something I'm not even aware. And the next thing I know, you're resigning and you say, you say it's because low pay, because that's an easy answer. But I think a lot of times people use that as a cover for I didn't like my boss. I didn't feel like I had enough growth opportunities. And frankly, the work I was doing was just repetitive, boring and draining. Right. And so. But who's asking those questions? Are you as a leader asking those questions? And that's the thing.

It's interesting. One of the workplace surveys that I looked at, that I talk about in the book, pay is usually fifth or sixth in regards to why people stay or leave. Growth opportunities, and specifically learning opportunities are almost always top of the list. And how often do you hear people say, hey, how do you want to learn? Even within my business and the businesses I coach, there's three questions that I always ask my staff. This has now become a part of our culture where it's not even formal anymore, but at least a few times a year to ask your employees. First, what are you doing now that you absolutely love that you want to keep doing? Second, what are you doing now that you hate that you wish you could take off your plate? I mean, I have never had a boss come to me when I worked in a full time job and say, what do you hate that we can take off your plate and have it be a safe conversation. Usually it's a let me give you more things you hate and suck it up. And so the idea of, let's take things off of the plate and shift those job roles. And then third, where do you want to grow? Where do you want to get education or learning that could help the company or that could grow you in a different way? Just being able to know where your staff are at. Uh, you may find that there's someone that's an aspiring videographer and maybe they're in marketing, maybe they're in accounting. That could be something that is a value add within the company that may not cost that much in the actual hours spent or the training, but could be a huge value add. And then when you talk about retaining that employee, where they get to do special projects that light them up, that's invaluable to those individuals.

Yeah. And I think another place to look is how connected do they feel to the rest of the team? And what would have you feel more connected and what can you do as a leader to bring people together when you do have meetings in a way that's energizing versus in a way that's draining? Right, exactly. On this question of like, what is that experience when people are getting together? Because they also say that the more connected you are, the more you build a sense of loyalty and it's the people that are going to keep it. Otherwise it just becomes transactional.

At the end of the day, we're all reevaluating where we spend our time post lockdown and pandemic and saying, do I want these friendships? Do I want this, this partner? Do I want to be this kind of parent? Do I want to have this kind of job? These are all questions everybody's asking themselves. And so leaders can choose to lead in those areas or they can choose to react in those areas.

Yeah, well, let's talk a little bit about how the brain changes when you slow down and limit your work. Can you share a little bit more about that?

Yeah. So when we look at kind of macro, what the evidence is showing us is that when you're stressed out and maxed out, you go with what you know. I was in Nepal between my undergraduate and grad school and I'm at the edge of the Chitwan jungle with my friend Todd. And our guide said to us, if we get chased by a wild rhinoceros, climb a tree. And at that point I should have asked a follow up question or two, but I didn't like, what kind of tree should we climb? How does that work often does this happen? So we go into the jungle and we're in there for about an hour, hour and a half on this hike and we come across a wild rhinoceros. And this was 2001. So I had a point and click film camera, take a picture, had the little zip, zip, zip. I have no idea how this picture turned out. It probably is going to be a big blob on my photo. So I take a step forward and I take another picture of this rhino, at which point I should have been satisfied, but I did not. I took another step forward and that rhino charged our group. So I take off running past my friend Todd because I knew that I could sprint faster than him. We had been in track together in high school, he was long distance. So after about 200 yards, he's going to have me. But then there's like a couple of Peace Corps volunteers behind me as human shields. So we get far enough into the jungle, we don't hear this rhino anymore. We come back, our guide is up in a tree as he had told us we should do, and he comes down. So why didn't I climb a tree? Like you don't try to climb a tree for the first time in the middle of the jungle when a rhinoceros is chasing you. And it's the same thing in the work that we do in that we are being chased by wild rhinos. We are just putting out fires in our businesses. We aren't being intentional on giving ourselves that space to say, I should learn to climb a tree if I'm going to be in a dangerous situation. So our brains react in the way that we do. What in that situation wasn't necessarily the best decision, but it was a survival decision. I can outrun Todd and these two Peace Corps volunteers. I'm going to survive and I'm going to Be known as the jerk that did that for years to come. In the same way the neuroscience is showing us when our teams are stressed out, maxed out, dealing with burnout, all the things that you talked about, the people you coach and work with are talking about, they aren't going to go with new and innovative ideas. They're going to start with the things that have worked. They're going to do the B minus work that doesn't cause too much attention out of fear of getting fired, standing out all those different ideas. What slowing down does to the brain though, is it allows that fear center to mute. It allows us to then have that space and time to allow different parts of the brain that when it's stressed out, can't talk to one another, to talk to one another in a different way. So those connections then that your staff are going to be able to make are completely different than when they're stressed out and maxed out.

Yes, exactly. No, I get it. So we can talk about this in theory, but people still may not believe you because we're so conditioned. It's like the water we swim in. And like I said, for some people a 40 hour work week would be a luxury because they're working 50, 60, 70 hour work weeks. Give me some examples of where entrepreneurs or executives you've worked with have seen the change in productivity that you're promising.

Yeah, I was working with an executive, his first name was Jerry, and he was working the 50, 60 hour a week job. And he actually reached out to me and we did a pre consulting call to really get an assessment of the business, where he was at, where he was headed, and he wanted his wife on the call, which doesn't always happen in business relationships. But it was nice. And what his wife said to me was, jerry's going to have a heart attack if he doesn't get some help. And between the time when he signed the contract to work with me and we had our first session, he had a heart attack. He was in the hospital, he recovered from it, but it was the wake up call he needed, where then he said, you know, I can't do this. 50, 60 hours a week he'd be in the office leading the teams, you know, leading the C suite people. And then he'd come home and be doing emails till 11 after he put the kids in bed. And he had young kids. And so I started with asking him, Jerry, you know, what's something that for you would just give you total joy? And he lived about an hour from the mountains and he said, if I could snowboard every Wednesday, that would just light me up. So what that did was it gave us a hook to say, okay, for you personally, if you're snowboarding every Wednesday, you're going to be a better executive. You're going to be a better leader. Now let's work backward and say what's not working to allow that. Well, there's certain decisions within the business that cannot be made without Jerry giving input. Are those always things that need 247 to have Jerry around for, or are there some automations, some decision making matrixes? Are there people that you trust within the company that could make 90% of the decisions and then the top 10%, maybe you do a standing meeting every morning. And so we figured out those processes to really remove him from a lot of those decisions that he didn't need to be making as a top executive. He needed to be the one making much bigger decisions. And he was getting stuck in that minutia. And so by then creating those systems to support him, we didn't yet get to that snowboarding, but we then tested it for a month to say, okay, just be at home on Wednesdays, like, go grocery shopping. Just step away from the business in some way to see if the team falls apart because he didn't want to be on the mountain and then have everything fall apart.

Right.

He was communicating it to the team and the benefits to the team, where if he can live that out, that doesn't mean that everyone else just keeps working 50 hours. That means that we talk about a healthier culture here. We talk about how this can help us be more creative and productive. And so it's not just this, you know, team leader or the C suite executive saying, peace out, everybody. I'm gonna work four days, and everyone else has to keep grinding along. No, it's saying, I'm gonna live this out and try to figure out a way that we can apply this either across the company or the department. So then once he saw that things did not fall apart and that he had the information he needed on a Thursday morning or on a Tuesday afternoon to be able to leave full day on Wednesday, he started snowboarding every week. And that then lit him up. It was that personal first that then applied to the business.

Yeah, and I think, you know, there's also this mindset that once I have the ipo, once I get the financial freedom and have the house, then I'll be happy. But for now, I got to put my nose to the grindstone. And the reality is, because I've certainly coached a lot of them. They're not any happier. Maybe temporarily, maybe feel a sense a bit of freedom and relief. But how you are during the journey will define how you are once you have everything that you think you're going for. And if you can do a journey where you are being lit up by going snowboarding along the way, you're going to fare far better at the end of the pot of gold than somebody who's relying on that to make them happy and sacrificing in ways that are harming their family, are harming their health and ultimately what you're suggesting is even their business.

Yeah. I mean, if you burn out 10 years early, I mean, then was it worth it? You still worked the same amount of time as if you had spread that out over, you know, those 10 years. And so the idea of doing work that matters, the enlightened side of the enlightened executive, is we don't want to attach to these outcomes so much that if they don't happen, that we just are devastated, or if they do happen, we're on cloud nine and then what's the next thing? What's the next thing? Nor do we want to avoid things so much that we're spending so much time either avoiding or attaching. Just recently I was thinking about how, you know, if someone said to me, hey, Joe, do you want to be a dolphin for the day? I'd be like, of course. That sounds amazing. Do you want to try being a ladybug for a day? Yeah, that sounds awesome. You could pick any animal or cloud or whatever. But how often do we really appreciate we get to be human, we get to experience being human with all the crud that happens as humans, with all the joys and sorrows and to just start with that appreciation, we get to be human. And so from there we get to choose the kind of work we want to do in the world. And that may be the work you are doing now. It may need some adjustment. But to say we don't always have to attach to here is the thing that is going to make me happy exactly how you said that. We can say right now I want to create some happiness right here in this moment.

Yeah, absolutely. So what is one thing someone is intrigued by this concept, but the idea of biting off a four day work week feels unmanageable at this time. What's one thing they can do starting tomorrow that would help?

Yeah. So I would say right now, look ahead to your future weekend. So going back to that idea of Slowing down first. Usually our weekends are in response or reaction to the week before. Instead, we want to switch that where it's in preparation for the week to come to make it the best weekend for our brains to slow down so you feel connected to those people we love the hobbies, the healthy things, that it's in preparation to then have an amazing week ahead of you. And so to start with, looking at your weekend and add one thing and remove one thing. So add one thing, remove one thing. What do I mean? So first we're going to add something in that we think might give us just a little bit more life. And so we're experimenting again. We're moving away from that industrialist mindset where it's always this way. It's always these checkboxes that work for everyone. No, we're, we're recognizing that you have different interests than I have. So maybe there's a book that's been on my nightstand for months. It's not a business book. It's not a self development book. It's just something that I think would be fun to read. Maybe reading that on Saturday and drinking some green tea for an hour, maybe that might light me up. But then I have to do some prep work. I have to tell those around me, hey, I'm going to go read this book for an hour. Please, unless you're dying, just leave me alone. So maybe we do that for an hour and give ourselves permission to not do all the productive things. Sure, there's laundry, sure there's dishes, sure there's things with the kids. But to say, I'm going to just see if this gives me a little bit more life this weekend. And then to remove one thing from our weekends. So it might be that you have coffee planned with a friend, but every time you leave, having conversations with that individual, you just feel like trash. You feel like it's a toxic relationship. It does not light you up at all. You are drained. We are too old for toxic relationships. You are allowed to say, I don't want to get coffee with you this weekend. Or it may be that you have your groceries delivered or have some sort of lawn care done or snow removal done by your neighbor kid, finding something that you can remove from your schedule and then just see, you know, for me, I enjoy blowing snow. I live in northern Michigan. It's fun to do. Usually it gets old after a period of time, but for the most part, it's like I'm getting exercise, I'm taking care of my driveway. I usually see my neighbors it's not something I would love to do. But then there's other times that, you know, I have a guy that I know that has a truck and he'll, you know, just clear the driveway if I don't feel like it. So I'll say, hey, you know, text him, will you clear the driveway? Zoom. He goes through, he sends me a bill. So finding that one thing to add and one thing to remove from a testing mindset so that over time you can then say, hey, here's the three to five things that if I add them to my weekend, I'm going to feel like that's the best weekend and my brain is going to be so ready for next week when I'm done. Or here's the five things or so that I know if I remove just a couple of them, I'm going to just feel like this is the best weekend ever. Starting there gives you a glimpse into that idea of slowing down to then kill it on the other side.

Yeah, I love it. I love it. Well, where can people learn more if they want to research how to make this happen?

Yeah. So we have a ton of resources over@joe sanock.com blog posts. We have people that are reporting out different experiments that they're doing, ways that they're trying to do the four day workweek. I also have a Harvard Business Review article that walks through how to implement the four day workweek. We do have a assessment that we usually charge $49 for that we're giving to your audience for free that starts with your internal. And so we've waived that price. If they go to internalquiz.com, they'll go through and it'll help them assess their internal inclinations and where they have natural positive tendencies and maybe where they have some areas of growth. So that's internalquiz.com all right, excellent.

Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Joe. I love the concept and I am going to try some of the things that you mentioned for my weekend. What do I want to add? What do I want to take away?

Well, Susan, thanks for helping make Thursday the new Friday.

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