Just as not all CEOs embrace remote work, not all business leaders believe a four-day work week is right for their company. However, it appears that employees sleep more when given an extra day off, and this could help the bottom line.
“Dream and work are in competition with each other,” University of Washington management professor Christopher Barnes told Bloomberg this week. “When you trade sleep for work, it’s problematic. You sacrifice your health and you have poor work results.”
Juliet Schor, a sociologist and economist at Boston College, is tracking organizations around the world as they experiment with a four-day week. “Employers are realizing that if they can rethink where people work, they can also rethink how many days they’re at work,” he said in a TED talk this year.
Among workers who switched to four days, she said, the percentage who slept less than 7 hours each night dropped from 42.6% to 14.5%, and they logged 7.58 hours of sleep per night, nearly a full hour more than before. the change.
“I wasn’t surprised that people slept a little more, but I was surprised by the robustness of the changes,” Schor told Bloomberg.
In survey results released last month by the 4 Day Week campaign in the UK, 46% of respondents said their business productivity had “remained around the same level”, while 34% reported that it was “slightly improved” and 15% said that it did. has “significantly improved”.
Remote work yes, 4 days a week no
But skeptics remain, and the four-day week isn’t for everyone, including companies that have otherwise shown flexibility by embracing remote work. FleetCor Technologies, for example, allows certain employees to work from anywhere or use a hybrid model, which it says has not led to a drop in productivity, according to TechTarget.
But the Atlanta-based company, which processes workforce payments, isn’t envisioning a four-day work week. “Our customers need us seven days a week,” Chief Human Resources Officer Crystal Williams told TechTarget.
In Congress, progressive California lawmaker Mark Takano introduced the 32-Hour Workweek Act in July. The legislation would not penalize companies for not adopting the four-day work week, but would incentivize them to do so, as they would have to pay workers overtime after 32 hours.
“There is economic, political and social upheaval,” he said News from New York In March Americans don’t “want to go back to the same normal.”
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