Why a four-day week could work in any industry

Wednesday, 22 January 2020

Founder and managing director Andrew Barnes said there was no downside to introducing the four-day week.

OPINION: During the New Zealand autumn of 2019 I visited Wellington, the country's centre of government, to discuss the four-day working week with a member of Parliament.

On the waiting room couch I was joined by someone who was there to see another MP.

We exchanged pleasantries, and he enquired about the reason for my visit.

Andrew Barnes, founder of NZ's largest corporate trustee company Perpetual Guardian, has become the leader of a movement calling for companies to move to four day working weeks.

When I explained the productivity week concept, he gave me a sceptical look and asked, 'Do you think it's applicable to every business?'

* Here's where you can have a four-day work week

* Perpetual Guardian makes four-day week permanent

* Working four-day weeks for five days' pay? Research shows it pays off**

'Yes,' I said.

He leaned back on the couch and was silent. After about a minute, he turned to me again.

'Well, how would it work in dairy? After all, cows need milking twice a day!'

I was nonplussed, having never much considered the daily routines of cattle, but I recognised this response for what it was. Instinctively, he had searched his mind for proof the concept is flawed; the one thing that shows it can't work.

To the sceptic, the four-day week is provocative, even bizarre.

Naturally, they draw on their own experience and preconceptions to form an argument against it.

Larger herds are managed by fewer people in the dairy industry, and yet the idea that technology could allow for four-day working weeks on farms strikes some as bizarre.

But let's return to the example of dairy, to which change has already come. A hundred years ago, we had smaller herds, with more farmhands to feed, milk and care for the animals. As industrialised farming developed through the twentieth century, milking equipment was mechanised and vehicles and other machinery grew more sophisticated and efficient, so herd sizes grew but the complement of farm workers shrank.

With scientific advances, feed and husbandry have improved and milk yields have risen accordingly. Now we are in an age of full automation and constant reinvention, with apps and drone-based technology refining farming protocols, pioneering concepts such as A2 milk raising the bar on yields and profits, and the demand for labour declining still further.

All this means higher output on a per-capita basis, so there is no reason why the operations of an efficient, highly automated farm could not adapt to a shift-based four-day week which maintains profitability and improves the quality of life of those on the land.

I have to pose these questions to the sceptics: Why, after years of advancements in technology and process, would innovation cease now? Does the five-day week, the nine to five, the relentless slog through rush hour represent the pinnacle of everyday commercial endeavour? Is there nothing we can do better?

Oddly enough, we may have been unintentionally doing the right thing all along.

In the study of work, an oft-referenced prediction is that of John Maynard Keynes, who said in 1930 that with the rise of automation, humans would work only 15 hours per week.

On the face of it, he was way off-base, not least because he could scarcely have foreseen the spillage, mostly through digital connectivity, of working hours into private life.

Many experts predicted a bountiful leisure dividend from accessible and inexpensive technology. Quite the opposite, at least in most industries in developed countries, has been delivered.

Look closer, though, and was Keynes wrong?

He was thinking about productivity when he made his prediction, which itself came in a time when measurements of output were easier to access given most countries had a predominantly industrial base.

Perhaps Perhaps Keynes would be unsurprised to learn of the two studies which catalysed the four-day week story – the UK and Canadian researchers who attempted to determine the actual output of office workers.

Remember, the estimated productive time was between 1.5 and 2.5 hours a day, and according to another study a loftier (but still low) 2 hours and 53 minutes – making for a true work week of around 14.5 hours maximum. On the evidence that the rest of the time spent at work is largely 'filler' – drawn-out meetings, personal calls, social media browsing and break-room chats – it looks like Keynes was on to something.

The data shows that productive work is coalescing at almost exactly the level he predicted, and most hours 'at work' are in the mode of leisure, 'busywork' and general time-wasting to meet the standard 40 (or more) hours expected by employers.

The 15-hour phenomenon is not surprising given the failure of the construct of the working week to keep pace with the changing impact of technology on work.

In previous industrial eras, work comprised mostly of physical labour and craftsmanship; today's worker is more than likely doing tasks using a computer or mobile device. Scrupulous attention to productive tasks is difficult to maintain, and output is harder to measure than it would have been for, say, a coal miner.

This very mode of work, coupled with the constant interferences and interruptions of tech devices and busy workplaces, encourages distractions and impedes productivity.

* Andrew Barnes is the founder of perpetual Guardian, which trialled and adopted a four-day working week without losing productivity. This article is an extract from his book The 4 Day Week.