Four > five

How many days a week can you stand working?  

Or sit, whatever. I bring this up to say that what you've been hearing about is true - there is a groundswell of support for cutting that nasty 5-day work week into a sweet 4-dayer.

There's a group called 4 Day Week Global who recently ran a trial involving some 33 companies and 900 employees.  For all of them, the old five-day week turned into four, with no cut in pay.

Surprise, surprise! After a six-month trial, 97% of the employees say they did not want to go back to five, and even more surprising, most employers rated the experiment 9 out of 10.

It would seem that, until the pandemic came along and forced us to try different ways of working, we were just content to go along with the ways of the past, but once we found that changes are not necessarily bad, we became amenable to trying them.

The companies participating were in the fields of administration, IT, and telecom. The  researchers mixed it up, with lots of jobs in lots of fields, but it did learn toward tech and white-collar jobs. 

The workers reported less stress, fatigue, insomnia, and burnout, with corresponding improvements in physical and mental health. And here is a key point: they did not have to work more hours for the same pay. Their 40-hour schedules became 32-hour weeks.

And with the realization that they had to continue producing the results they had under the 40-hour week, most reported no problems getting the same amount of work done.

Look at this way: if you have X amount of tasks to get done in Y amount of time, even if you subtract a few hours from that Y, you will still get X done if you're so motivated. And a perk like only having to work four days a week is plenty of motivation, I would think.

We used to think we couldn't function without everyone physically being at the office. We found out otherwise. During the pandemic, if you called your internet service provider with a problem or a request, you were likely to talk to someone working from their home, fulfilling your request. 

The only way you knew about was when you heard a baby crying or a dog howling. Same with other jobs. When something can be done in four days, why take five?

I say change the workplace and change the future!