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The four-day workweek is once again gaining traction after a large-scale successful pilot program.
Robert Bruno, a labor professor writing a book on how to fix work, isn’t surprised by the results.
He thinks a shorter week and a shorter work day are overdue, and that we’re heading in the right direction.
The hottest work trend right now is working less.
The four-day work-week is once again gaining traction, as yet another pilot program found that workers were less stressed, less burnt out, sleeping better, and companies were bringing in more revenue.
Robert Bruno, a labor professor and director of the Project for Middle Class Renewal at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, isn’t surprised by the results. Bruno is writing a book on the current state of work and how to fix it, called “What Work Is,” based on workers’ experiences.
“If you create work environments where individuals really want to be there and they’re not resentful and they’re not distracted, everyone is going to do far better,” he told Insider.
Bruno thinks it’s time for a shorter workweek — both in hours and days. With so many workers not content in the current state of work, or opting to stay on the sidelines, the curtain has been pulled back on the state of work, he said. Shaking up the workweek, and making it more responsive to what workers actually want, could help ease labor shortages.
“Record levels of workers have stayed out of the labor market, or they’re constantly shifting jobs. And almost always, if you pay close attention, they are speaking to how much control that their working hours had over their life, and they wanted to renegotiate that. They have a different consciousness about it,” Bruno said. In addition to companies in the UK trial seeing revenues up, while workers are better rested, anecdotally, four-day workweeks have boosted retention rates, which saves firms from having to scramble to hire more.
One of the biggest themes that’s come up in Bruno’s research is time — what it means to workers, and how work controls and defines it for them. Many workers are forced to manage their time so that they’re available to work certain hours, while fitting in sleep and personal lives around that. In essence, work schedules control their time.
The harsh reality of the current system is that “the only time that matters is …read more
Source:: Business Insider