Are businesses finally starting to question the assumption that more hours at the office equals more value for the customer?
Back in November, I mentioned that the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal both ran articles on the productivity benefits of reduced work hours. Not to be outdone, NPR reported that Microsoft Japan moved to a four-day workweek this summer while increasing productivity by 40%.
Last week the Wall Street Journal hit the topic again. The essay, adapted from a new book by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, adds more anecdotal evidence that reducing work time doesn’t undermine the ability to deliver customer value, and it’s better for workers. As the author points out,
“Making the change [to shorter work hours] spurs staffs to collaborate more effectively, prioritize more ruthlessly, and develop deep respect for one another’s time. Leader gain time to scan the horizon, incubate new ideas, and recover from their weekly pressures.”
Jon Miller of Gemba Academy is skeptical that a four-day workweek is the future of work. Among other issues, he points out that four days is an arbitrary number (Why not three days? Why not two?), and that it seems to apply better to knowledge work than to, say, trucking or construction. As usual, Jon has excellent points, and he might be right.
I don’t know whether four days is the right number either. But what everyone seems to be missing is that reducing weekly work hours (in an office or a factory) is a perfect analog to reducing inventory levels. Just as reducing inventory uncovers problems in a process, reducing hours has the same effect.
A four-day workweek is a forcing function. It reveals the gap between the current condition and the target condition. When people have to work, say, 32 hours instead of the scheduled 30 hours (or 38 instead of 35), workers must confront and resolve those issues that keep them at the office or factory longer than the target time. They have to eliminate the non-value added activities that typically consume large chunks of a worker’s day—think flabby meetings, worthless emails, pointless administrative tasks, unnecessary firefighting, etc.
We have to recognize that more working more hours doesn’t mean creating more value. We have to move beyond the expectation that working nights and weekends is an immutable law of nature.
Let’s expand the kaizen mindset and start looking at the way we consume our only truly non-renewable resource: time.