My school maths text book set the following problem. If a boat being rowed by four men can cover a mile in 10 minutes how long would it take a 10 men to row the same distance? The assumption being that the more men rowing the faster the boat would travel. Yet clearly a boat that could accommodate 40 rowers would not go ten times faster than a boat with 4 rowers and cover the distance in a tenth of the time.
It may seem logical that the more rowers you have the faster the boat will go but in reality it’s clearly not the case. The same was true of working hours. Logically the more hours a worker works the more they produced. Reduce the working day and factories would be less productive. In 1847 Factory owners campaigned against the introduction of the 10 hour day saying it was the last two hours in which they made their profit. It proved not to be the case.
The advocates of the four day working week argue that just as factories benefited from reducing the working day modern companies would benefit from reducing the working week. So far the limited evidence supports the view that a four day week leads to a healthier workforce with less time lost to absenteeism. That employees can accomplish as much in four days as five having more energy and not feeling they have to pace themselves. Employees report feeling more refreshed and ready for work after a three day weekend break. Whilst most organisations are still only trialing the four day week with no guarantee that it will continue they still report that they are having less difficulty filling posts and lower turn over rates with employees reporting they find the idea of a four day week attractive.
Whether these benefits can be sustained as pilot schemes transfer to mainstream only time will tell. If the four day week became the norm in some industries/areas of work then it would no longer serve as a retention and recruitment incentive but early adopters would defiantly have an advantage over more traditional organisations.
If you’re not convinced that a four day week would work may be it’s worth remembering that the early post revolutionary Russian communist party experimented with a longer working week only to abandon it as productivity plummeted. So maybe the opposite is also true. After all there is nothing sacrosanct or scientific about the 5 day working week.
Blair Mcpherson former director author and blogger www.blairmcpherson.co.uk
