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Workaholic America vs. laidback Europeans

Since late May different countries, including Canada, started talking about the possibility of turning towards a four-day workweek as a measure that may help the post-COVID 19 economy to get back on track.

Since late May different countries, including Canada, started talking about the possibility of turning towards a four-day workweek as a measure that may help the post-COVID 19 economy to get back on track.

Approaches to switching to a shorter week are different but for the North American ear, the idea, in general, might sound quite radical.

Some European countries like Denmark, Norway, Germany and the Netherlands have been known for their experiments with shorter workweeks. On average people there work about 27 hours and these countries proved to be near the top of the most productive ones. Other places that conducted experiments reducing work hours also saw positive results and a significant increase in productivity.

At the same time, North American culture assumes hard, tireless work, in which citizens are used to having three days off at a time no more than once a month and often don’t really know what to do with vacations longer than two weeks. However, it seems that the unprecedented times we've been experiencing and the new problems we are facing may move the idea of a shorter workweek from the dream category closer towards a new norm in the post-COVID reality.

The talks about a shorter week became more real when New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern introduced these measures as a possible cure for their economy at the end of May. First, I felt that for anyone outside Europe it might be too big of a piece to swallow. But soon I realized that even here people went through much greater changes than this.

The U.S. started switching to 9-5 workdays during Henry Ford’s era, and Canada achieved the contemporary standard of 40-hour workweek only in the 1960s, while Europeans didn’t adopt it until the 1970s. Prior to that, workweeks in most cases varied between 70 to 100 hours.

It is against this background that the switch from 40 to 27 (or even just 35 as it’s suggested in the case of Canada) seems like a relatively minor change. Besides, if it could actually bring the economy back to life while increasing employee satisfaction, company commitment and teamwork, and decreasing the level of stress, as experiments show, it could become just the thing.

There are two main approaches to switching to a shorter workweek: reduction of work hours and compression when the same or slightly shorter hours are fit into four days. There is no universal solution for all spheres, and longer days might be unacceptable in some sectors, while a decreased amount of work hours might not be sufficient for others.

But one way or the other experiments showed that when employees were given more time for their families and hobbies, their work results went up.

Following examples of other countries and particular companies like Microsoft Japan, whose productivity went up 40 per cent when experimenting with reduced workdays, Canada started talking about the possibility of a shorter week. Before COVID-19 arrived, tourism was the fifth-largest sector, with a big chunk of it coming from citizens travelling within the country. It was hit the first and the hardest, with job losses accounting to about 50 per cent in March and April.

Now Ottawa announced significant investments into domestic travel promotion. And even if travelling in Canada will remain relatively expensive, but people have more time, I’m pretty sure they’ll be eager to use the opportunity to explore their own gorgeous country. It definitely won’t be enough to recover the sector, which will keep staggering probably until we find a cure or a vaccine for the virus. But an increase in local travel will help to get it going.

Besides, now more than ever people are open to changes, and the model that we’ve been using for a while might not be perfect, especially keeping in mind the technological progress. (We don’t need to do most things manually anymore, which allows us to get the work done faster and spend more time with families.) Europeans have been cutting their work hours for a while, and the level of happiness and satisfaction (as far as one can measure it), and also productivity and creativity at work kept going up there. Experiments with shorter weeks also allowed to reduce the costs of production and had some other pros to them.

So maybe it’s just the time to make a little step away from traditional American workaholism and get a bit closer to a more laidback lifestyle focusing more on personal interests? And if that may help our economy to recover, it definitely is the price I’m willing to pay.