It’s 10.54am in Auckland on a Thursday morning. I’m sitting at home with a nice cup of coffee and the BBC playing on internet radio. I have a morbid fascination with Brexit. Part of me finds it hilarious to see perfidious Albion shoot itself in the foot and take a hacksaw to its own leg. But being Irish, I know that collateral damage is likely from this process too.
I’m at home on a Thursday morning because my company recently moved to a four-day week. You might have read about it, apparently it has achieved about 180 million hits on the Internet. The owner of our company has been on CNN, Chinese TV and the BBC to press the message that the five-day week is an arbitrary number.
We still get paid the same as when we worked five days and work the same eight hours or so. The idea is simple. Like most people, I don’t get paid for simple attendance at work. I get paid for completing tasks. Nobody ever looked at these tasks to see if they fitted neatly into a forty-hour week. Throughout my 36 years of working in the Financial Services industry I’ve been given tasks and deadlines and told to get on with it. Quite often you can meet these deadlines comfortably and spend the rest of your time in the office talking to workmates about football, reading the paper on the toilet or in my case, writing the bones of a novel while pretending to work in a large American bank.
On occasion the pressure would mount when a project deadline was imminent and I’d work late at night or weekends. But the truth is that when this happened, it mattered not a jot that my contracted hours where 37.5 hours a week. When I was busy, I’d work 80 hours and when I wasn’t busy, well I’ll be honest and say that there were days when I did nothing productive.
Our four-day week recognises the reality of this. We will adapt to the time we’re in the office. Meet our deadlines by reducing water cooler chat and surfing the internet while pretending to work and still put in the extra hours when appropriate. The reality is that for most of us working in the Financial Services industry, we are not head down automatons. We’re effectively firemen. We react to issues like client complaints and looming deadlines like firemen react to a fire. We jump into our trucks and we get it sorted, regardless of how long it takes. And the rest of the time, we play cards and polish the equipment.
Our owner has realised this. When we sat at our desks for five days, we would work at about 50% productivity in weeks when we weren’t busy and at about 140% on the weeks when we were busy. Like the fire service, he knew that staff can only have the energy and enthusiasm to attack the 140% weeks if they were rested and not burned out. As most weeks are 50% weeks, he has figured that we might as well spend a day a week at home. It’s just a reflection of the real world. He knows we’ll be there for him when the 140% weeks kick in. In fact, we’re more likely to do that because we are rested and more bought into the company objectives.
I spent most of my career working for American banks. The expectation (although not the actuality) is that you worked at 110% productivity in normal weeks and lifted this to 140% in the busy ones. The Americans are still fixated on being present. They wanted you at your desk early in the morning and the later you stayed there at night the better. Most people gamed it of course. Leaving a jacket on the back of your chair was a common trick as was disappearing the minute your boss went home.
Of course, many people need to be busy. Their self-worth and ego are tied up in being fully committed to work. These are the people who don’t talk about football or last night’s TV at work, who eat lunch at their desk and make sure that their boss receives an email from them at 9pm. Most of them are well meaning but the truth is that they invent work to make them selves busy. Work expands to fill the time available. If they work 60-hour weeks then their work will expand to fill this.
I lived in Melbourne for seven years and one of my favourite sights was the monument to the 888 movement. This commemorates the introduction of the 8 hours work, 8 hours recreation and 8 hours rest in Melbourne in 1856. Workers fought hard for this right but even after they achieved this, they were still working six days a week. It took another fifty years before the forty-hour week became standard. Ironically, the Financial Service Industry generally sets out a lower expectation of hours in its contracts. In Melbourne, my contract called for me to work thirty-five hours, when in reality I was expected to be present for much longer than this.
The monument demonstrates that what we consider to be the standard working week has been changing over time. Stone Age man worked every waking hour. Christianity brought in the day of rest and for most of the next two thousand years that meant working six days a week. The Victorian working class nudged this down to half days on Saturdays so they could go and watch football in the afternoon.
Somewhere in the twentieth century, five-day weeks became the norm throughout the world. The expectation of output didn’t change from when we worked six days. It won’t change when the rest of the world follows our lead and moves to four-day weeks.
If nothing else, it gives me a chance to get back into blogging, and at least this time, I’m not doing it at my desk while pretending to work.
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