The four day work week sounds sexy, but flexible work is the real key to productivity
At a recent talk held at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, University of Southern California economist Joanne Yoong said that the unthinkable nature of the Covid-19 pandemic could destabilise old mental maps of how the world works, prompting a reconsidering of how society is to be organised. Not even the sacred cow of the “five-day work week” has been spared. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, riding on a growing trailblazing reputation, has even suggested that employers implement a four-day week to boost flagging consumption to widespread expert support.
Admittedly, such an idea is not new as arguments for a shorter working week have existed since the 1930s. The British economist John Maynard Keynes once said his grandchildren’s generation would enjoy a 15-hour working week due to labour-saving technologies. Ironically, in a 2015 interview with National Public Radio, Nicholas Humphrey — grandson of Keynes’ sister — said that he was working 15 hours a day. The discussion continues and earlier this year, Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin proposed a four-day work week comprising six-hour days to promote work-life balance and strengthen family ties. But with Covid-19 already disrupting our world beyond recognition, the world is finally sitting up and taking notice. While big name brands such as Shake Shack and Uniqlo have experimented with a four-day work week, Microsoft Japan has been a recent poster child for such a practice. The tech giant saw a 39.9% jump in productivity and reduced demands for days off. When surveyed, 92% of its workers say that they preferred a four-day work week to a standard five-day arrangement.
Even politicians in conservative Singapore have begun debating similar proposals. “I propose moving away from the traditional five-day work week to a four-day work week with the option of working from home on the fifth day, and even having a flexi-hours work model,” said Nominated Member of Parliament Mohamed Irshad recently, though he stopped short at calling for a real four-day arrangement. Singapore’s last modification to its working week was in 2005, when it abolished half-day work on Saturdays. Still, there remains scepticism about the economic effects of such a policy. “Any reduction to the standard 38-hour work week in Australia without a commensurate increase in productivity or a matching reduction in weekly pay would be very damaging for jobs, investment and productivity,” Australian Industry (AI) Group chief Innes Willox told the Sydney Morning Herald recently. Such concerns call into question if Singapore is ready to shave off a day from its working week.
However, the human resource experts that
spoke to expressed doubts that a four-day work week would be a feasible arrangement for Singapore. No country in the world — including New Zealand and Finland — has actually implemented a four-day work week despite the constant buzz. They also questioned whether it would even be the right solution to boosting productivity in the first place, citing insufficient evidence supporting this fact.
Professor Song Zhaoli, associate professor of management and organisation at the National University of Singapore (NUS), is sceptical about the feasibility of a four-day work week as there are too many unanswered questions to make such a scheme feasible in the near future. Evidence supporting the efficacy of a four-day work week is patchy, he tells Assuming that a four-day work week constitutes eight-hour days and worker salaries remaining constant, Song highlights that the wider economy would have to bear a cost to cover the loss of production from the fifth working day. He argues that this would have to come about either in terms of workers experiencing reduced wages, firms paying five days’ worth of wages for four days’ worth of work, or the government using taxpayers monies to subsidise this lost labour. It is debatable, he muses, if any of these stakeholders would be willing to bear these costs.
When asked if productivity gains from worklife balance arising from a four day work week would offset the cost of one less day of work, Song says that there exists little evidence for this aside from speculation and anecdotal reports. In any case, workers may have to take home work; some may even use their extra day off to get an additional job rather than gain the alleged productivity gains by having an extra rest day. And this does not even account for the extra childcare burden that parents will have to undertake if school weeks are shortened to four days.
“There have been some experiments (on a four-day work week) but I don’t believe that these experiments have provided solid evidence. No experiment provides evidence to suggest that four days’ work and three days’ rest will be implementable globally,” Song adds. He compares the hype associated with a four-day work week to universal basic income, where existing experiments are conducted on too small a scale and too short a time frame to yield reliable conclusions as to its effectiveness. Switzerland, supposedly one of Europe’s most advanced economies, famously put a UBI proposal to a referendum in 2016. More than three quarters of voters said no.
Even lengthening work hours to make up for the lost fifth day of work has questionable benefits. After introducing a four-day work week with ten-hour days for civil servants in the US state of Utah, an audit by the state legislature found that instead of a predicted US$3 million ($4.19 million), the scheme had barely saved US$1 million. According to US news site Governing: The Future of States and Localities, the audit also reported a lack of hard evidence on productivity gains, with anecdotal evidence showing mixed results across departments.
As for the famous Microsoft Japan case, Song notes that the tech giant’s staggering 68.2% profit margin and massive valuation makes it an unrepresentative outlier. Businesses with much thinner profit margins and labour shortages may find greater difficulty in implementing a similar policy.
The NUS don even suspects that the experiment may have a political motive, since Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo’s political agenda incidentally includes workplace reforms designed to reduce (or death by overwork, a condition often attributed to Japan’s notorious overtime culture) and bring more women into the workforce.
HR consultant Alin Sneha Abraham from Up! Advisory concurs. She observes that the policy has not been continued by Microsoft Japan fulltime despite its apparent success. “They are quite sensible, you know. If it makes business sense for them they will do it,” she tells
Microsoft Japan’s unwillingness to fully phase in a four-day work week suggests that the success of the experiment has perhaps been overstated.
Song suggests that flexible work arrangements are in fact a more tried and tested way of boosting productivity. “[This finding] has been tested with a lot of evidence, with most people able to provide testimonies,” he says. Abraham concurs, saying that worklife balance is a problem that cannot be solved by a four-day work week, with work hour flexibility based on the needs of individual workers, a better solution that caters to the diverse needs of different people.
“There are people who don’t need a four-day work week. Almost everybody would like flexibility — having the choice is more important,” she argues, citing Australia and New Zealand as countries where differentiated working hours have become the norm. It is not uncommon for workers and employers to negotiate contracts where the former turns up for only four or three days a week for certain jobs functions within industries like healthcare or government service. Firms can thus tap into a new pool of time-strapped talent like working mothers and students.
A study by Willox’s AI Group found that parttime work in Australia (under 35 hours per week) has become more prevalent across all types of employment over several decades, hovering over 30% since 2013. This change has stemmed from more female and older workers entering the workforce following a structural shift towards service jobs in Australia. More promisingly, this has also stemmed from a greater recognition and accommodation of personal circumstances like study, family caregiving and other personal commitments. Of Australian businesses, 85% are willing to use part-time arrangements to retain talent — the highest proportion worldwide.
Abraham notes that Singaporean employers have been less enthusiastic about giving employees a “fair go” than counterparts down under, with most work contracts and pay scales catered only to full-time “nine-to-five” employees. According to a Ministry of Manpower report, part-time workers only comprised 11% of the workforce in 2018, though this represented an increasing trend from just 8.4% in 2009. Meanwhile, the International Workplace Group notes that just 63% of Singaporean workers work remotely at least once a week compared to the global average of 70%.
The Randstad Work Monitor 2018 also found that 76% of workers in Singapore reported that their companies prefer everybody working in the office during business hours compared to 62% in Australia. Slightly less than three out of four Singaporean employees also noted that they would love to work from home or another location but are unable to in their present jobs compared to just 55% of surveyed employees in Australia. Tellingly, only 59% of Singaporean workers preferred working in an office compared to 64% of Australian workers.
Forced remote working from Covid-19, however, may have awakened employers to the benefits of more flexible working arrangements. According to HR firm Robert Half: “If an employee has the ability to work remotely from home, they save time on commute, meaning they may be inclined to start work earlier and finish later. Nearly two-thirds (60%) of HR directors have seen an increase in work productivity, further demonstrating the business benefits of flexible working.” Even better, a Stanford University study led by business professor Nicholas Bloom found that home workers in fact took less sick leave and time off from works than in-office counterparts. Women also stand to benefit from such arrangements, with a study by the University of British Columbia finding that the wage gap between mothers and women without children is narrowed by the presence of flexi-work schemes. Keeping mothers in the workforce is key to breaking the “glass ceiling” as it increases the number of women in the running for top posts.
In the wake of Covid-19, Abraham calls on employers to create an environment where workers feel empowered to ask for flexible work arrangements. Beyond updating HR policies like pay scales and upgrading remote working technology, this also involves making flexible workers feel included in the office through new innovations and occasional face-to-face meetings and social events. This includes keeping flexible workers in the running for promotion so that workers do not see such arrangements as a career obstacle. “If after Covid-19 employers learn how to employ flexible workers that would be a huge battle won for human resource management,” she said in a recent BBC interview. E