What the young teach us about work
I was cautious about whether to go down to a four-day work week. The usual reasons: a love of the job; the worry that after 40plus years doing it, I won’t be able to fill in an extra, wide-open day in a credible way; the whiff of mortality that comes from glimpsing the end of the working days.
I took the plunge anyway, because a person can’t toil forever and perhaps it is best to start this process with tentative baby steps rather than cold turkey withdrawal, and also because all this talk about work-life balance had got me thinking.
A year later, I welcome the extra day to refuel between bouts of typing. I have discovered to my relief that I can entertain myself when left to my own devices.
I am happy to also say that I see with greater clarity what the younger generations, who have a different attitude to work than my cohort, are on about.
There was a time, for example, when I would have snorted at the story that Global News recently ran about the latest job trend sweeping the workplace: “bare minimum Mondays,” which encourage workers to do as little work as possible for the first few hours of that day, “in an effort to ease into the workweek and stave off anxious feelings about the week ahead.”
Whiling away the first few hours of a day — doing enough as the Global News story says “just to pass muster” — is good if no deadline beckons, I would have harrumphed.
Besides, the nature of this work, which tends to depend on what is going on, is not the kind to bring on the “Sunday Scaries,” the dread the youngsters feel about the week ahead.
So, a few years ago I would have shaken my head at this whole notion, maybe even muttered a “Jayzus, how pampered kids are today,” as if I spent my life at the pit face rather than the keyboard.
Now, even I realize these are different times.
TRADEOFF
The existential threat from the global pandemic, the U.S. Surgeon General wrote in October, has “sparked a reckoning among many workers who no longer feel that sacrificing their health, family and communities for work is an acceptable trade off.”
Vivek Murthy added, “Today, more and more workers are worried about making ends meet, dealing with chronic stress and struggling to balance the demands of both work and personal lives. The toll on their mental health is growing.”
Not just in the United States, research shows.
A 2021 study conducted by Mental Health Research Canada found that more than one-third of Canadians felt burned out at their jobs, and that only a third of respondents said their company was committed to
a low-stress workplace.
Though experts say the Great Resignation — a buzzword to describe the unprecedented numbers of people who quit their jobs during the pandemic — never materialized here like it did in the United States, data from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives found that 73,000 more people retired in the year ending August 2022 than a year earlier, a 32 per cent increase.
Then there was the survey, also last year, by RBC Insurance, that found onethird of recently retired Canadians retired sooner than planned because of the pandemic, economic uncertainty, inflation, and other factors, while threein-10 pre-retirees intend to change their retirement date because of the pandemic.
CHANGING JOBS
The pandemic’s influence on how we see work is broader still.
A 2022 Microsoft Work Index study found that 52 per cent of Generation Zs and Millennials, both globally and in Canada, said
they’d think about leaving or switching their jobs in the next 12 months especially if their current position prevented them from enjoying their lives.
Meantime, “quiet quitting” — where employees perform their duties according to their work contract, but refuse to go the extra mile — has become viral enough to even hit the financial services sector, home to the country’s most committed worker bees.
Change is coming. A recent survey conducted by the recruitment agency Robert Half Canada found that nine-in-10 senior managers across a variety of Canadian organizations were in favour of “some type of four-day work week.”
In the same survey, 69 per cent of respondents said they expected their employer to make the switch within the next five years.
For some Nova Scotia workers, the dream is already here. Last October, Ecology Action Centre (EAC), along with a collection of other Nova Scotia non-profits, started a ninemonth
pilot project on a four-day work week.
Since then, EAC employees have only worked Mondays to Thursdays, for a total of 30 hours a week.
The goal of the undertaking was “to better support people’s needs, not only as workers, but as humans,” said executive director Maggy Burns.
“We wanted to make a change to help people be less vulnerable to overwork, burnout and turnover, especially given the challenging and important nature of our work.”
Five months in, the response among staff has been overwhelmingly positive, particularly when it comes to better work-life balance.
“We’re also seeing statistically significant results in lower stress and higher job satisfaction,” said Burns.
These things matter, the younger folk are teaching their elders. I suppose we always kind of knew it. It is good, still, to be reminded.