In praise of a 6-hour workday
For about a year, nurses at the Svartedalens retirement home have worked sixhour days on an eight-hour salary.
They are part of an experiment funded by the Swedish government to see if a shorter workday can increase productivity. The conclusion? It does. As with any cultural shift in the workplace, the six-hour day has to prove itself to be more than just humane. For any employer, in Sweden or elsewhere (and perhaps especially in the U.S.), an abridged workweek can’t damage productivity if it’s going to have a chance.
A year’s worth of data from the project, which compares staff at Svartedalens with a control group at a similar facility, showed that 68 nurses who worked six hour days took half as much sick time as those in the control group. And they were 2.8 times less likely to take any time off in a two-week period, said Bengt Lorentzon, a researcher on the project.
Additionally, the nurses were 20 per cent happier and had more energy at work and in their spare time. This al- lowed them to do 64 per cent more activities with elderly residents, one of the metrics researchers used to measure productivity.
Svartedalens is part of a small but growing movement in Europe. The key result of the current Swedish study — that productivity can increase with fewer hours worked — eliminates a major stumbling block to globalizing the shorter work day.
Americans work around 38.6 hours per week, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
They get, on average, fewer than eight paid vacation days a year; only about three-quarters of workers get any paid time off at all, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics.
“The Swedish model will not be easily accepted in the U.S. because we are a nation of workaholics,” said Pramila Rao, an associate professor of human resource management at Marymount University.