Here’s how a six-hour workday actually saves money
new york — In February, after almost two years worth of six-hour workdays, nurses at the Svartedalens elderly care facility in Gothenburg, Sweden went back to eight hour shifts despite recently published research showing the benefits of the shortened workdays.
The City of Gothenburg didn’t extend the experiment in part because funding ran out. It cost about 12 million krona ($1.3 million) to hire the 17 extra staff members needed to fill the gaps created by shorter work hours. The city had only budgeted for two years, and legislators said it would be too expensive to implement the project across the entire municipality.
So, for now, the project has come to an end. Yet, there are longerterm savings the study didn’t take into account. Working shorter hours resulted in healthier workers, researcher Bengt Lorentzon found in a new paper. “They were less tired, less sick, had more energy coming home and more time to do activities,” said Lorentzon.
Specifically, the nurses took fewer sick days than they did when working longer, eight hour days. Nurses at Svartedalen got an average of seven hours of sleep a day versus less than six hours a day for nurses working traditional hours. They also took fewer sick days than nurses in the control group. In fact, they took fewer sick days than nurses across the entire city of Gothenburg. Overall, they took 4.7 per cent fewer sick days over the period of the experiment, while nurses in the control group took 62.5 per cent more sick days over the same time frame. Nurses who worked fewer hours took less unexpected time off, too.
In general, the working population of nurses in Sweden are in worse health than the average Swede. The women in the facility have higher body mass indices than the average worker, for example. While the study didn’t run long enough to fully measure health effects of shorter days, the research indicates nurses working only six hours will experience permanent health benefits, resulting in savings. “The satisfactory blood pressure is slightly lower for nurses at Svartedalens and the reference facility in comparison to the normal value for all professional women,” the study found.
Healthier employees spend half as much on health care, a new study published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings found. Looking at 10,000 employees at a health system in Florida, researchers found that those who were in “ideal” cardiovascular health, using the American Heart Association’s Life’s Simple 7 measurement, spent $4,000 a year less on health care costs than those in “poor” heart health. — Bloomberg