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In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, work-life balance has been top of mind, with many workers and businesses actively rethinking and challenging the status quo.

One way that employers worldwide have toyed with business as usual is by testing out the four-day workweek – with studies and campaigns going all in from the UK to Iceland – but there are also other options.

Besides offering some flexibility with remote working (ahem, Elon Musk!?), there are also those wondering if a shorter workday might be a better option.

Working parents/ side-hustlers/ part-time students, you here?

For companies reluctant to close for an extra day every week, indeed, a shorter workday model may be easier to sell.

Some organisational psychologists reckon a shorter day’s work – say, six hours rather than eight – can be hugely beneficial for everyone involved, in terms of both business productivity and worker wellbeing, per the BBC.

The paradigm shift will take time, though. As Celeste Headlee, author of Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving says, “the idea of the eight-hour day is so ingrained in industrialised society”.

Adam Grant, a professor of organisational psychology at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, agrees that “status-quo bias is real”:

“People often take for granted the default that they’ve been raised with. Everyone they knew worked five days a week, and worked eight-hour days. It seems like it’s an inevitability,” he says.

Employers also play a part in the perpetuation of this workday structure, he argues, saying the lack of evolution is a “failure of imagination”. “Instead of actually measuring people’s results, it’s nice and simple to count the number of hours that they’re working, and assume that more is better. That’s an assumption that needs to be shattered.”

Shatter away!

Going home sooner is a dream for many, and science can back up why it could work wonders:

“Cognitively, we really only have a limited amount of focus time per day,” [Headlee] says. “When you are trying to force your brain to focus outside of that window, you’re going to see really diminishing returns, and end up in burnout. You’re going to end up making more errors, you will be less innovative, you’ll miss stuff. And that makes you less efficient.”

Therein lies the crux of the argument; with fewer hours to work, one won’t suffer burnout, be more capable of thinking clearly, and won’t make as many mistakes.

There are a whole host of studies showing how working longer does not necessarily correlate to greater productivity, including from Stanford University.

Both Norway and Denmark have workweeks that come in at under 40 hours and rank second and seventh as the most productive countries in the world.

Replicon also reported on how the six-hour workday trial has been shown to increase efficiency and reduce sick days when implemented, outlining experiments along with the various successes and failures.

Be honest, how many of you go in for your eight-hour shift and only manage around four hours of actual work? A survey of nearly 2 000 workers in the UK showed that on average, people only really feel productive for about half the workday.

Rather than doing a combination of working and wasting time for eight hours straight and ramping up back pain in the process, why not just shorten the working day and get the same, if not better, results?

It makes sense, says Grant, that a condensed schedule would result in increased productivity…

“When you have less time, you start to focus on the things that really matter. That might mean managers assigning less busywork, and it might mean fewer frivolous meetings.”

Of course, there are potential pitfalls to consider and the model is not attainable for all companies, like those that rely on time-zone overlapping to conduct international business or those that have less committed workers and poor management.

There are, however, reasons to believe that a shift to shorter working hours could be closer to reality than it once was.

[sources:bbc&replicon]