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2014-07-31 07:12:14
By Michelle Goodman
Andrew Bauer needed a way to invigorate his staff working the production line.
I used to have them working up to nine or 10 hours a day, said Bauer, chief
executive officer of Royce Leather in Secaucus, New Jersey, in the US, which
makes wallets, luggage and other leather accessories.
But the longer his employees worked, the more their productivity declined. So
last year, after taking over the company from his father, Bauer cut the workday
of his 15-person assembly line by two to three hours, depending on the
position. Workers still received the standard breaks, including 45 minutes for
lunch.
Bauer s goal was to boost efficiency, not to cut payroll. On the contrary, he
increased the team s compensation by 15%.
Switching to a seven-hour workday paid off: output went up, with the line
churning out 10% to 15% more merchandise each day. Plus, he added, his staff
many of whom have been with the company one to three decades appreciated
getting home earlier.
Shorter workdays have made headlines lately, thanks to Gothenburg, Sweden. On 1
July, the city began a year-long experiment with six-hour days, enlisting a
segment of government employees to work less than their eight-hour-a-day
counterparts, for the same pay.
The hope is that staffers working shorter days will accomplish just as much,
only with more efficiency and less calling in sick. It s a nice idea, but will
it and other efforts to shorten hours in the office work?
The grand productivity experiment
Studies of past attempts by various countries to trim employees workdays have
yielded conflicting results.
Last year, research from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD) reported in The Economist showed that the more people
worked, the more their productivity tapered off.
But South Korean research detailed in the Journal of Happiness Studies last
year found that employees appreciated shorter workdays in theory only. In
practice, researchers found, the country s 2004 workday reduction from 44 hours
to 40 and a declaration of Saturdays as an official day off didn t do much
to improve workers job satisfaction or overall happiness. Instead, having less
time to tackle the same workload increased their stress. The workload, it
turned out, for these already-efficient employees was simply too high to get
done in fewer hours.
And back in 2005, Sweden s Kiruna district council ended a 16-year-run of
mandated six-hour workdays for 250 employees, claiming the programme cost too
much and was too unwieldy to manage. According to the council, managing two
different sets of employee work schedules the six-hour day and the eight-hour
day had grown too complicated. The European news site The Local also reported
that at a similar experiment a hospital in Stockholm created resentment among
employees whose schedules hadn t been reduced.
Whether reduced workdays succeed may have more to do with the type of work
performed, the workload and the managers overseeing it than the country or
company making the change. Part of the problem is that one work schedule won t
necessarily fit all employees or job descriptions, said Cali Williams Yost, a
workplace strategist based in Madison, New Jersey.
In a competitive global economy, I find these one-size-fits-all, strict models
are hard to maintain to the letter, said Williams Yost, author of Tweak It:
Make What Matters to You Happen Every Day.
When shorter workdays don t work
Kenny Kline of MedPreps can vouch for that. In 2012, Kline trimmed the workday
of 20 full-time employees he d hired to write practice questions for medical
certification exams, keeping their salaries intact. The four-month experiment
was a failure.
Giving employees only six hours a day to devise test questions instead of the
customary eight changed the company culture for the worse, said Kline,
co-founder of the St Louis, Missouri-based company, which sells medical exam
preparation materials in the US.
People definitely worked harder and we ended up getting more out of them,
Kline said. But they wouldn t interact with each other at all. And they were a
lot less happy at work.
Without much time for lunch or other breaks, the camaraderie his staff once
enjoyed ground to a halt. What s more, Kline said, employees were too mentally
drained at the end of the day.
People felt a lot more burned out working six hours a day just because of the
intensity, Kline said.
Royce Leather s Bauer can relate to the need for some people to put in more
time to be more productive. At the same time that he reduced his production
team s workday, he gave his 20-person product development and design staff a
pay bump and encouraged them to start working 10 hours a day instead of their
customary eight. The idea was for them to create and collaborate on ideas at a
more leisurely pace.
The time increase has definitely made the office a lot more relaxed, Bauer
said. There s not as much stress, which definitely makes everyone a lot more
productive.
In praise of flexibility
For a shorter workday to succeed, companies have to treat the change in office
hours as a guideline that can be adapted to meet various employee and business
needs, not a rigid rule, Williams Yost said.
For example, she said, What about business that has to get done in time zones
during the hours the workplace is closed? And what of companies who pile 40
hours of work on employees who only have 30 paid hours in which to get the job
done?
For Jody Greenstone Miller, whose 75-person in-house staff includes people who
ve chosen to work 10, 20, 30 or 40 hours a week (for commensurate pay), knowing
how long each assigned task takes is key.
As a manager, you have to make sure people don t work too much, said
Greenstone Miller, chief executive officer and co-founder of Business Talent
Group, a consulting firm with five US offices and clients throughout Europe,
Asia, Australia, North America and South America. Because if they work too
much, they end up being dissatisfied, she said.
Debbie Carreau, chief executive officer and founder of Calgary, Alberta-based
Inspired HR Ltd, agrees. To prevent workweek creep and as an example to the
dozens of Canadian and US companies her human resources firm serves Carreau s
12-person team handles the bulk of their work between 9:00 and 15:00. After
that, the team goes home but stays on call, often fielding emergency messages
one or two hours a night from clients dealing with on-the-job accidents,
performance issues and resignations.
People are not productive after a 37-hour week, Carreau said. More does not
mean better.