4 Day Week Global: Working at Hybrid Arrangements with the Same Pay for the Same Rate of Pay in a London Public Relations Firm
It wasn’t hard for Samantha Losey, managing director of Unity, a public relations firm in London, to convince her team to work fewer hours for the same paycheck.
Losey said her team has hit its stride after a very difficult journey to convince her board. She said she is 80% sure everyone will keep the routine after November, when the trial ends.
Unity is one of 70 companies in the United Kingdom participating in the trial. For six months starting in June, more than 3,300 employees have worked 80% of their usual hours — for the same rate of pay — in exchange for promising to deliver 100% of their usual work.
The program is being run by the nonprofit organization 4 Day Week Global; Autonomy, a think tank; and the 4 Day Week UK Campaign, in partnership with researchers from Cambridge University, Oxford University and Boston College.
There are new ways of working. Hybrid arrangements are well-established at many companies (even as some C.E.O.s are finding success getting staff back to the office more regularly). Thirty-three of the 33 companies that had a four-day workweek for six months as part of a large-scale study this year said they would not return to a standard schedule. The firms, which together have more than 900 employees, also reported higher revenue and employee productivity. The nonprofit advocacy group that coordinated the pilot programs, called 4 Day Week Global, has signed up dozens of companies to participate in studies next year.
For Gary Conroy, founder and CEO of 5 Squirrels, a skincare product manufacturer on England’s south coast with 13 full-time employees, the new work routine gets “better and better all the time,” he told CNN Business.
Improving the workplace productivity: How many of their employees are having a lot of time to do what they do? Unity, Losey, and Schor
He said that they all have lost a lot of weight. “[The team has] more time to prepare food, [eat] healthily. Lots of people are going to the gym a lot more.”
Losey says her clients and team are happy with their performance so far, and she thinks they are more inspired and creative. The study says that productivity was up and staff said they were feeling a lot better.
While her board is still skeptical about the impact on the business output, Unity’s clients are “desperate” for the experiment to pay off, she said — so they can convince their bosses to adopt the routine in their own workplaces.
Many of us probably already do this in anticipation of the weekend, grinding hard on Thursdays and Fridays so that we aren’t stuck doing work on Saturday or Sunday. A four-day workweek, or a 32-hour workweek in which an employee comes in for five days but for fewer than 8 hours would have a similar effect: less wasted time at work in the service of more personal or leisure time later.
It also makes for happier and healthier employees, Schor said. Many burned out because of the demands of the Pandemic.
How much time does it take to get a job done? An employee’s perspective on a stressful family care worker’s experience in Losey’s office
Americans are not finding two days enough to get them through the weekend. They can’t get all of the family care done, they have to prepare for the work week, and they can’t take their kids to activities. “All of that gets crammed into two days and it’s just not enough.”
She described the first week as “Armageddon,” with too few colleagues available to respond to a client emergency. “I just sat down on the kitchen floor and cried,” she said.
Slowly, the team has adapted, and introduced new habits that have made all the difference. Internal meetings are only capped at 15 minutes and client meetings are 30 minutes. Emails to colleagues are not allowed to exceed more than a quarter of a day’s total emails.
Losey’s staff swears that a traffic light system can reduce distraction in the office. Colleagues have a light on their desk, and set it to green if they are happy to talk, amber if they are busy but available to speak, and red if they do not want to be interrupted.
In order to allow his staff more time to focus on their projects, he has introduced deep work time where the staff can ignore emails, calls or instant messages for two hours each morning and afternoon.
His team has even started unplugging the office phones, as they were too distracting. He stated that clients had initially bothered them but have since responded by sending more emails.
The Road Ahead: Artificial Intelligence can Make Smart Cities More Convenient, More Sustainable, Faster, Better, Less Difficult
Wall Street and venture capitalists are bullish on green tech, too. Bill Gates states in his year end letter that the climate-related R. & D. has grown since the Paris accords. Over the past two years there has been a 70 billion dollar investment in the private capital sector. There are new technologies that can address climate issues. At last year’s DealBook Summit, Larry Fink predicted that venture funding will move into start-ups that are using hard science to tackle the world’s biggest problems. “I believe we will be seeing a transformation of where the money goes,” Fink said. “It’s not going to go to all this stuff that provided us good utility to get food quicker or find a taxi sooner.”
Bots probably won’t take your job — and could make it easier. Fears of technology replacing human workers were raised again in November when a company called OpenAI released an automated writing program. Artificial intelligence experts say that technologies can’t completely replace humans, because of limitations. What the bots can do well is make grunt work easier. One example that went viral shortly after ChatGPT’s release: A Palm Beach doctor posted a video of himself dictating a letter to an insurance company.
There is progress being made in the fight against child poverty. The number of children below the poverty line has plummeted since 1993. As The Times’s Jason DeParle reported in September, “child poverty has fallen in every state, and it has fallen by about the same degree among children who are white, Black, Hispanic and Asian, living with one parent or two, and in native or immigrant households.” The improvements coincide with more generous state and federal subsidies for working families, and changes to welfare laws that make it easier for struggling households to apply for assistance programs.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/24/business/dealbook/optimisim-in-2023.html
Why Do We Live in a World with Machines? The Case of Moderna and Other Robotic Cancer Vaccines: An Introduction for Jill Filipovic
We’re getting closer to cancer vaccines. Researchers have believed for a long time that they could cure cancer in people who were already showing signs of it, by immunizing them. They had made little headway until recently, but results from preliminary studies are giving some doctors hope. Moderna said this month that a skin cancer vaccine performed well in midstage trials. Moderna and other companies are working on vaccines to treat many other types of cancer.
Editor’s Note: Jill Filipovic is a journalist based in New York and author of the book “OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind.” Follow her on Twitter. The opinions expressed are hers alone. You can give your opinion on CNN.
In the last few decades, American work life has undergone a revolution. Many jobs have become desk-bound because of technology. Automation has replaced many forms of manual labor. Working women, once an anomaly, are a standard part of a workforce that is more diverse and better-educated than at any point in American history.
Instead, it seems, technological innovations have just made us more tethered to machines and devices (while machines also threaten to take over our creative works). Why are we doing this to ourselves?
Working Weeks in the Shadow of the Swine Pandemic: Employers in Britain are More Flexible and Flexible than They Used to Be
The working week has been called into question in recent years. During the H1N1 swine flu, millions of workers switched to remote work and saved money and time.
That fear may be overblown. I am a sample size of one, and as a freelancer my hours are all over the place, but I will often at least try to schedule out my week so I am working four full days rather than five (or sometimes seven) partial ones. Creating these boundaries around my working hours means that I am much more focused and efficient; I spend less time perusing social media or doing non-work tasks so that I can enjoy the reward of a free Friday.
We are three years into a pandemic that upended work life (and life-life) as many of us knew it. We are living in a time where out-of-work demands and other forms of family caregiving are more extreme than ever. And we are living in a country that, unlike other nations, provides meager support as its people strive to balance it all: a slim majority of Americans and a strong majority of workers still get health insurance from our employers, there is no universal childcare on offer and we have no guaranteed paid parental leave – let alone enough sick days or vacation that we are empowered to take, even when offered them.
2,900 workers at 61 UK companies worked 80% of their usual hours in exchange for being paid the same as they always were. 4 Day Week Global said that it is the largest number of companies to ever take part in a trial.
The time workers spent looking after their kids increased 27% according to time diaries they kept. By comparison, female participants reported an increase of 13% in childcare.
“It is wonderful to see that we can shift the dial and start to create more balance of care duties in households,” Charlotte Lockhart, founder and managing director of 4DWG, told CNN.
The majority of all workers said they were better able to combine their jobs with caring duties and have a social life.
The women’s experience is generally better than the men’s, with both men and women benefit from the new schedule, according to the chief executive of 4DWG.
Managers and employees who worked in the trial told CNN about how the extra day off had changed their lives, giving them more time to spend with their families and hobbies.
4DWG: How Many Days Have You Been? A Study of 33 Workforces in the United States, Ireland and the United Kingdom
A trial involving almost one thousand workers was conducted across 33 companies, most of which were based in the United States and Ireland.
That experiment was even more successful: none of the 27 companies that responded to 4DWG’s survey said they were leaning towards or planning on returning to their former five-day routine.