Shorter workweek good for companies

For about a year, nurses at the Svartedalens retirement home have worked six-hour days on an eight-hour salary. They're 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, 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.

Less surprising was that the nurses were 20% happier and had more energy at work and in their spare time. This allowed them to do 64% 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. Sweden has dabbled with shorter workdays before: from 1989 to 2005, homecare-services workers in one Swedish municipality had a six-hour workday, but it was abolished due to a lack of data.

The Svartedalens experiment is designed to avoid that. "This trial is very, very clean because it's just one homogenous group of workers," said Lorentzon.

In Sweden's private sector, the practice is taking root in places such as Toyota service centres in Gothenburg. In the UK, a marketing agency adopted a staggered schedule to allow for reduced work hours while ensuring coverage; a survey last month found that six out of 10 bosses agreed that cutting hours would raise productivity.

The key result of the Swedish study - that productivity can increase with fewer hours worked - eliminates a major stumbling block to globalising the shorter workday. "The six-hour work week has not been well accepted in many countries because organisations are worried productivity might fall," said Pramila Rao, an associate professor of human resource management at Marymount University in the US.

Even with such results, it's unlikely the US will soon shift to shorter days. Americans work around 38.6 hours a week, according to the Organisation 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 US Bureau of Labour and Statistics.

"In many companies today, you still see that mentality that you have to be in the office," said Carol Sladek, work-life consulting lead at Aon Hewitt. "Reducing the workday is very foreign to our overall values."

John Maynard Keynes didn't think so. He predicted technological progress would lead to shorter weeks and abundant leisure time; a 15-hour workweek should be the norm by 2030. This was echoed by Herman Kahn, who in the '60s said Americans would one day have 13 weeks of vacation and a four-day workweek.

Any link between hours worked and productivity was shown to be weak in a 2014 paper from Stanford University.

The research found a "nonlinear" relationship between hours worked and output: results start to slide around the 50-hour-a-week mark. In fact, too much work can damage productivity. People who feel overworked said they made more mistakes at work, according to a study by the Families and Work Institute.

Research has found that workers who have control over their schedules report lower levels of stress, burnout and higher job satisfaction.

"Employees would rather have more time off, but ... giving a little control is a good substitute," said Sladek. "We're like toddlers: as long as we have control over our environment, we feel good."