Reevaluating Our Weekly Schedule

Welcome to summer.

            This long weekend when we honor our fallen military men and women and gather with friends and families is the unofficial start to the summer season.

            Memorial Day has always been my favorite holiday. It usually marks the first cookout of the season. Baseball is in full swing. And if the weather cooperates it is usually the first time we get to take a dip to cool off in a pool, lake, or at the beach. It is a weekend filled with possibility as we envision the coming summer’s adventures.

            And for those of us who still work for a living, Memorial Day weekend brings the added bonus of the first long weekend of the summer followed by the first short workweek of the summer. It gives us an extra day to tend to errands, to tend to our homes, and to tend to ourselves.

            Consider how great it would be though if every week was a long weekend followed by a short workweek. The five-day workweek is an artificial construct. There is no law that says a person needs to work five days to get paid a full-time wage. There is no law that says that forty hours constitutes a full-time work week. There is no legal requirement that in order gain valuable workplace benefits like health insurance, vacation days, and retirement benefits, that you must work five days and forty hours a week.

            And here’s a dirty little secret for you, lots of folks who hold full-time jobs are already working fewer than forty hours and fewer than five days a week. And the world has not ended.

            For decades police and firefighters have worked schedules that call for working fewer than five days a week. In fact, federal law acknowledges these different schedules and has modified overtime rules to adjust to the differences. While typically an employee must work forty hours in a workweek to gain overtime premium pay, federal law allows for exceptions for public safety workers who do not work a typical five-day, forty-hour workweek.

            Lots of experiments have been done over the last decade to see how working fewer hours and fewer days at the same rate of pay would affect productivity, employer culture, and employee lives. All the reviews have been positive.

            Well, of course you might say, workers would love it. But employers wouldn’t. You would be wrong.

            In study after study, employers found that because workers were more satisfied with their personal lives by working fewer days, they showed up for work on time, they called out less, and they remained with their companies for longer periods of time. They were more satisfied with their jobs and get this, their productivity improved. More got done in less time. And these results were across the board.

            Because of the higher productivity, improved mental and physical health of employees, and a lower use of sick days, employer costs for things like health care, and lost time declined dramatically. Employee retention skyrocketed.

            Making the move to a four-day workweek requires planning and probably some experimentation. But every study suggests that doing so is good for workers and good for the company bottom line. This weekend as you enjoy your Monday by the grill, think about how great it would be if every Monday were like this.