How a four-day working week could benefit everyone
In June 2022, companies and businesses across the UK began trials of a four-day working week with no reduction in pay. The aim was to help employees who may be struggling with their work-life balance and improve productivity. Full-time employees in the UK work two and a half weeks more a year than the average in Europe.
The issue with excessive work hours
If you ask people why they work such long hours, they will cite excessive, competing and/or unrealistic deadlines, too few resources (mainly meaning too few members of staff) and the drive for greater profitability or to manage reduced budgets.
While there is undoubtedly truth in some of these perceptions, people can be their own worst enemies.
Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) sessions often find that clients believe that their work and performance should always maintain a “perfect” standard. For people who think this way, “good enough” is not an option, even when clients or managers are entirely happy with it. Even for those of us not driven by perfectionism, our tendency to focus on things that don’t matter much or to procrastinate, can be part of the problem.
External pressures
Managers and/or clients may be bullying people into working excessively or just pressuring them to do so. By combining these aspects together, you have the worst combination of staff driven to work excessively due to their internal beliefs and organisations that drive staff excessively due through bullying management, excessive focus on profits/cuts or their own fears of clients and losing business.
What does this result in?
The pressures of strenuous working hours can contribute to poor health for the people doing their work, both physically and mentally. The pressures can also result in poor performance due to sick leave and presenteeism – showing up for work but performing at a poor level or barely at all. It can ultimately also lead to poor work.
There have been many studies in recent decades on the impact of excessive work on people’s performance. They show consistently that performance drops off a cliff after a person has worked in the region of 8-10 hours regularly. Fatigue means we slow down and make more mistakes. Concentration levels can go, so we have to keep checking our work and we end up taking two hours to do something that should only take 30 minutes.
Improving productivity at work
The key to improving our health and our work performance is rather scheduling and prioritising. The use of CBT in reducing the working week (by as much as 15-20 hours for people who work extremely long hours), contrary to beliefs and expectations, can improve employee productivity as well as performance.
CBT can be helpful in treating issues related to perfectionism, including the fear of failure and associating self-worth with performance, by replacing flawed beliefs with more realistic ones. It’s highly structured with the aim of finding solutions to problems in a short time frame and helps employees to break down problems into manageable chunks dealt with in steps.
The next step is for organisations to instil cultures and practices to reflect that approach. We don’t necessarily need to reduce the week to four days but certainly cutting it to 35-45 hours per week should improve staff health and wellbeing, productivity and performance.
This will, ironically, likely increase organisation profitability due to better performance and productivity by staff.
In partnership with Onebright
Onebright is a personalised on-demand mental healthcare company.
