A couple of incidents this week reminded me how reluctant we humans are to change.
The first was a chance encounter with an old acquaintance. Mary told me that everyone at her mid-sized non-profit society now works from home. She loves it.
Way back in 1984, I founded Work Well, a small non-profit that promoted family-friendly work schedules. Later, I wrote a 260-page self-help guide, Put Work In Its Place, to assist Work Well clients in other parts of Canada.
Quite a few of our clients were interested in working from home. We helped them to write telecommuting proposals to their employers. Sometimes we would visit their organizations to present what research data then existed on telecommuting, which fairly consistently showed higher productivity, higher job satisfaction, lower absenteeism, lower turnover and reduced overhead costs.
What was fascinating to me was how terrified most organizations were of the idea that their employees could work from home. They’d imagine all sorts of things that could go wrong.
Managers often expressed the need to physically see that their employees were working. We pointed out that lots of employees have learned to look busy at work while doing nothing of value, and that good managers typically monitor employee productivity via some form of output or deliverable.
We’d suggest they use our client in a small-scale six-month trial. If they didn’t like it they could go back to how it had been before. The ‘trial’ also helped deal with employer’s fears of ‘opening the floodgates’; the organization didn’t have to say ‘no’ to other wannabe telecommuters, they could simply say ‘not yet.’
It was like pulling teeth to get most employers to do even a small six-month trial. Often it would take months of talking and meetings before an employer would finally agree to a trial. More than once, organizations would nix even a temporary trial.
When employers did finally allow a trial, within months we’d almost always get feedback to the effect: “This is no big deal - we should have done it years ago.” Sigh.
We helped set up telecommuting programs in a number of Canadian organizations that continued for years and gradually grew in size. A couple were so successful we did case studies of them.
That said, the idea never caught on with most Canadian employers. Most employers were afraid to even give it a try. Which was very frustrating for the staff at Work Well, believe me.
Then COVID came.
During the COVID lockdowns, thousands of employers were forced to have all their employees work from home as the only way to continue operations. It was all fairly chaotic, make-it-up-as-you-go.
Even so, a great many organizations couldn’t help but notice there were significant benefits to productivity and staff morale, and office overhead savings.
Some organizations have gone overnight from making everyone work at the office, to making everyone work from home. (Eventually they’ll notice that not all jobs - or all workers - are suited for telecommuting. The productivity and morale improvements come from better meeting employee needs - not from where they work.)
Even those organizations that wanted their employees back in the office after the lockdowns ended, often are now more open to employees working from home a day or two a week.
I just shook my head, watching all this. Better late than never, I suppose.
My friend Maggi, who, coincidentally, I met at a conference on family-friendly work schedules almost 40 years ago, passed on to me another story of employers (belatedly) overcoming their fear of change.
A British six-month multi-employer trial of the 4-day workweek has just ended. From Zdnet:
“Most of the companies that took part in the world's largest four-day week trial will continue with the experiment. Some 61 companies with around 2,900 workers joined the six-month trial. Now that it's over, 56 companies have opted to extend the four-day week -- and 18 of these firms have made the change permanent.”
It was beneficial to workers:
“The study found that 39% of employees were less stressed after the trial, and 71% had reduced levels of burnout at the end of the trial. Some 54% reported it was easier to balance work with household jobs while 60% found it simpler to combine paid work with care responsibilities, and 62% reported it was easier to combine work with social life. Companies reported a 57% fall in staff departures over the trial period.”
It was also beneficial for employers. Researcher Juliet Schor observes: "We don't have a firm handle on exactly what happened to productivity, but we do know that on a variety of other metrics, whether we're talking about revenue, [workforce] attrition, self-reports of productivity, employee well-being and costs, we had really good results."
The five-day workweek was designed for men with stay-at-home wives. It wasn’t designed for today’s norm of two full-time breadwinner families. That lifestyle is a prescription for stress, burnout, strained marriages and neglected children. That simple fact alone explains why four-day workweeks typically produce happier and more productive employees.
We’ve known all this for a very long time. Juliet Schor’s seminal work The Overworked American catalogued in great detail the problems associated with the five-day workweek way back in 1992.
By the time I wrote my 1993 book Working Harder Isn’t Working: A Detailed Plan for Implementing a Four-Day Workweek in Canada, there was already solid empirical evidence that a four-day workweek typically improves both productivity and employee wellbeing.
What’s taken us so goddamn long? Why hasn’t a four-day workweek been the norm for decades, when it so much better fits the needs of today’s workforce?
Change is scary. We’re very good at imagining everything that could go wrong with a new idea. Sometimes we need a crisis to push us into trying something new - much like what has happened with telecommuting.
I suspect the crisis we need may be just around the corner.
North America has now entered what some observers are calling an economic doom loop.
Record levels of all kinds of debt are creating self-reinforcing problems.
There are now a lot more borrowers than lenders, which is steadily driving up interest rates.
Americans’ credit card debts have never been higher - and now the interest rate charged on that debt is going up.
Whenever a home-owner has to renew their mortgage, it will be at a higher interest rate, which increases their mortgage payments.
Much of the US Government’s bond debt is short-term. As it rolls over, the interest to be paid on the new bonds will be double or triple what is previously was.
America’s Corporations are also deeply indebted. As their debt rolls over those borrowing costs will go up too.
All of that will set off a secondary cascade of economic distresses. I won’t depress you with the gory details.
Best case scenario is we find ourselves ending 2023 in a 2008-style meltdown and recession. Worst case scenario is we find ourselves in a protracted 1930’s style depression.
Early and widespread adoption of a four-day workweek could insure we avoid the latter.
If you lived in the hinterlands of Vancouver and commuted to work an hour each way every day, you’re probably very grateful if you’re now able to work from home. Your workday is two hours shorter. Your commuting costs have disappeared. Your paycheck is unchanged. Lockdowns sucked, but, for you, they had a silver lining.
The coming recession will not be fun. But if you find yourself in a four-day workweek when it’s over, that will at least be some compensation.
It’s not too early to begin talking up the idea of a four-day workweek with your co-workers...
PS: As someone who loves reporting on under-reported stories, it’s hard to resist talking about a whole raft of late-breaking stories. Perhaps, as a compromise, I can point you to others who are doing so.
Excess death and vaccines: Edward Dowd has a free e-book on Amazon that looks at the links between excess deaths and vaccines. Dowd is a former hedge fund manager who’s good at recognizing trends and analysing data. Here’s a teaser: Dowd found a good long-term study that found that, on average, 19 athletes per year worldwide died of heart attacks during sporting events. Since 2021, the world has been seeing up to 90 such events per month.
Nordstream won’t go away: When Seymour Hersh first broke the story of the My Lai massacre in 1970, the US Government denounced it as vicious lies, and implied Hersh was a communist sympathizer. The story nearly disappeared. Several weeks later, an American soldier who had participated in the massacre came forward to be interviewed on national TV. Only then did the story become front-page news. In a recent interview, Hersh predicts something similar will happen with his Nordstream story. When a small group within the US State Department decided to do something so utterly stupid and reckless as blowing up a major piece of infrastructure of a NATO ally, it pissed off a whole lot of very powerful people within the broader US Government. He figures there are those within the US administration who are now determined to get rid of Sullivan, Blinken and Nuland - and that they will find a way to make sure that more comes out on this story soon.
China moves closer to Russia: Not content with pushing America to the brink of war with Russia, the neocons in Washington have also worked very hard to poison America’s relations with China. Those efforts bore fruit today. Zerohedge reports: “China is now pledging to ‘join forces’ with ‘like-minded’ partner Russia to defend national interests.” Gonzalo Lira reports on a Chinese document that indicates that China has now reluctantly decided that America is its enemy, and has begun preparing for war. Larry Johnson gives more details.
So many stories. So little time. I’ll stop there.