Moving towards a six-hour work day

Sweden shows the way

With this in mind, Sweden is moving towards a standard six-hour work day with businesses across the country having already implemented the change, and a retirement home embarking on a year-long experiment to compare the costs and benefits of a shorter working day.

“I think the eight-hour work day is not as effective as one would think. To stay focused on a specific work task for eight hours is a huge challenge. In order to cope, we mix in things and pauses to make the work day more endurable. At the same time, we are having it hard to manage our private life outside of work,” Linus Feldt, CEO of Stockholm-based app developer Filimundus, told Adele Peters at Fast Company.

Filimundus switched to a six-hour day last year, and Feldt says their staff hasn’t looked back. “We want to spend more time with our families, we want to learn new things or exercise more. I wanted to see if there could be a way to mix these things,” he said.

To cope with the significant cut in working hours, Feldt says the staff is asked to stay off social media and other distractions while at work and meetings are kept to a minimum. “My impression now is that it is easier to focus more intensely on the work that needs to be done and you have the stamina to do it and still have energy left when leaving the office,” he told Fast Company.

Getting more done

The thinking behind the move is that because the working day has been condensed, the staff will be more motivated and have more energy to get more done in a shorter period of time. Feldt reports that not only has productivity stayed the same, there are less staff conflicts because people are happier and better rested.

Back in February, a Svartedalens retirement home in Gothenburg implemented a six-hour work day for their nurses with no changes to wage, and will be running the experiment till the end of 2016 to figure out if the high cost of hiring 14 new staff members to cover the lost hours is worth the improvements to patient care and employee morale.

A study published in The Lancet last month analysed data from 25 studies, which monitored health of over 600,000 people from the US, Europe and Australia for up to eight and a half years, found that people who worked 55 hours a week had a 33 per cent greater risk of having a stroke than people who worked a 35 to 40-hour week, and a 13 per cent increased risk of developing coronary heart disease, while a separate study found that working 49-hour weeks was associated with lower mental health, particularly in women.

Source: www.sciencealert.com