Sweden is known for its many family-friendly policies that afford employees a good work-life balance. Most employees receive at least 25 vacation days per year, which they are expected to use. When a couple has a baby, the parents are given 480 days of paid parental leave to split between themselves. Most offices empty quickly at the end of the workday, since working extra hours shows you did not make the best use of the workday.
So it wasn't surprising when headlines started sprouting up last autumn that Sweden was instituting a 6-hour workday.In 2015, Svartedalens retirement home in Gothenburg changed 90 nurses from the traditional 8-hour workday to a 6-hour workday, with no reduction in pay. Before the change, employees suffered burn out as was seen in high absenteeism and turnover. This was part of an experiment funded by the Swedish government to see if a shorter workday increased productivity.
After a year, government researchers compared nursing staff at Svartedalens with a control group at a similar facility. The nurses working the 6-hour day took half the amount of sick time as those nurses in the control facility. They were also 2.8 times less likely to take any time off in a two-week period.
Will the experiment be expanded? In Sweden's private sector, the practice is taking root in places such as Toyota service centers in Gothenburg. A handful of other organizations, including some small private companies, have followed suit.
While the Svartedalens experiment shows that shorter hours improve productivity, is it valid to presume office workers would follow the same pattern? The study was able to equate productivity with the quality of care, a metric that doesn't make sense when looking at white-collar workers.
What other changes might be required to make this change in an office environment? The first change would be to ban using social media and taking or making personal phone calls during the workday, since the employees must be productive for all six hours. Then, companies would have to seriously consider the business necessity of every meeting. (Researchers claim meetings take up about 35% of a professional's workday.)
Even with those changes, the increase in productivity would have to be greater than the increased costs of hiring more workers. Svartedalens had to hire an additional 15 nurses to cover the 24-hour day. This cost the facility about $735,000, only half of which was offset by the decrease in sick days and time off.
I wondered if this radical change from the current workday would be viable in the United States. Both cultures are egalitarian, transactional, direct communicators who see time as something they can control, yet most business owners surveyed did not see this as a viable option, even if there were a metric to determine productivity from a knowledge worker.
I don't see the 6-hour workday catching the US by storm. Basically, we're a nation of workaholics who confuse face time in the office with productivity. Many employees proudly pronounce that they do not use their entire vacation allotment. Bragging that you haven't had a vacation in years is seen as a badge of honor. Others are glued to electronic devices in the evening and on weekends, so that they never completely sever the connection with work. What's worse, since many companies mistakenly reward employees for spending long hours at the workplace, the focus remains on hours spent in the office rather than work that gets accomplished.
In Sweden, where most jobs are unionized and there are not wide pay variations, it is easier to conceive of a change to a 6-hour workday. One of the culture essentials is the concept of "lagom" or "just enough". This concept shapes Swedish attitudes and beliefs. People work hard, but not too hard; eat enough, but not too much; and have enough, but not too much. Wanting a harmonious culture, they strive for fairness and equality. Swedes believe that "lagom is best", so they can easily accept working fewer hours but giving total attention to work during those hours.
Many Americans believe there is no such thing as too much. They believe working longer hours correlates to a higher salary, which then leads to a better lifestyle. A culture that grows up on stories of someone going from rags to riches by virtue of their hard work is not likely to see the benefits of a shorter workday.
Were the US to consider such a move, they would first have to put an end to the myths that American office workers take as gospel. Companies would have to extoll the virtues of using all vacation time and implement consequence for employees who did not take sufficient time away from the office. Managers would have to evaluate performance on what was done rather than the time spent doing it. Meetings would need to be shortened and their need evaluated to determine if there were a positive ROI.
Only once the existing work paradigm is changed could the United States consider adopting a shorter workday. Want to learn more about the US? Click below for our webinar !
