BBC 全球服务 一周工作四天是未来的工作吗？

If you look at what the World Health Organization says,

regularly working long hours raises the risk of stroke, of heart disease and even premature death.

Japan, E.G., has such a

strong culture of overwork that they even have a term for death by overwork A I'm Hannah, and this is what in the world?

The forecast for all of your news trends and talking points from

the BBC World Service. What if every week we could have three mornings of lions instead of two?

The four day work week is being trialed across the world, and for some people, it feels like they're finally hitting snoozed on the burnout.

A recent study found that people who work four days instead of five say that they feel more productive and they feel better and happier working fewer hours.

But does this actually work in practice for every type of job and in every culture?

And if the results are so clear, then why aren't we doing it already?

Well, here in the studio with me to rate this down is the bbc's global health reporter, sophia Bettiza.

Hello, welcome. Hi. Why do we even work five days in the 1st place?

Something that a lot of people are probably asking.

It just feels like a routine that we've got ourselves into.

Yeah? And a lot of people don't question it, right?

But it's, it's sort of only been the case for the last hundred years.

Before that, people actually used to work six or even seven days a week.

Yeah, it was worse. So what happened is that at the beginning of the 20th century, factory workers started demanding shorter hours, and that's how the five day week came about.

And it was then popularized by big companies like Ford, which actually realized that if they gave people two days off, they would come back more productive.

But if you think about it, 100 years ago, we were a society mostly based on agriculture, on factory workers, and things have changed massively, and yet working hours have stayed essentially the same.

That's really interesting. If if there can be changed from seven or six to five, then maybe they can actually be changed from from five to four.

And you have been speaking to researchers in campaigners who have been trying to make this happen, and there have been all of these trials.

How do they work? The four day week is based on the principle that's called 180 100.

So what that means is that you work for 100% of the pay, but only 80% of the time, as long as you keep up 100% of your productivity, right?

Um. And the key here is that it's not, it's not about crumming in five days worth of work into force.

It's not about doing really long hours.

And actually what's interesting is that research says that that's actually because that has an opposite effect.

So that makes that leads to stress, to burn out.

So it's not about that. It's about working smarter and cutting ways.

So e.g. shorter meetings, fewer meetings, better use of technology.

And what campaigners for the Four Day Week are saying is that, with AI now automating a lot of our tasks, this is a really good time.

And like now, more than ever, it is really possible to achieve that 180 100 goal.

And there was a study at this What did they find?

So the study is the biggest of its kind.

So essentially, researchers from Boston College looked at 141 companies that decided to trial the four day week.

And they looked, so this was across multiple countries, the U-S, canada, the UK, australia, new Zealand And Island.

And what they looked at is for components, they looked at job satisfaction, burn out, physical health and mental health.

And they found that overwhelmingly, people reported being happier, being more satisfied and being sort of more better are their jobs when they switched to a four day week.

And what's interesting is that the trial is over now, but about 90% of the people that took part decided to keep doing it, and the companies let them.

Yeah, that's amazing, cause I would have thought that was one of the big barriers to this bosses wanting things, not wanting change.

So we say, um, but the countries you mentioned?

1st of all, they're all Western countries, something we should probably talk about a little bit.

And the 2nd thing is that in this study, people, it was self reported, right?

So people might have just said that they they were just as productive.

Because, I mean, what would you say?

I would like a four day work week.

I'm really productive. I could do five episodes of the podcast in four days.

Just give me a chance. Um, well, that's the thing.

The result of research has got came from employees.

So there is a chance that they might have exaggerated the benefits because they wanted that extra day off.

And honestly, I mean, I don't blame them, right?

And then the other thing is that all the companies that took part in the trial, they did it voluntarily.

So I think when you talk about a barrier being bosses who are skeptical, clearly they were already kind of open minded and thinking about this idea.

And then the other thing, as you said, precisely this sort of trial took part only in Western country, so it doesn't really take into account how developed a country is, or what work culture looks like in that country.

e.g., if you take Africa, a lot of people in many African countries work in the informal sector, in mining.

And so I mean, then nowhere near this sort of conversation were all of the companies that trout this out, where they kind

of standard office jobs, quite flexible ones, not really.

They were all. It was mostly office jobs, but it was also, uh restaurants, e.g.

or cash actors. It was a bit of a mix, but it is easier to implement this in an office job.

The size of a company also matters, so e.g.

a startup that employs 20 people for them, it's a lot easier to decide to try and work, you know, four days a week.

But if you've got a big corporation with offices around the world, different departments, different time zones, a bit like the BBC, it's really difficult, and it will definitely not look the same for everybody.

So there are limitations to this.

You've been speaking to people in the companies that have done some of these trials, what do they say?

How do they find it? Yes, I wanted to speak to some employers who could have said to me that they implemented it and it worked.

And I spoke to Charles, who uh is from South Africa and runs a counciling center in Cape Town, and he said that for him, implementing the four day week was like it changed everything.

He was managing a staff of 56 people, psychologists, who worked at a university of 30000 people.

They were severely burned out, to be cooling in, sick all the time.

They found it really difficult because, I mean, south Africa is one of the countries that ranks at the bottom when it comes to mental health, so they were constantly exposed to other people's trauma, and, you know, they were really struggling.

So he decided to implement a four day week.

And interestingly, he got a lot of pushback from his employees.

They said, well, this is never going to Yeah, they were like, this is great in theory, but it's never going to work.

But he said that he did, and that the results were phenomenal.

So he said that in the year before the trial, the team logged 51 sick days, and in the year of the four day work week, that dropped just four.

And he said that people had more time to themselves, so they were healthier, they were happier, but he said they were also better at their jobs because they were more focus and they should a lot more empathy in the therapy sessions.

Whether any companies from the trials that said, we tried out it didn't work well, 10% of the companies in the trial decided not to implement it.

So that's some minority, but that number is still there.

It does happen. One example is Microsoft.

So in 2019, microsoft in Japan implemented a four day work week as a trial, and the results were really positive, and in fact, productivity did not drop at all.

But they still decided to bring back the five day week.

So, you know, it is a long process.

How would it work a restaurant or a healthcare job?

It's really hard, and campaigners admit that that's one of the big limitations.

So a hospital, E.G., you can just shut down a hospital three days, but it doesn't mean it's impossible.

So it's, instead of maybe doing four days a week, it's about doing short hours, or re adjusting how you do shift work.

So it is, um, it is possible.

Cause shift work is one of the things that leads to massive burnout, isn't it?

I mean, actually, I think there are studies that show that the way we work isn't actually very good for us.

Yeah, so there's a solid body of research that shows that if you work long hours, that's really bad for your health.

It leads to stress, anxiety, burnout.

But it's more than that. So if you look at what the World Health Organization says, they say that regularly working long hours raises the risk of stroke, of heart disease and even premature death.

And that's what campaigners for the four day Week say.

They say that the way that we work now, five days out of seven is actually bad for our health, And that, you know, when we have more time to ourselves, we are more physically active, we spend more time with our family, with our friends.

And so when we go back to work, we are more focused, we are more energized.

That so it's not only better for our health, but it actually makes us better at our jobs.

They say. They say around the world, people work in very different ways.

And in China, I was reading about the nine, nine, six, which is people working from 09:00 a.m.

till 09:00 p.m. six days a week.

I mean, there are cultures that have it a lot worse off, yeah?

And I think that's a really interesting point, because all the experts I spoke to said that cultural difference is actually the biggest barrier to this, because they are so deeply ingrained into who we are, how we grow up, where we live.

So China, the nine, nine, six culture.

That means people, most people were from 09:00 a.m.

to 09:00 p.m. six days a week.

You've got Japan, E.G. So Japan has such a strong culture of overwork that they even have a term for death by overwork.

Death by people die from over work.

I mean, I think around the world, it happens, but I think Japan just documents

it. So it's not that it happens just in Japan, and that's Harroshi.

People

come in early, leave late, even if they have nothing to do.

It's just how it is. And there are all sorts of benefits that people are not even taking because it looks bad.

E.G., men in Japan

are allowed one year paternity, which is very generous.

Yeah,

most of them don't take it because it looks bad.

There are some countries that already have a fewer working hours, sure to working hours, like France.

I mean, they brought that in years ago.

Yeah. And interestingly, trials for the four day week are happening, or have happened, across the world, not just in places like France or Germany or Spain, but Botswana, the Dominican Republic, brazil, south Africa.

So there's definitely an interest in that.

So if you take Iceland, that's a really good example.

In Iceland now, nine percent of workers have a right to a shorter work week.

What about the money? Though? Businesses might say that having people working few hours makes them less money.

Yes, and I think especially in kind of lower level jobs I was talking about, mining earlier, evidence shows that employers like their priority is not really work as well being, is sort of getting as much as they can out of their employees.

So that's a different conversation. It could argue that when people work less, they are more productive.

There is some evidence that says that you can be even more productive.

But yet, that's another that's another limitation in a customer facing role, e.g., say you work in a supermarket or you're a taxi driver, if you work for your hours, you literally have for your customers, and then you actually bring in less money.

That's a pretty strong argument, isn't it?

That you always think for a self employed, oh, you're self employed.

Yeah, that would be really, really tricky to implement.

I mean, it would take quite a lot of self control, wouldn't it?

Yeah, it's definitely not of one size fits all, it isn't.

I I'm really interested in how this conversation's happening now, because, gosh, not that long ago was the dreadiest covied pandemic, and that changed things for all of us.

I mean, there was, you know, the zoo meetings and working from home, and and now we've got this massive cultural shift that is ai and people who are joining the workforce for the 1st time, or who joined in the last few years, they have very different expectations and priorities.

Absolutely Younger people are questioning more and more than nine to five office base work model.

They have completely different priorities and ideas about what work means and what sort of the purpose of work should be.

So for them, what top of the agenda is work life balance?

You know, across the world, one of the 1st questions that Jensie um job seekers ask is what the working hours are, and whether there's options to do remote work.

So that's a really interesting share.

And in Japan, you know, we were talking about Japan and how the culture of overwork is deeply ingrained.

Now a younger men are taking paternity leave more so about 30 %.

Ah, which is still quite low.

But if you think about the fact that it used to be zero a few years ago, so there is a change there.

And what's interesting though to me, is that it's not just younger workers.

Was this global study that came out earlier this year, which showed that, for the 1st time ever, um work life balance out ranks pay when it comes to sort of what the top priority for your job should be.

And that's not just Janzi, it's millennials, its Boomers, its gen X.

So we are, I think, seeing a change across generations when it comes to what people think the priorities should be when it comes to their careers.

It's a fear. Thank you so much.

Thanks for heaven me. That's it for me today.

But if you like this episode, please do subscribe and share and check out some of our other episodes.

I'm Hannah. This is What in the World from the BBC World Service.

We'll see you next time.

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