In the space of two weeks, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal both ran articles on the productivity benefits of reduced work hours. The WSJ introduced us to the workers at Rheingans Digital Enabler in Germany, who only put in five-hour days, for a workweek of 25 hours. The same is true of employees at Tower Paddle Boards (at least during the summer months) and Collins SBA, a financial advisory firm in Australia.
Not to be outdone, NPR reported that Microsoft Japan moved to a four-day workweek this summer while increasing productivity by 40%. Of course, software firm 37 Signals has been operating four-day work weeks over the summer since 2008. And New Zealand-based Perpetual Guardian believes in the four-day week so strongly that the founder created a non-profit to promote it. Indeed, a recent survey by the Society of Human Resource Management indicates that fifteen percent of companies offer a 32-hour workweek.
Unfortunately, companies in the lean community don’t seem to take much note of, or try to copy these experiments, probably because the benefits aren’t reflected on the income statement or balance sheet. Overtime expense isn’t a major concern when many office workers are on salary. There’s also no scrap, no defects, and no late deliveries to erode financial performance.
Cynics might attribute the productivity gains as a demonstration of Parkinson’s Law, which states that work fills the time available for its completion. There’s certainly some truth to that argument. But that simplistic analysis ignores the way in which reducing working hours is very much in keeping with lean thinking.
The classic Toyota metaphor about lowering the water level to reveal the rocks is typically used in relation to manufacturing. By lowering kanban levels, Toyota reduces work in process inventory. This reveals problems as they arise, and forces workers to confront and resolve problems in real time.
These companies are really doing the same thing: they’re reducing the critical resource available to knowledge workers—in this case, time—which forces them to work differently. The only way for them to deliver the same value in fewer hours is to eliminate the non-value added activities that typically consume large chunks of a worker’s day—think flabby meetings, worthless emails, pointless administrative tasks, unnecessary firefighting, etc.
Rheingans Digital Enabler’s approach is to ban social media during work hours, make most meetings 15 minutes long, and ask people to keep phones in backpacks. Menlo Innovation carefully schedules software production in predictable two-hour, four-hour, and eight-hour blocks. Cleveland Clinic, as well as the IT department at Nationwide Insurance, use a tiered huddle system to drive problem solving down to the lowest possible level and reduce the need for firefighting.
Of course, every situation is different and will require a different approach. But the reduction in office hours can be the stimulus for creative thinking about how to increase productivity and efficiency. The evidence from the experiments run by the companies in these articles indicates that it’s a fantasy to pretend that an additional eight or 15 hours of work per week will be highly productive.
If nothing else, remember that reducing work hours embodies the principle of respect for people. Humans have a limited capacity for cognitively demanding work—we can only focus for so long before our powers of concentration wane. We need time off to rest and recover. We need time away from work to recharge with friends and family. And that may be the best reason of all to try a shorter work week.