Dr. Juliet Schor on How Less Time At Work Makes Us More Productive

Juliet Schor:

One of the really big changes when people go to a five to four week is that their self-reported productivity soars. So what's happening is you have this very connected kind of relationship between feeling on top of your job and your wellbeing. No surprise, people spend a lot of their time at work. Their work really matters to them if they feel better and more productive and more competent at work, they have higher wellbeing.

Karim Morgan Nehdi:

Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Whole Brain at Work Podcast. I'm Karim Morgan Nehdi. I'm a CEO and entrepreneur investor and scientist focused on how thinking impacts organizations and teamwork. And so in my work leading Herrmann and also in building a new startup, Ned.ai, and also in working with thousands of leaders and teams around the world, I've gone pretty deep in understanding the interplay between how we think, how we work together, how we use technology, and especially as it relates to creativity.

Ann Herrmann-Nehdi:

I’m Ann Herrmann-Nehdi, chair and chief thought leader at Herrmann and have been exploring cognitive science for quite a few years as well.

Karim Morgan Nehdi:

Our guest today, Juliet Schor, has studied hundreds of companies implementing this radical shift and most recently published a study tracking more than 2,700 employees across five plus countries. Dr. Juliet Schor is an economist, a professor of sociology at Boston College, and the author of numerous books. The most recent one was Four Days a Week, and her research shows pretty remarkable results. 69% of participants in the four-day workweek experience reduced burnout, and only 10% of companies who tried it out reverted back to five days after one year. Juliet, welcome to the Whole Brain at Work Podcast.

Juliet Schor:

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Karim Morgan Nehdi:

So as I've shared with you, Juliet, and many of our audience members know, here at Herrmann, we've been on our own four-day workweek journey for the past few years. So I'm personally very excited and invested in understanding when this works and when it doesn't. To start us off, tell me what's the most compelling data point that you think convinces skeptics that the four-day workweek isn't just wishful thinking?

Juliet Schor:

So this may not be the answer you want, but it's the one I kept hearing, and then we can go into what's underneath this. But time and again, I was told, "Our company decided to do this because our CEO or somebody else read an article, often in The New York Times, about companies which had been successful." So I think the number one thing is hearing about the experience of other companies. That has been really powerful. I mean, I can come with all my data. And of course, you know why it is that certain kinds of evidence are more compelling to people than others.

So that's the number one. I would say that there are two other pathways and we can get into this there. What we are seeing is two big kinds of effects and companies in each, and then of course, there are hybrids. But one is how much better off employees are. And there are many companies that are concerned about their employee wellbeing and they wanted to do something about it.

The other, a little bit easier to pinpoint is resignations. Part of this research was done during this great resignation in the United States, historically high numbers of quits. And there's some companies who just were like, "We got to do something." They had a mass exodus one month, and then two months later, they're on a four-day workweek.

Karim Morgan Nehdi:

That certainly describes our experience, I believe. I can't remember if it means a New York Times article or otherwise, but I remember coming across the notion of the four-day workweek and it being a eureka moment where I said, "Ah, indeed, this does feel like the right move for us." And I'm really interested in some of the key mediators that you found in the science of the four-day work week. Can you tell us a little bit about those, about things like sleep and fatigue and how those vector in?

Juliet Schor:

Yes. So that also for me and my team has been some of the most fascinating research that we've done and findings that we have. So the first major modeling that we did has been on wellbeing. We have many wellbeing metrics. We actually have about, we have 20 of them, but we took five to start with. We ended up publishing on four just to make it a little more streamlined, but they all go up significantly from the baseline point, which is people on the five-day week, and then six months later, we're looking at them on the four-day. And then we also are looking at 12 months and so forth.

So why are these going up? Why is there less anxiety, less stress, less burnout, more positive emotions, fewer negative, et cetera? So then we do the mediation analysis. And the first group are the things that you're talking about, which is they're the behavioral changes that occur when people have that extra day. So the sleep is really key and fatigue is really key. There's a little bit of an exercise impact, but not as sleep and fatigue. I think that certainly in the US and possibly in other places, there's a chronic sleep deprivation issue in the population, particularly among working people with paid work. So that's the first thing.

And that's maybe not that surprising, right? If you know people are sleep-deprived, you give them an opportunity to sleep more, they feel better. The second piece, I mean, it's great. It's really important. We have collaborators who are doing MRI scans on people also showing how that four-day week people and how their brains are changing and so forth. You're the brain experts. I can't tell you more than that, but they're getting bigger, I think.

But the other thing is the piece of it that really surprised us. So one of the really big changes when people go to a five to four week is that they're self-reported productivity soars. We have a question called, it comes from European Working Conditions Survey, rate your current workability compared to your lifetime best. That goes way up. Rate your productivity, and then we have a smart working scale. These things all rise, but that current workability and productivity really soar.

And that turns out to be absolutely key, a huge mediator for the wellbeing increase. So what's happening is you have this very connected kind of relationship between feeling on top of your job and your wellbeing. No surprise, people spend a lot of their time at work. Their work really matters to them. If they feel better and more productive and more competent at work, they have higher wellbeing.

Ann Herrmann-Nehdi:

Yeah. It's interesting because I know a lot of the previous studies looked at longer work weeks, not the standard work week that you were currently describing. And were you really surprised that you saw the benefits extended to the 40-hour workweek in terms of looking at your research? Because I mean, it seems kind of obvious if you're working the level of crazy hours, but getting it down to the 40-hour workweek, did that surprise you that you saw these benefits extended to this more standard work week?

Juliet Schor:

Yes and no. I would say on the no, I think one thing, and this is how I can give a partial reconciliation to the standard model. The pandemic created a real transformation that in which the old model didn't work. Pre-pandemic, I think it might've been hard to get as much of an impact as we did, but what the pandemic did was it dramatically raised people's stress levels, burnout. It made everything harder. And so the wellbeing possibilities of giving people some time were high.

I mean, that said, it's continuing. We're not really seeing any differences in our 2025 data from our 2022. So it's partly that stress levels have stayed high. And I could be wrong. I mean, there are plenty of companies that did this pre-pandemic and had similar results, but the pandemic, I think there's something that was going on there that made this an even better innovation.

The second part of it is I think that even within the 40-hour week, you had a lot of wasted time, which is a big part of why you get these benefits. Plus, you still had lots of people quitting with the 40-hour week. And they're quitting because for a lot of them, it's burnout. You look at some of the really high quit rate occupations, and then we see these phenomenal results in the studies like nurses, restaurant cooks, and managers, and the whole healthcare sector, they might've been working 40 hours. I mean, a lot of them are working longer, it's true, but not only.

I mean, or we got a lot of nonprofits where the psychological burdens of time rather than the long hours were really key. Some of those companies or organizations I talk about in the book where they're doing really heavy work with global poverty, war, conflict, and they just became really hard for people. They needed a break from that, and the four-day week gave them that.

Karim Morgan Nehdi:

Your research shows that pauses or changes to the four-day workweek to reflect market demands aren't uncommon. And you're an economist. I'm curious, maybe to start off, have you noticed any interesting relationships between the broader economic environment and adoption or retention of the four-day workweek?

Juliet Schor:

Okay. So I guess the first thing I would say is they are rare in the sense that, and you referenced this earlier, 90% of our companies, least one year, so for one year or more, are still on it. It's made it a little bit challenging to analyze the failures because we just don't have that many or the pauses.

I think that you are right. I don't have really good ... It's anecdotal, but we had one part of the world where it seems like the reversion rate to five is a little bit higher, and that was Australasia. And they were going through a particularly bad time when those companies started. It makes sense that this would happen. I think we'll have a better sense of it if we do have a bigger recession, and then we'll see. We try and keep in touch with a lot of these companies, but we'll see if that happens.

We had one company that paused because it was a very small company and half their team was out on parental leave. And it just couldn't work with substitutes and so forth. So I think they said, "We fully plan to go back." I think if employees understand that you're going back to it, I mean, you seem fairly committed to it, it's been there for a couple of years, then it'll be pretty viable to go back. And I think people do understand that when ... You see, the external environment is out of your control. You can't suddenly snap your fingers and get much more business. You can do what you can do, but when it's a macro level phenomenon, it's just things out of your control. So I think people understand that. So I do think external environment can create that.

I mean, that said, most of the reasons that companies reverted in our database are other things. A private equity firm bought up one of our most successful early larger, I mean larger for us, 400 person company and just ended it. It was super successful. "No, that's it. We don't do that."

What are some of the other things? We had some where the implementation was a problem. I go into that one in detail in the book. It's one where they put a small number of people onto the four-day week. I mean, you need to do this organization-wide.

And the other thing, they still want to do it. They had no metrics for figuring out whether it was working or not. And the CEO was a very data-driven person and they were a startup, super rapidly growing. They sell toilet paper. So during the pandemic, everything just exploded and they just hadn't thought through exactly how to do it. They also made it very conditional, but it was really such a small number of people, but they tend to be a little bit idiosyncratic.

This firm, it was for this reason. This one, they just didn't have enough staff and it was a retail establishment. And they wanted to stay open for the five days and they only had three employees or something. We have a few really small firms.

Ann Herrmann-Nehdi:

Well, I'm kind of curious. So if you do need to pause, what is the most effective way for you to make this transition? I mean, do you have any insights on that? I know you don't have a ton who have done this, but what are your thoughts on knowing that you aren't always in control of the external environment, a pause may need to happen? Any thoughts on the most effective way to pull that off and still maintain the trust in the organization and that culture that you've created with the four-day shift?

Juliet Schor:

I'm off the data now because I don't have any data on this. I would think, I would focus on that word you just used, trust. So one thing might be to figure out what would have to happen to get back to it, and rather than just leaving it open-ended. So how much more revenue would we need or how many new clients would we need or whatever it is, whatever metrics have led you to pull back from it, thinking about where you would need to be. So that might be one thing so that people have a concrete sense of there's a plan to get back here. It's not just, "Oh, they're saying we're going to get it back, but who knows?" It also would allow people to have a sense of what they needed to try and make happen. So that might be one idea.

I think another thing to think about that may be in people's minds, because this is what people think about in a downturn, is layoffs. So could you, if you laid off some fraction of your workforce, could you get back on the five-day week? Because what's happened is your revenue has fallen or your number of clients or something like that has fallen. Maybe you have more staff than you need and you could do well at that lower revenue number with a smaller number of staff.

I think maybe figuring that out and being a little more transparent about that could help to alleviate anxiety that might be there in the firm. We have a company, for example, in our database, which is a startup, it was a rapidly growing startup, but they're on those funding cycles. And something got tripped up on one of them and they ended up having a layoff in the midst of their trial, but they kept going with it and it ended up everything worked out for them. They're doing fine.

I mean, layoffs are a complicated thing, but it is a piece of the picture. How many people are at your firm and is it the right number of people? And especially if you feel the four-day week is really important to our success. Are we just postponing the inevitable? I am not sitting here saying that you should lay people off by no means, but it's probably in people's minds. So it's probably something that you want to think about.

And maybe do you feel better keeping 100% of people and working five days? I mean, that's where you're at this point. You'd rather hold onto your people. That makes a lot of sense. How temporary is the downturn? Nobody knows, thinking, trying to forecast and figure out future paths.

Karim Morgan Nehdi:

As you said earlier, if I could just snap my figures and everything would be miraculously solved, then I'd be a snapping machine, man. I'm curious, you've talked about predictors for failure and the implementation of the four-day workweek. Can you talk a little bit about some of the predictors for success?

Juliet Schor:

Okay. So this is a cool point because the answer is, I love this one. So we have a model, a success and failure model, which is measured by reversion at least at one year. And we're running all sorts of things. We have tons of data and nothing is predicting. I mean, there are a few things, but basically, no.

And normally researchers don't like that, but I was big smile on my face because it meant it just so many different conditions can lead to success with this. So didn't matter what country you're in, didn't matter what the time period was, didn't matter what your industry is, didn't matter how large or small you are. It doesn't matter if you're remote, in person, hybrid, doesn't matter how burned out folks are. I mean, almost nothing is predicting it. So that's great, I think, because that means they're like all roads leading to Rome here. Just there are lots of company types who can succeed with this.

That said, we can talk about the sort of two archetypal company type, four-day week types that I identified and talk about in the book. I think that there are those two main pathways, and then you've got the hybrid folks in between. So I think it works for many types of companies. However, it's also true that certain types of companies have been much more likely to do it. And the main thing there is white collar.

So we have finance and firms like yours. We have a lot of PR. We have tech firms. We have a much smaller number of manufacturing, construction, retail. I mean, retail, of course, in a lot of countries, there's hardly any full-time work in retail, so you wouldn't expect it as much. We are seeing more and more in the service sector, in healthcare, in other kinds of social services. That brings me back to those two archetypes, which I can get into.

So I think the basic answer to your question is, I mean, I think it can work for everyone. There's one category that I talk about in the book where I think it's harder, which is certain kinds of manufacturing companies which are very globally exposed to competition and have already done a lot of optimization. So those firms that are on the frontier, it's harder, but we're also in an environment in which the technology is changing so much that, whether it's AI or robotics, gives us an opportunity to reduce hours of work.

So I think that those companies can do it too as their productivity increases through these new technologies. But it's a little bit different than a company that with no change in technology basically needs to change its meeting structure and teach people focus. And where it's really easy or that the Parkinson's Law example that I talked about earlier, that PR guy. And for him, it was almost seamless because they just had so much wasted time and they didn't really have to do a lot of heavy lifting to figure it out. Whereas other companies, they really go through rigorous processes trying to figure out where they can save, shave minutes off and so forth.

Karim Morgan Nehdi:

I'm curious, how do you see AI and automation intersecting with the four-day workweek movement over let's call it the next decade?

Juliet Schor:

Yeah, I love this question because this is our next big research focus. We're trying to write some grant proposals for this now. So there's some survey evidence and just thinking of what we know about the landscape of the four-day-week companies and also the five days.

One of the things we're seeing ... So the bottom line is we expect that four-day-week companies will have higher rates of AI adoption and more proficient use of AI. And there are two reasons. One is there's a lot of employee resistance and skepticism or reticence about AI at this point in the workplace. There's a lot of studies on that and more and more coming out. And of course, I mean, there's the fact that we're not seeing the kind of productivity improvements that people predict. It's still early.

But we think in a four-day week, people believe more in their employers. They are more loyal to their firms and they are less worried about layoffs. We think that's one of the reasons people are resistant to AI because if a machine can do your job, is your employer going to lay you off? Four-day-week companies, people feel like their employers have given them an incredible gift and they feel grateful and loyal.

And we can talk more about that, but there's a key basic economic dynamic at work here, which is what we call the employment rant, but it's basically the value of the job to the worker compared to other available opportunities. And those are almost all five-day weeks.

So we think more adoption because of the employee side. But the other reason is there's more of a time constraint back to the forcing function. When you're only there for four days, the possibility that AI can save you time, it's even more valuable. That's our view about it.

Then there's at the social level, as someone who's been studying work time since the 1980s and has really promoted it as a mechanism for maintaining employment, I just think it's so crucial that we not have AI lead us to mass unemployment and the inability to hire people and keep people in work. And it's wise that these business leaders are predicting not just a four-day week. You've got some of them predicting a three and a half or a three-day week because it's the logical development to reduce hours of work when you have a massive productivity boom.

Ann Herrmann-Nehdi:

I was curious about, and I think that it's right to look at this as an opportunity. It really is an opportunity for people to understand how these two things come together, AI adoption and the four-day workweek. But I'm also very curious about how widespread adoption of the four-day workweek could be a driver of gender equity, or are there hidden ways it could backfire on us? Just looking at that whole dynamic there. I'm just curious if you have an opinion on that.

Juliet Schor:

Yeah, not just an opinion, but we also have research, a lot of research results. We have questions directly on this where we look at the share of household work that people do. And the big backfire you worry about is that women spend that extra day doing housework and childcare.

What we're finding is that male partners actually do more with a four-day week and that women are not taking on a larger share. So we're not seeing those rebound effects or backfire effects.

What we love about it from a gender point of view is we're hearing from many women, and we're seeing this in the data because we collect data on what people do on the off day. Colloquially, I would call it me time, and that's what people call it. It's because many of these women, and especially women with children, and that's we're looking at them, parents and non-parents, but women with children, the thing that's gotten squeezed out of their very busy lives are the me time.

So they have long hours of paid work, long hours of unpaid work, and they just don't have that. So biggest thing that people do on that off day is hobbies and leisure. Personal grooming is another thing. And I love one of my early interviews was, "I can get a pedicure without guilt." Just people, it's important they can go and they can take a nap or whatever.

So what we are seeing is that it improves gender equity. That said, there's a big benefit for men. And in the wellbeing models, once you control for everything, women don't get bigger wellbeing improvements than men, but it looks like they're getting more ... The gender inequities are reducing on things like time use.

Karim Morgan Nehdi:

That's fascinating. I mean, I know my explicit intention when we shifted to the four-day work week was to spend that extra day with my children as much as possible and was one of the most personally gratifying outcomes from that shift for me.

Juliet Schor:

And that's what we're seeing. I mean, men are doing a bit more housework, but the childcare increase is really big. And we have testimonials similar to yours like, "Oh, I can be a father to my new baby daughter."

Karim Morgan Nehdi:

In your research, are there specific implementation considerations or operational levers that most reliably produce a sense of time sufficiency? "I have enough time to do my job," within the constraints of reducing the actual number of hours worked, things like no meeting blocks or shorter standups or async status or any of those kind of moves that you suggest, are there any of those that you think are just most reliably valuable, especially if you start thinking about doing them at scale within large organizations?

Juliet Schor:

Okay. So this is super anecdotal. I mean, for sure you've got saving time with the meetings, but my sense is that the more important thing is that focus time, because I think distractions are so prevalent in workplaces, white collar workplaces today. And what we've heard is that getting rid of the distractions and focusing is really key.

And there's lots of research that would tell us that, that having from Shixima High all the way to the present. So getting into that flow state or just, I mean, one company CEO telling me about how one of the sales team could actually be proactive and not just reactive, and they made so much more money with a proactive sales team, and that was due to the focus time. So I would say focus time.

Karim Morgan Nehdi:

So I guess one last question, Juliet. Are there any big misconceptions about productivity that you feel like your research around the four-day workweek has challenged or maybe debunked?

Juliet Schor:

Most important one is that shorter hours of work lead to less productivity. And we're just, so many companies are telling us either productivity did not fall or productivity went up. I mean, we know that people get more productive per hour when their hours fall. And the people who can sort of, I think anecdotally, the people we hear this historically the most from are parents, especially mothers in the workplace. I mean, so many times I've heard people say, "After I had a kid, I got so much more productive."

Karim Morgan Nehdi:

And that's not just a factor of the denominator being smaller in that case in terms of the numbers of hours worked, right? Is there anything-

Juliet Schor:

No, but no, that people, they would reduce their hours of work, but they would just get everything done in fewer hours.

Karim Morgan Nehdi:

And I guess final question, for our listeners drowning in long work weeks, where should they start?

Juliet Schor:

Read the book. I mean, go to the end of the book. It's also a bit of a guide to ideas about how to get this at your own workplace, so Four Days a Week.

Karim Morgan Nehdi:

Perfect. It's a great book. Highly recommended to our audience. Juliet, thank you so much for sharing your insights and just for a fascinating conversation. Thank you also for really bringing this idea to the world and all that you do to really help us as a society achieve more balance and more productivity.

For our audience, if this conversation sparked something for you, I want to hear about it, share your four-day workweek experience, your productivity revelations, or maybe just the one thing that you're going to stop doing this week to allow yourself to be that little bit more productive.

And remember, every great breakthrough, every great team breakthrough, every great organizational breakthrough starts with someone who's brave enough to think a little bit differently. So whether you're that analytical thinker or that practical thinker, relational or experimental, you have a unique perspective on how work could do better and don't keep it to yourself.

So thanks for joining us. Until next time, keep bringing your whole brain to work.

Ann Herrmann-Nehdi:

That's right. Thank you.

Juliet Schor:

Thank you.

Karim Morgan Nehdi:

Thanks, Juliet.