Who is popular today?

Paolo Kernahan
ARE YOU sure you want to institutionalise the three-day weekend?
The fact that a company on a small Caribbean island is embracing the four-day work week is significant.
Trinidadian architecture firm FORM is showing good form in its rationalisation of the move. The company cites better work-life balance and mental health for employees thereby boosting productivity as key objectives. Also among the referenced benefits were reduced energy usage and opportunities for continuing professional development.
If someone wants to update their skills or add to their professional quiver of expertise, finding the time and energy to do that after being ground to a fine powder during the conventional work week can be tricky. Hopefully, the media can check in with FORM, perhaps a year later, to see how its grand experiment is going.
I have always believed that employees with a better quality of life produce better quality work; provided you have the right employees to begin with.
The five-day work week (six for many) as we know it is a construct of relatively recent vintage. American industrialist Henry Ford is credited with pioneering the 40-hour work week. He believed workers would put in more effort during their shifts in exchange for additional leisure time.
Few people today appreciate that the structured workday began in earnest during the Industrial Revolution, which spanned the mid-18th to the early 20th centuries. People back then often clocked six-day, 70-hour work weeks. Life expectancy was abysmally low; if you died at 40 you were considered old.
Nearly all the factory labour that defined those eras has since been usurped by mechanisation and office work. Notwithstanding evolutions in technology, economies and concepts of production, the way productivity is harvested from human hosts hasn’t changed that much.
Still, several countries in Europe are test-driving the four-day work week. In Belgium, the right to a four-day work week with no pay cut has been legislated. Employees can apply for the privilege where they work and it’s granted on a case-by-case basis. However, the way it’s applied varies from one workplace to the next. Some companies in Belgium give workers the option of working four days but making up the “lost day” with longer hours; that’s either a fair compromise or a non-starter depending on the individual.
Japan, notorious for overworking citizens and office hours pushing 10 pm, is trialling the concept.
For the most part, however, the “shortened” work week remains an outlier notion around the world. High-profile entrepreneurs and tech innovators like Jeff Bezos abhor the idea of work-life balance as an aspiration. He prefers work-life harmony, suggesting that if you can find your work fulfilling this will enhance the quality of your personal life; yin and yang.
This is, of course, nonsense. Amazon fulfilment centres aren’t that kind of fulfilment.
Entrepreneurs and economists get this wrong all the time – we aren’t all careerists. Some people just want a job that enables them to live a decent, meaningful life. Some people get their satisfaction from family, humanitarian work, or whatever pursuits float their boat.
Such people are neither lazy nor unambitious. I have a friend who worked very hard to raise two well-adjusted children, who went on to have their successes – that’s as good an ambition as any.
Conversations about the four-day work week force us to confront some ignored truths about conventions of employment.
Not long after we’re born, humans are herded into a five-day-a-week education system. That’s a significant chunk out of our developmental years. Then it’s on to secondary school and university, all in preparation to work for 50 years of our lives. By retirement, our most vibrant years are behind us.
Moreover, the average lifespan of a human being is just over 70 years. After having worked for 80-90 per cent of our waking lives, many of us have just ten years or less before we go into the dirt. If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to live out those years without the chronic illnesses accumulated during a life of stress-filled work.
Puts a different complexion on work-life balance, doesn’t it?
Many employers still equate productivity with clocked hours, rather than what’s done within those hours. Perhaps if we were more results-focused rather than systems-oriented as a species, the idea of a four-day work week wouldn’t seem as outlandish as it does to so many.
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