Every few weeks, another tech titan promises to give us our time back. Jamie Dimon says a shorter work week is coming. Elon Musk says AI will make work optional, like a hobby we’ll only do when we feel like it. Bill Gates is even predicting two-day work weeks. Translation: Five-day weekends.
It all sounds amazing…but there’s just one problem: we don’t actually need AI to have a shorter workweek. The research proving it’s already possible – and beneficial – has been sitting in front of us for over a decade. Bestselling author and journalist Joanne Lipman has been tracking the disconnect and wrote about it recently in this buzzy New York Times piece.
Lipman joined the HerMoney Podcast to dig into what’s standing in the way of a shorter workweek – and when change could eventually come.
MIXED SIGNALS FROM THE CORNER OFFICE
Ironically, while executives are promising shorter workweeks in public, many of them are demanding more hours, more output, more everything from their employees in private.
In other words, the same men predicting our AI-powered leisure future are the same ones demanding everyone back in the office, five days a week. Musk has said 40 hours is the minimum to have any impact at work; you really need to be there 80. Dimon has been vocal about no remote work, full stop.
“Leaders generally have been demanding face time in a way that they are very, very reluctant to give up,” Lipman says. “And these leaders are almost all men. We know that for women, for people of color, for people with disabilities…having flexibility in the workplace is so important and allows many of those people to actually participate in the workforce.”
THE RECEIPTS ARE IN: SHORTER WEEKS CAN WORK
Research shows that in many cases, a shorter work week isn’t just possible – it’s better.
The first big trial ran in Iceland back in 2015. Productivity held steady or improved, and employee satisfaction soared. Since then, similar trials in New Zealand, Japan, Australia, and Brazil have found the same thing.
The biggest trial yet ran in the UK in 2022, covering 61 companies and almost 3,000 employees. Revenue went up. Stress and burnout went down. “We have not seen any studies that have shown the reverse,” Lipman says. “So far, it’s been all positive news.”
SO…WHY ARE WE STILL STUCK AT FIVE DAYS?
If the data’s good and it’s what people actually want, why haven’t shorter workweeks happened? Lipman points to a few culprits.
First, the “ferocious attachment that CEOs have to face time in the office.” Second, we consistently overestimate how much time technology actually saves us.
Lipman remembers typing on a manual typewriter at The Wall Street Journal in the early ’80s, fixing mistakes with scissors and glue. “Theoretically, our workload should have just plunged with the advent of digital tools,” she says. “But instead, journalists’ workloads all have exploded because technology gives us this ability to publish around the clock. And so now we actually spend more hours [working].”
AI is doing the exact same thing. Lipman points to a 200-employee tech firm where introducing AI didn’t reduce work – it intensified it, a phenomenon now dubbed “workload creep.”
And then there’s culture. Lipman says we’re simply a “workaholic nation,” and that’s not something a study or a CEO pledge fixes overnight. “There’s a cultural shift that needs to happen as well,” she says.
THE COMPANIES MAKING IT WORK – AND WHAT IT WILL TAKE TO CATCH ON
A handful of companies – Kickstarter and Thredup among them – have already made the leap to a four-day week since the pandemic. “They’ve seen good results, but they’re small,” she points out.
For this to really take hold, it will likely take one of two things: legislation or a movement. After Lipman’s piece was published, a reader pointed out that while Henry Ford gets the credit for popularizing the five-day, 40-hour workweek, it was actually legislation that made it official.
When it comes to a movement, the UK already has organizations lobbying for and continuing to research the four-day week; the U.S., as Lipman puts it, has only the “inklings” of a culture shift. “This might be one of those cases where it starts somewhere else before it ends up coming here,” she says.
Or, as Lipman explains, the leaders of larger companies – like those saying AI will give us shorter workweeks – will need to step up and start a trend. “It’s a really interesting way of thinking about it,” says Lipman. “Who should be the first mover, and what would it require? If some people are doing it, but not everybody’s doing it, you’re the problem.”
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