Thoughts on leadership


Matt Baker
Commander, U.S. Coast Guard


Shorter: Work Smarter, Better and Less - a book by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Indulge in a thought experiment for a moment. Imagine that your work is limited to four days a week. For the remaining three days, the office doors and windows are locked tight. Email servers don’t respond, cell phones lose their signal, and intranet pages go blank. Even if you try to jot some notes on a sticky pad, a cosmic force prevents your pen from touching the paper. For three days each week you are completely prevented from exerting any physical or mental energy for your job.

What would the four days you spent at work look like? Could you accomplish what you needed to do? Could your organization accomplish what it needed to do?

How would the rest of your life be different? What would you do with more time at home? Would you be physically healthier? Or mentally stronger?

As chronicled in Dr. Alex Soojung-Kim Pang's new book Shorter: Work Better, Smarter and Less, some innovative companies have already answered these questions. They figured out how to shorten their work weeks. After transforming themselves around the idea of working less, they’ve discovered that they perform better in four working days than they did in five. The book discusses the how and why of the four day week, and I think there are two important lessons in it for leaders. First, even if you don't change to a four day week, thinking carefully about how employees use time can lead to insights that make your workplace better. Second, the amount of time people spend at work is determined by workplace culture, not by the policies or procedures in place. Balance between work and life must be central to the organization's culture, not just an alternative adopted by a few workers.

The first step is to believe it is possible to abandon the status quo

Dr. Soojung-Kim Pang describes several companies that decided to shift to a four day week. In each case, the change was driven by a leader who recognized that a pace of work that doesn’t allow time for life was unsustainable for themselves and their employees. These leaders were not unique in that recognition, but they were in their willingness to overhaul the way they did business to do something about it.

Their strategy to shorten their week focused on two lines of effort. The first was externally focused. Every organization has customers and those customers have expectations. The leaders profiled in Shorter shared that their greatest concern about changing to a four day week was their customers reaction. Clients historically expected the company to be available and responsive at any time. To manage new expectations, leaders were upfront about their planned transition to four days. There were two approaches to managing client engagement. First, some companies told clients they were only available during the four days. Client concerns would need to be communicated during that window. The alternative approach allowed clients to reach out any time as they did previously, but assigned a group of employees to share the responsibility of responding, so that although the company was always available, individual people were only on call for four days. Both approaches were successful.

The bottom line is always performance. Clients were won over to the idea of the four day week only when companies showed they would continue to deliver high quality work. Leaders did find performance benefits to a four day week, so client concerns were addressed. Some of the clients even decided to pursue a four day week for their own employees once they saw how successful others could be in four days. The second line of effort was internally focused. Shifting to a four day week required rethinking the entire way the company worked. One of the book's key lessons is that every facet of our workplace behavior is driven by the assumption that we will work five days or more. Challenging that assumption demands challenging everything that happens at work. Do we need to have so many meetings? Should we have open floor plans to encourage mingling, or closed offices to allow for individual focus? Does the company get more value from focused, creative work by individuals, or from information sharing and collaboration in groups? Whatever the answer to that question is, do current practices align? The answers will be different for every organization but the questions are the same. Someone needs to ask them.

Good ideas even if your organization sticks with five days of work

The rigor of examining your organization's work practices and culture around them is helpful even if you don't pursue a four day week. A bit of self-reflection about long standing habits is always useful. How many recurring meetings are on the team's calendar, pulling unquestioning people away from their work, because Outlook or Google calendar directs them to? The calendar event is an hour long, but could the meeting be completed in half that time if we really tried? Are we spending time on things out of habit or inertia, or are they genuinely productive?

The companies profiled in Shorter also show that a focus on balance is not a retreat from high performance. In this book and his previous book Rest Dr. Soojung-Kim Pang presents evidence that work productivity can actually increase when work time is reduced. People with shorter work hours have more time for physical and mental rest. They can spend more time exercising, engaging in an invigorating hobby, or restoring emotional wellness with friends and family. People who enjoy these benefits do better work than others who are exhausted. Physically and mentally recharged people often accomplish more in four days than exhausted people can do in five.

The performance benefits of a shorter work week lead to what I believe is the most important point in this book. To truly reap the performance benefits of a shorter week and better work-life balance, the organization cannot create a balanced work paradigm as an optional alternative to a traditional full week. If balanced work is only an option, rather than the accepted norm, some people will take it but not all. The cultural norm is likely to remain a full week. Workers who have a family may take the balanced option, but others will stick to the traditional full week. The full week people will likely still be perceived as the dedicated, high performers while the workers who choose the balanced option will be perceived as second-tier. The workforce will be divided into two classes. It is very possible the balanced works will find their contributions undervalued as organizational leaders give preference to the traditional workers. To truly achieve the wellness and performance benefits of work-life balance, leaders must redesign the entire organization around a shorter work week. They must deliberately bookend days and weeks. The cultural norm must be balance. Leaders will know they've succeeded when workers find it unusual for someone to stay late or come in on a day off, instead of our current status quo, when shorter work weeks seem unusual.

Not everyone is in a position to shift their entire workplace to a four day week. But Shorter is a worthwhile read for any leader that can influence the way their followers spend time. It’s worth a read.

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