How Working Less Will Revolutionise the Way Your Company Gets Things Done

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What do you think about the four-day working week? Author Alex Soojung-Kim Pang shares his insights about this idea which he tackles in length in his book Shorter.

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Topics Discussed in this Episode:

The answer to the question “What can working moms do in order to get more rest?”
Challenging the assumptions about work and overwork
How bad is overwork
What some companies are doing to implement the four-day working week
Redesigning the workday
What drives businesses to move to the four-day working week
The risk of burnout
The impact of moving to a four-day week to businesses and the wellbeing of employees

Key Takeaways:

Many of the problems we face in building more rest in our lives are structural rather than personal. This is not merely a question of self-help or life advice.
The answer to the question “What can working moms do in order to get more rest?” is not just personal routines. What they need are structural changes.
Overwork is as bad a public health problem as smoking. It affects as many people, and both the long-term and short-term impacts on people’s health and happiness are just as great.
Research shows that most employees — thanks to a combination of poorly-run meetings, technology distractions, multi-tasking — lose about two hours of productive work time every day.
The road to a shorter workweek begins at the top with a founder to a charismatic CEO saying, “We’re going to do this.” But all the work of figuring out how to make it happen is done by the employees themselves.

Action Steps:

Recognize that the norms about how we work are not hard and fast structure. There are things that we can break down and put together in better and more effective ways.
Learn from people who are already doing four-day weeks to make your own work more pleasant and more productive.
Look at the way you work now (or the way work is done in your workplace) and keep a mental list of what changes you think you could make if you had a blank sheet of paper and a four-day schedule.

Alex said:

“In a lot of companies, there are separate initiatives to deal with the recruitment challenge or the work-life balance challenge or the flexible work thing or the sustainability thing. The four-day week is actually a great way to solve all of these problems at once.”

“When you have the opportunity to redesign your job, you really want to redesign it in ways so that your job doesn’t get harder at the end of the day.”

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What are your thoughts on overworking? Jump on to social media and let us know what you think or email me at leanne@bodyshotperformance.com

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Links to things mentioned in the show: