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The overworked American by Juliet Shor

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Transcript:

Helen: This week I'm delighted to welcome Joe O'Connor as my guest. Joe is the Director and co-founder of the world's first Centre of Excellence in Work Time Reduction, a global initiative recently launched in partnership with people consultancy Curium Solutions. Joe also heads up Curium Solutions' Canadian operations from Toronto where he currently lives.

Previously as the CEO of 4 Day Week Global, Joe led the design and implementation of four day week trials all over the world, supporting over 200 employers and 10,000 employees to make the transition to reduced hour productivity-focused working.

Before that, Joe spent a year in New York City as a visiting research scholar with Cornell University; he chaired the 4 Day Week Ireland campaign and worked as Director of Campaigning with Ireland's largest public service union. He has managed several successful national political and electoral campaigns and held governance and policy directorships in tertiary education. And during the pandemic, Jo co-founded the Doorstep Market, a voluntary initiative supporting more than 300 small, independent Irish businesses, and encouraging Irish consumers to stay home and shop local.

Welcome to The Business of Being Brilliant, Joe!

Joe: Hi, Helen, pleasure to join you. Thanks for having me.

Helen: Thanks so much for coming on the show. Just before we came on air, I saw in your longer bio that in 2018 you organized a major international conference on the future of working time and I just chuckled to see that because my book's called The Future of Time and categorically I hadn't spotted your conference title while we were debating book titles, but it seems like a nice, nice, happy coincidence there. I know it's a topic we're both deeply interested in.

Joe: Absolutely. Lots of synergy and association there, and I know this is a subject you've been interested in for a long time as well, Helen.

Helen: Yeah, and we'll get very shortly straight into talking about the four day working week and the UK trial that's just concluded.

But just to ease us into the conversation and help listeners get to know you a little, a question I often ask my guests, is to invite you to tell us about a favourite thing you do when you are not at work, outside of your working hours?

Joe: So one thing is definitely walking our two cocker spaniels. We have two lovely doggies that made the trip over to North America with us, which in itself was quite a experience collecting them from cargo at JFK at the back end of the pandemic in 2021. So that's definitely one thing; love doing that. I also have, for an Irish guy, a bit of a strange obsession with North American sports long before I, I moved to this part of the world.

So I like to catch up with the American football, baseball, hockey, you name it. I watch it much to my partner's difficulty, this used to be a thing I used to stay up late at night when I was in Ireland to watch, so it wasn't really a part of her life. But now that we live here, it's on during times of the day that she has to put up with it, unfortunately for her.

Helen: So it's full immersion, much to your satisfaction and sounds like not so much to hers!

Joe: It works for me. Probably less so for her.

Helen: Oh yeah. And I can imagine bringing dogs over to another country, particularly transatlantically in the, well, almost not quite aftermath of the pandemic must have been quite an interesting challenge because it was hard enough to get ourselves from one country to another right? So taking dogs as well must have definitely complicated things.

J

oe: Yeah, it seemed like it was going to be straightforward when we started looking into it. It used to be the case that you could check them in as excess baggage, and it was relatively inexpensive, seemed to be pretty straightforward. But they changed the policies about a month before we left, which meant that they had to be effectively checked in as cargo. It meant there was an agent involved in Ireland, a broker involved here, and honestly, we went to pick them up from this industrial estate close to the airport and it was like a scene out of the Sopranos. We had to give someone a a cash envelope to pick up the dogs. It was a strange, strange experience, I have to say.

Helen: It sounds it. Well, well, I hope the dogs found it okay and not too stressful and they've acclimatized well to, to life in Toronto. So let's get on and talk about the four day week because it's been a hot topic. We're recording this about a week before the episode's going to air so over the past week it's really been in the headlines a lot because the UK's six month pilot with over 60 organizations has just concluded and the results have been very, very positive. Companies that have participated have seen their revenue go up 35% compared to previous years, employee turnover drop by just under 60%, and employees saying they feel significantly less stressed and with lower levels of burnout and improvements in physical health. So that all sounds super encouraging.

Can we start by going to the basics and just hearing you explain, for people perhaps that haven't been following the news, what is the four day working week and how is that different to what people might think of normally in terms of a four day working week part-time pattern?

Joe: So the model that very much I've worked on over the last number of years since I first got interested in this subject back in 2018 is very much around work time reduction for the same pay, but with a commitment to maintaining the same level of productivity. And that's something which has obviously been borne out by the results, but for a lot of people, seems very counterintuitive.

How can you produce the same amount, or in many cases, even better outcomes in less time? And I think it really harks back to, to something that really motivated and inspired me in getting interested in this subject, which is this idea of Parkinson's law. This idea that a task expands to fill the time that's available for its completion.

And what we've seen with a lot of the leaders and organizations that we've worked with over the years is that often when you use the four day week as a forcing function to really take a hard look under the bonnet of your organization and of your business to figure out how can we become more efficient? How can we become much more prescriptive in terms of how we spend our time? What ends up happening is that the four day week becomes something which is not just a conversation about the number of hours that people are working, but there's a much more fundamental conversation about the way in which we work.

So we've seen companies who have really used this as an opportunity to streamline their processes, to make their operations more efficient, change their work practices, and in turn, they've been successful in being able to maintain their performance, their productivity and really succeed in, in pulling off this, this major organizational transformation without compromising their business priorities.

Helen: Okay. That's a great overview and already people are probably hearing the benefits to individuals and, and to employers on that. So with the four day week, it's a 100% of pay for 80% of the employees' time. So no, as you said, no, no pay reduction for the individual. And still 100% hopefully or more of what they were performing or delivering before.

A couple of nuts and bolts questions about it. So with this four day week model, does the whole business run for just four days a week or does it operate five days a week and some employees work four of those five days and other employees might work other four of those five days?

Joe: So we often say that the four day week is very much not a one size fits all model, and its critics often try to position it as this rigid structure, when in reality it's very much something that's very flexible in its application.

So the answer to your question is 'it depends'. So if we were advising, for example, a marketing or an advertising agency where most of their work is very much geared around producing a certain output for their clients within a certain timeframe and really the work is very much project based, it's, it's only time sensitive in terms of needing to get delivered to the right standard on time, and it doesn't require a huge amount of availability day to day; it doesn't require immediate responsiveness. Then we would probably say in that organization, they might be better off having a universal day off, having a single day off for the entire company. Because what it means is it maximizes the length of time that their people have to collaborate with each other and to create value. So in other words, structuring it and coordinating it in that way would make sense for that business.

However, if you were a business with a significant customer service support or retail dimension, where a huge part of your value is around providing service coverage five days a week, in some cases, maybe even six or seven days a week, then of course in that scenario, everyone having Friday off or everyone having Monday off isn't going to be workable.

So there it's about devising a schedule or a roster that makes sure you can maintain that service coverage throughout the work week. And not only can this depend or vary between organization to organization, industry to industry, particularly when you're talking about larger companies, this is something that can actually differentiate between department to department where one model might work better for some functional groups and a different model might be more appropriate for others.

Helen: Okay, that makes sense and, indeed, I had heard and read, some of the critics say, well, this is imposing a one size fits all model on the workforce. We'll come onto that perhaps again, a little bit later.

So another question is, how do you define success of a transition to a four day working week? Does that vary as well by the business? I shared some of the statistics around employee wellbeing and one business statistic around revenue increase, but there's obviously got to be something in it for the employer as well as for the employees. So how do organizations define success around this transition?

Joe: Sure, you're absolutely right, it depends on the individual business. So revenue is something that can be measured in a pretty standardized way from company to company, regardless of whether you're a software firm or a brewery. But the reality is that if you look at the diversity of companies involved in those trials, measuring productivity in the same way on a like-for-like basis was just not going to be possible.

So we worked with individual companies to help them define what were the most appropriate productivity metrics for their business to measure? Generally speaking, we would advise for businesses that had relatively sharp performance and productivity measures already in place that were well understood, well communicated within their organization, that actually sticking with those, because generally your business objectives on a four day week are going to be the same as your business objectives on a five day week.

So the conditionality and the measurement of this is really critical. It's a really central component to this because, I mentioned earlier using this as a forcing function to find inefficiencies within your business; I think the other really powerful dimension that's at play with the four day week is the psychological one. It's the behavioral one.

And it's this idea that, if framed correctly and if positioned correctly within your business, this can really align the objectives and the targets of the business very powerfully with the individual interests of employees. Because let's not forget, this is something that is just so life-changing, so transformative for people individually within their lives, whether it's giving them extra time to spend with family, caring for elderly relatives, childcare, learning new skills, endeavours, spending more time on hobbies, whatever it is that, that people use that extra time. It really holds such value for people that people are very focused and motivated to meet those goals and meet those targets so that the policy can be sustained. So measurement is really central and critical to this.

Helen: Yes and I love what you say around the alignment of interests and the benefits to employer and employee. And it makes me wonder, if an organization is looking to adopt the four day working week, do they ever then encounter in the early stages unhappiness or objections from employees?

For example, employees who might already be working on a four day week schedule, but for less pay and now they're seeing their full-time colleagues shift to four day week without losing pay and I imagine there's a adjustment that needs to be made in that case or perhaps from employees that might be, I don't know, in certain roles where it's really difficult, because of the nature of their work, for them to adopt a four day pattern as well. Is it always going to be possible for everyone in an organization to work a four day week? Can you talk to a couple of those kinds of practical obstacles that organizations might need to work through?

Joe: Sure. Well, let's take the part-time question first. This is something we spoke about Helen when we had a conversation in advance of this where one of the things that really drew me to this topic all the way back in, in 2018 when I first became involved, was some research that I did in Ireland that suggested there was a huge volume of working parents, predominantly women, whose experience was that they had moved to shorter work weeks, often four day weeks, for work-life balance, for childcare reasons, often coming back off maternity leave. And they were doing it for less pay, for 80% salary.

But their experience often was that their responsibilities in the job, their expectations, their their output, it was pretty much the same as what it was when they were on the five day week, which I think harks back to the Parkinson's law theory.

So what we've seen with organizations who have moved to shorter work weeks is that they take one of a number of different approaches with part-time workers. Either they apply a pro-rata reduction in hours to part-time workers; so in other words, people, for example, who are on 80% would have a further reduction in hours. But we also have seen some organizations, particularly with people who are already on a four day week, equalize their salary up to a hundred percent. In other words, acknowledging that once four day weeks become the new full-time, that those people should effectively be treated as full-time workers for the purposes of salary.

And I think your point is correct: the four day week as we think of it now, this idea of, in the same way that today, the five day week is the most common work arrangement, the most standard work arrangement across the economy. It's the benchmark. The five day, nine to five, is the benchmark that we often compare work models against, but it's not the only one. So even people like me who are advocating for this idea of the four day week becoming the new normal, I'm in no way arguing that absolutely every individual in every company and every industry will work a four day, nine to five.

So part of what we're trying to do at the Work Time Reduction Centre of Excellence is applying the practices and principles that we've been able to successfully support companies to move to four day weeks with, to a whole range of other different versions of work time reduction. And I think the key thing is within organizations is to make sure that whatever set or range of policies you implement, that it feels fair and it feels like people have, even if it's not the exact same flexible model, that people feel that they're accessing the benefit in some way.

Helen: Yeah, that makes sense. So I guess part of the things that you need to do really well when preparing for this is to take a really good change management lens at it and look at the different audiences that will have a response to this or will be impacted by it and say, how might this feel to them? What might their questions and concerns be and what might we need to address to make it feel fair and a good thing for them? And there might be certain groups in your employee population that you do have to put something additional in place for, make some adjustments for, or adapt your messaging quite specifically so that it does feel equitable to everybody.

Joe: Absolutely. There's a, a marine science company in Cork who I worked with last year who have moved to a shorter work week, but obviously had to put in a different structure for people who were physically on ships and were working a couple of weeks on, a couple of weeks off. That was obviously going to, to need to be a very different solution to that of the rest of the workforce.

But you know there are always solutions and often what we do with organizations at the beginning of this process is we do a diagnostic which really looks at how ready is the organization to move for shorter work week? What are the particular issues and challenges that they might have culturally, operationally, process wise?

Sometimes those issues and challenges are of the kind that you could address as part of a planning or preparation phase for moving to a shorter work week. And sometimes they can be a little bit more fundamental, or actually they need to do some pretty significant operational excellence work before they're in a position to contemplate moving to a shorter working week.

And that also allows us to assess and understand the pros and cons of different models of work time reduction and again, how they might apply within different parts of the business. And as I said, sometimes there can be, particularly with larger organizations, some variance between how you implement this across different functional groups and departments.

Helen: Yeah. Okay. I understand that. And I guess there are stepping stones, right, on the way to implementing whatever the ultimate chosen solution is, and some organizations will be more ready to make a wholesale shift to working patterns and working hours, and others, as you say, will need to do some more operational efficiency work or perhaps automating some tasks, stuff like that, before they can really shift the model wholesale. Is that right?

Joe: Yeah, I think if you had asked me this question back in 2019, I probably would've taken a much more purist research and advocacy view in saying, we already have the productive capacity and the technological tools at our disposal to move to a shorter work week in, in most industries and most settings across the economy.

And while I think, I would still argue in general terms that that is the case, one thing that really has has been a learning for me was a huge amount of companies in these trials over the last year who've moved to what we would define as the gold standard four day, 32 hour work week, where often they had already implemented some of these steps along the road in advance. So nine day fortnights, flexible Fridays, half day Fridays. They had done a lot of these things really to generate buy-in and to increase confidence within their organization that they could actually take that step to a four day work week. So I think part of what we're really trying to do now is to look at if you take the profile of companies that have been involved in these trials and experiments over the last year, they are largely small to medium sized businesses with quite flat organizational structures where, in terms of decision making, often once the founder or the CEO says, I'm bought into this, they can make it happen.

Whereas if you're talking about an organization with a much more bureaucratic decision making structure, a transformation project to a shorter working week probably looks more like a 12 to 24 month roadmap than it does a a six month trial. And I think really acknowledging that and putting in place the infrastructure to support that is something that we're really keen on doing.

Helen: Yeah, I think that'll be really exciting when we start to see bigger, more household names, multi-country organizations start to talk openly about more innovative models of working instead of just tinkering around the edges of what's been the longstanding model of work for a long time.

So you've mentioned some of the other variations that organizations can consider as stepping stones or as long-term solutions. I've also heard of organizations moving to gasp, a seven day working week, ie giving employees complete flexibility over how they spread their hours across the working week.

I know a six hour day across five working days is another option that organizations look at. I'm curious to hear your views, particularly on the former, just saying, well, let's stop differentiating between weekends and weekdays and let our employees make it work best for them.

Joe: Helen, I hate it because it has two fundamental problems. The first is that it's such a heavily individualized approach and it, it reminds me a lot of unlimited paid time off which is probably more common here in North America than it is in Europe. But as a policy, most of the people I've spoken to of their experience of this have said that while it can complement other policies relatively well, when you've got unlimited paid time off as the answer to all of your workplace flexibility problems, what ends up happening is it's so uneven in its application. In different departments, depending on how different managers perceive the policy, how they feel about it, how they implement it, depending on, as an individual, are the other members of your team availing of the unlimited paid time and therefore, do you feel empowered and enabled to actually make use of it to the same extent? People are concerned about how will this impact my perception in the organization, career progression?

So I, I think that, that when you have something that's so individualized or is completely left up to the individual, first of all, it's very uneven an application, but secondly it means that from a change perspective, individual policies will lead to individual behavioural change. So in other words, if you think about the four day work week, sure there are efficiency and productivity gains to be made from people maybe spending less time browsing social media or people doing their life administration tasks like booking healthcare appointments on their scheduled day off rather than during the work.

But does that make up 20% worth of efficiency and productivity? Absolutely not. I don't think there's any evidence to suggest that.

The things that really move the needle are collective structural things. No one person can decide we're going to redesign the way my team or my organization does meetings. So my view is, is that if your incentive structure is really individualised, the response from people will be very individualized as well. Whereas if you've got a collective policy like the four day week that really throws everyone in at the deep end together to figure it out, you get a collective response. It increases collaboration, it increases engagement, and it gets better outcomes.

Helen: I would completely agree with that because otherwise we're missing that alignment piece you talked about earlier. And in my experience, the best way to come up with really effective ways of working is to figure that out collaboratively with teams who actually do the work day in, day out, and to give them a lot more freedom in thinking about what could be possible and trialing it and learning from it. And then, deciding, okay, what are we going to keep, what are we going to ditch? So, yeah, that makes sense. So, so you're not rushing to advise clients on unlimited paid time off or weekend working and anything like!

Okay. Well, thanks so much for talking us through the four day week and generally different models of reduced working time.

Let's chat a little bit more about you and your career specifically. And in the introduction, I gave a quick flavour of the different fields and industries you've worked in and the different kinds of roles you've had. What, across all of that, do you look for in a role and what makes you want to stay in an organization?

Joe: I think it's a sense that I'm making a difference and that I'm contributing to broader change. I'm probably quite an impatient leader in that I constantly need to work a little bit on celebrating successes rather than moving on to the next thing really, really quickly.

And, and so as a result, I tend to look for things that I'm not just sustaining success, but instead, looking for new ways to really bring about long-lasting change. And my career has taken a lot of different turns. My academic background was in accountancy, business innovation and strategy. I ended up spending a long time in campaigns, communications, advocacy roles probably brought about by the fact that I spent a lot of time in the students union; was elected to the National Studients Union President in Ireland back in 2013, which probably gave me a lot of exposure to different worldviews and, and meant that, when I eventually left college, I was looking for something maybe a little bit different than I would've been looking for if I had just immediately graduated straight out of my degree and entered the workforce.

But yeah, I've gone from most of my work on this subject to be research and advocacy based to most of my time now is spent working directly with companies, supporting them to make change. And that's been an incredible experience because the kinds of leaders that tend to do this, at least at this really early adapter stage of something that I think is going to continue to grow and grow, and the kinds of companies that do it, the leaders tend to be very brave; the companies tend to be very innovative. So getting the opportunity to be exposed to that dynamism has been really an incredible experience.

Helen: Yeah. And that's great that you are able to focus on those kinds of organizations. I know from my own consulting career, I spent 15 years as a management consultant working with all kinds of public and private sector organizations, that making organizational change happen is hard for lots of reasons. It can be really rewarding, but it can be quite exhausting and feel like pushing water uphill for 90% of the time. But one of the biggest difficulties we used to run into was that there wasn't real leadership consensus about making that particular change happen. And a lot of seeing change and people as primarily risk to be managed rather than opportunities to be excited about in terms of creating change. So, if I could have selected a subset of clients and organizations to work with. I would definitely put committed CEOs and organizations up for change at the top of the list!

Joe: For sure. Which isn't to say though that, I'm really motivated now when you think about the conversation we had earlier about you were saying, these bigger companies starting to move in this direction, and of course there are examples. We see Unilever in Australasia have implemented this in New Zealand and now expanded it to Australia.

We've seen some bigger companies like KPMG have done Summer Fridays here in Canada. Adam Bank, a number of companies in the UK who are a little bit larger. But I think for the most part, as I said, it has been very much a movement driven by small to medium sized companies.

I often say there are a few of us who have experienced helping smaller to mid-size businesses move to four day weeks. I don't think there's anyone that could say they have lots of experience moving big companies to shorter work weeks because that right now doesn't exist. So part of what I was really motivated by in setting up this new initiative was the partnership with Curium Solutions because their client base and their work is very much focused on big change projects with larger companies.

So, if I can't offer the experience of working with larger companies to move to four day weeks, then maybe the blend of my experience of doing it with smaller companies and their experience of managing bigger change projects can really be something that can be appealing and that can help to be part of that solution of getting these strategically significant mid-market firms to move in this direction.

Because I think when that happens, it's going to have a really significant competitive ripple effect within those industries. And that will be when the Fortune 500 companies who I think right now are monitoring this, they're watching this, but I think that's really what, what would make them stand up and take notice.

The other thing that I really identified as something that we needed to, to build capacity around was specialist industry expertise. If we're saying that this is not a one size fits all model, then the support infrastructure that we provide shouldn't be one size fits all either.

And that's why we have people like Quinn Ross, who has implemented this in his legal practice here in Ontario and Toronto. He's on our expert advisory board and is very involved in the conversations we're having with people in the legal sector, which are very specific to challenges around billable hours, challenges around overcoming that very particular culture in law which are very different kinds of challenges to that which a tech company or a software company or a not-for-profit might be dealing with.

Helen: Yeah, it's great to hear how you're now focusing on tailoring it to different industries and I wish all the best of luck in moving that work forwards and I agree with you it'll be really exciting when we start to see signs of larger companies taking an interest and part of me wonders how much of that might be driven by their own employees clamoring for this evolution in the world of work.

And coming towards the end of our conversation, is there a particular resource either... might be a conversation that you've had with someone or some good career advice you've had in the past or something that's publicly accessible like a book or a podcast or a talk that's been particularly helpful to you at some point in your career or just generally that listeners might benefit from hearing about?

Joe: I've had the pleasure over the past couple of years to collaborate with Dr. Julia Shor from Boston College, who's led the research around the trial results. She published a book all the way back in the nineties called The Overworked American which I think is, is a really interesting reference point now to how a lot of the conversations that we've had around the four day week - this is not new stuff. This is something which I think the pandemic has really dislodged some of the societal and cultural norms, and that has meant that we're now able to have this conversation in a very different way. But I really think that it highlights the role that she's had in talking about work time reduction and the benefits around rest, the benefits around productivity for really a number of decades at this point. So I think that's something that maybe people interested in this subject might be interested in taking a look at.

Helen: Great, thank you for the recommendation. I've not heard of it or read it so it's going on my book list and I have read one that sounds a bit similar called Overwhelmed. I think it's 'Work, love and play when no-one has the time' by Brigid Schulte. And that's a really good read as well. So thank you for that, I'll pop a link to that and obviously to your Work Time Reduction Centre of Excellence in the show notes.

And my final question is how can listeners connect with you or follow your work after the podcast if they've enjoyed hearing about it and want to keep in touch?

Joe: So our website is worktimereduction.com and people can find me on LinkedIn, they can find the Work Time Reduction Centre of Excellence on LinkedIn. And we're also both on Twitter there. There was a time when I used to do Instagram and Facebook and other things, but over the last number of years I've tried to keep the social media usage a bit more focused. So yeah, website or LinkedIn is probably the best way.

Helen: Yeah, great. I totally get that being more efficient about our own social media investment of time as well; definitely pays off. Wonderful, thank you, I'll include those links in the show notes, and it's been brilliant talking with you about the four day week generally, about other models of reduced working time that can work successfully in organizations and just hearing about your own career and how you are looking to positively influence the world of work going forward. Thank you so much for joining me and being a brilliant guest!

Joe: No problem. It was a pleasure, Helen. Thanks.