TGIT and The Four Day Work Week

The feeling starts early Sunday evening. All the fun, relaxation and care-freeness of the weekend begins to fade. It is replaced by thoughts about your boss, colleagues, clients, expected tasks/interactions and a general disdain for corporate life. Sometimes you even dream of how it would be if you could quit the corporate life and open your own restaurant or bar. Come Monday morning, the blues are still lingering, especially since most of your colleagues look, act and work in a sullen fashion as well.

Right?

Well you’re certainly not alone.

And this experience is not something that is unique to people in the world of large corporations. I work for myself at the moment and I get the Sunday evening/Monday morning blues as well (although the intensity is less than when I worked in a corporate setting). Also , my two and a half year old son tries to convince us every Monday, that it’s actually Sunday and none of us need to go to work/school.

I think one of the major causes for this problem lies in the fact that our lives are too skewed towards work. 5 days of work and 2 days of family/other things, is quite unbalanced. It just doesn’t provide enough of non-work time that we need. After a long weekend (due to a public holiday on Friday or Monday), it’s really nice to see people going back to work happy and refreshed. This situation, or some form of it, should be more common. A four day work week would be nice, wouldn’t it?

I know what you’re thinking. All this sounds good in theory but will never work in practice. Companies and people/employees are just too money minded to want this.

Virtually every study around this topic finds that huge majorities of people say they want to work less and spend more time with their friends, their families and their thoughts. We know it’s bad for us. Professor Cary Cooper (Distinguished Professor of Organisational Psychology and Health at Lancaster University), who has studied the effects of overwork on the human body, says: “If you work consistently long hours, more than 45 a week, every week, it will damage your health, physically and psychologically.” You become 37 per cent more likely to suffer a stroke or heart-attack if you work 60 hours a week.

Initiatives to reduce the number of work days aren’t necessarily a loss making proposition for organisations and there can be several different ways of implementing them, so that both employees and organisations get what they want. The key is knowing/finding out what is right for your company/employees and being flexible.

There have been instances where alternative work schedules and 4 day work weeks have been implemented with success.

• Over two years ago the state of Utah (USA) ordered 18,000 of its state employees to work four days a week, 10 hours a day, and to take Fridays off. More than three-quarters of employees reported a positive experience a year into this ’4/10′ program, according to a study by Brigham Young University management professors Rex Facer and Lori Wadsworth. They observed fewer sick days, reduced overtime costs, and savings on energy bills. Employees experienced fewer conflicts between work and family commitments, so their morale shot up. And they knew they only had four days instead of five to get their work done, so they became more productive
• Several private companies in Asia, North America & Europe have also done something similar (variants of the 4/10 system) and seen positive results

So hopefully sometime (in the not so distant future), we’ll start hearing the term TGIT (Thank God It’s Thursday) a bit more often

Topics: four day work week, three day weekend, work life balance, monday blues, monday morning blues, sunday evening blues