Is a Four Day Workweek a Pipedream with AI? Not at All!

Let’s start with a bold statement. There is nothing “traditional” about the traditional five-day workweek. While most of us grew up in a world where men and women “went to work” Monday through Friday, the very notion of a 40-hour workweek is actually only about 100 years old. 

In fact, it was only in September 1926 when Ford Motor Company, then one of America’s largest employers, adopted the five-day, 40-hour workweek. (The model didn’t become legally codified until June 1940 when Congress amended the Fair Labor Standards Act, limiting the workweek to 40 hours nationwide.) Truth be told, until the early 20th century, it was not uncommon for people to work six days a week—with only Sundays off for “worship.” Also, factory workers put in days commonly stretching 10 to 12 hours at a time.

As we’ve discussed before in this space, the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020 blew a battleship-sized hole in the 40-hour, five-day workweek paradigm. 

A radical model gaining in popularity is the literal 4-day workweek. This is not the antiquated idea of cramming 40 hours of work into four 10-hour-long workdays. Instead, it’s literally about getting five days of pay for just four days—32 hours—of work. 

To this point several U.K. companies agreed to switch to a four-day workweek as part of a controlled experiment. Virtually all found that their productivity actually increased, and many chose to stick with the new model even after the experiment finished. Obviously, there is significant controversy about the experiment’s results. Perhaps the employees involved simply worked harder to ensure the initiative succeeded and would relapse to their old “lazy” ways once they had secured the new, more liberal schedule. 

Certainly, recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are making it likelier than ever that huge swaths of the workforce may soon become obsolete, and that those who remain may be able to produce far more with far less effort. 

Recent research by the Josh Bersin company indicates that when individual workers fully embrace AI as their personal assistant, a full day of work may be saved each week due to workers needing to do less administrative work.  Taken further, when AI is fed specific company data and specific job related data is loaded into AI, the system can generate work on our behalf.  It can generate emails, write code for software engineers, and generate sales proposals. What AI produces still needs to be edited, but it provides a huge jumpstart to many projects.

So, is a Four-Day Workweek in your company’s future? If so, enabling the transition without disrupting operations takes great skill and care. As experienced corporate culture and compensation specialists, our team can help you determine the alternative model best suited to your organization. We can also help you plan and implement a transition benefitting both employees and their managers. Please contact me at laura@conoverconsulting.com to take your first step into a brighter future.