Book Club: Over Work by Brigid Schulte

Should the workweek be 4 days? This is one of the bold claims put forward in the book Over Work by Brigid Schulte. She attempts to understand work-related stress and exhaustion and propose solutions to overcome the problems.

Ever since Henry Ford instituted a five-day eight hour schedule in the 20s after pressure from labor unions (down from 6 days a week), the workweek has not changed much. But new experiments suggest that productivity can increase under a four-day workweek – that people can do the same amount of work in four days as five, with certain adjustments like reducing the amount of meetings or streamlining them, less busy work, and time for focused work.

In Iceland, there is a pilot across many labor unions to have shorter working hours with no reduction in pay, where on the whole results have been positive. There have been a wide variety of schemes for reduction in work hours (such as taking one day a month, one day every two weeks, or shortening one day). This has not reduced work stress necessarily, but has reduced the amount of stress in their private lives.

Schulte points out that the shift required a culture change. Iceland still works more than other Nordic countries, but their work week has been reduced by nearly 4 hours since 2017. In the North American context, which has traditionally been a more work-oriented culture than in Europe, with fewer vacations, and longer hours, the culture shift would need to be a big one.

But as business owners, we have more autonomy over the work we do and Schulte’s book is food for thought on the future of work.

References

Brigid Schulte. Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2024.

The Autonomy Institute. On firmer ground: Iceland’s ongoing experience of shorter working weeks Study of Iceland’s shorter working hours. London: 2024. https://autonomy.work/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Iceland_-1.pdf