Here is the full transcript of Dale Whelehan’s talk titled “Rethinking Time: Why A 4-Day Work Week Is The Future of Work” at TEDxUoChester conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
“I don’t have enough time,” or so the old saying goes. Across generations, we have been obsessed with time and understanding how best we can use it. Today, I’m going to tell you the story of three men and their experiences with time: my father, his father, and the father of modern philosophy, René Descartes. We’ve seen rapid changes in our world from the 17th century all the way up to the 21st, but still, a fascination exists with how we spend our time.
The Case for Time
The case I’m going to make to you today is that spending time and how we use it is fundamental to true human happiness and health. In order to be able to do that, I’m going to bring you back to the 1600s, before the Enlightenment era, when René Descartes was writing prose about the need for us to doubt everything.
For us to access our truest potential within society, we must doubt as far as possible all things. What Descartes was talking about was that there was an unlocked human potential within us that we have yet to uncover. “It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well.” Despite these doubts, we still yearn for a better version of ourselves. We eat kale, we drink gallons of water, we sleep for eight hours, we breathe with purpose, and that’s just to get by.
The Changing World of Work
What Descartes couldn’t have predicted is that in the 21st century, not only would it be a nice thing to have to use our minds well but a requirement. The world of work has changed so dramatically. We innovate, we create, we are producing mass amounts of product, often to the detriment of the world around us, and we are now in a situation where the world is burning around us, and in the process, we are burning out too.
So, with that in mind, we must go back to the words of Descartes and doubt as far as possible all things, including whether the world of work is working for us.
Let’s fast forward a small bit to my second companion, my grandfather, who was a rural farmer in a by and large agrarian society in Ireland. For him, working seven days a week was normal. From dusk till dawn, toiling the land or milking the cows was a necessity. For me, that doesn’t sound like the ideal work week, but for him, he had something in the world of work that I don’t have. His purpose was clear, and he existed in the last remnants of a society that expected him to be productive for anyone else but himself and his own family.
Fast forward to our final companion, my father. By the time he had entered the world of work, a shift in worker psychology had been embedded. Society had moved away from the idea of free time in favor of the free market, and we saw the production of mass amounts of products several degrees away from the consumer themselves. It was during this time as well that we saw the emergence of a new discipline.
The Rise of Management
The discipline we now know as management. Because we were producing so much, we needed people to be able to understand how to do that in an efficient way. So, managers came in, they dissected, analyzed, and timed tasks. As a result of that, then, work intensity increased, and the amount of free time that people had to complete their work reduced significantly.
Really interestingly though, at the same time that this conversation around mass production was happening, we were also having a conversation globally around working time, particularly working time reduction. It was being driven by many fields: from legislators in the US and in Europe, from trade union organizations who were reaching their prime in the 20th century, and from leading businessmen like Henry Ford, who implemented a five-day week in his autoworkers. The idea of working time reduction became not just an aspiration of the working class but actually something that was required in order to maintain or improve productivity.
The Birth of the Five-Day Work Week
What our management colleagues were beginning to show in their studies was that long working hours led to high levels of fatigue, which reduced the productivity of people. And so, suddenly, the harsh realization of the seven and six-day workweek became no more, and the five-day week was born. Lastly, let’s turn to me. I was born in the ’90s in Ireland, in a time that was called the Celtic Tiger.
It was a time of booming economic prosperity for the country. Technology had taken center stage in the world of work, giving birth to what we now know as the knowledge worker. Work has changed so much from my father’s time. We now largely work in a very cognitive and emotional form of work, and despite all of the progress that we have made, I’m still exhausted.
So, why is that? I decided to do a PhD on the topic, literally posing the question, “Why am I so tired all the time?” And two things emerged for me. Not only has the nature of work shifted away from a very physical labor workforce to a highly cognitive and emotional one, but actually the parts of our bodies that we are using in work are fundamentally different as well.
It explains to us why physical fatigue feels very different to cognitive and emotional fatigue. Not only that, but we are now experiencing a wide amount of data on a daily basis. We are expected to process so much more in today’s society, and oftentimes we find ourselves a cup overflowing with information.
We have conceptualized the malady that we now call burnout.
The Concept of Burnout
We created that as an occupational disease, and it’s not by coincidence that the term burnout is analogous to being cogs in a machine. In fact, we have so conceptualized our understanding of our emotional expression that we liken ourselves to being like a machine. When we put that expectation on ourselves to perform constantly, ever standardized, we are going to constantly burn out. In fact, we’re constantly running out of steam and grinding to a halt.
You might be feeling a little bit hopeless right now. I know I was. Let’s draw back on the words of Descartes once again: “You must conquer yourself rather than the world.” And for today, I ask you all to take away some of the words of Descartes on doubting whether the way you’re working is working for you.
A New Perspective on Time and Productivity
For the past hundred years, we have used time as an arbitrary metric to define what productivity looks like for us. We need to challenge our assumption that we don’t have enough time, but in fact, we are just using our current time unwisely. There is a growing amount of evidence out there now showing that reduced working hours in the form of a four-day week is beneficial for individuals’ performance, to reducing their levels of stress and improving their lifestyles, to improving team collaboration and performance, to improving business performance including revenue generation, and more broadly, leading to a more sustainable and equitable world for us all.
But what is happening within organizations that helps to drive that sort of change? Well, we go back to science once again. Similar to how we have fundamental physiological needs like the need to eat, the need to sleep, the need for shelter, we have three psychological needs that need to be fulfilled, and if we can do so, we feel happier, motivated, and can work more intelligently. Working smarter, not longer, let’s go through what some of those needs are.
Take, for example, when you’re doing a task that you enjoy. So you’re learning to play the piano, you’re cooking a new recipe, you’re going out for a run. You might find yourself actually becoming quite absorbed by the activity, and at the end of it, you say, “God, I did a really good job there.” When we are looking at tasks that we enjoy, we have dopamine firing in the brain, which drives us towards achieving mastery in that skill, and that’s our first fundamental psychological need.
Challenging the Work Paradigm
We want to become masters. We enjoy the work because we see the progress in the work. It’s the task of doing it. The problem with the world of work today is that we have used time as an arbitrary scapegoat for defining what good looks like.
Long working hours mean you must be a good worker, right? But we know that that is actually not the case. Recent research from Gallup’s data global workforce finds only 10 to 12 percent of the workforce is actually engaged in work. When we think about that, there is such an untapped potential to get more out of people for business and for themselves.
In 4-day week organizations, the fundamental shift that happens is that you remove time as a productivity metric. Work becomes a lot more focused on output, and you drive towards key performance indicators that are transparent. As a result, people know what good looks like, and they can strive towards mastery in that. I start my workday at 5 a.m., which might come as a bit of a groan to many in this room, but my colleague starts her workday at 1 p.m., and somehow, it actually works for us, not without trial and error.
Autonomy and Trust
What it is doing is it’s helping to fulfill our second psychological need, which is the need for autonomy over our own time. By having this flexible working pattern, we can work in a way that’s congruent with our own preferences. Trust is so critical in order to make this work, and what we often find in the world of work is that we see forms of micromanagement appear when leadership doesn’t trust the highly qualified staff they have recruited. But surely, if we’re reducing working hours in an organization, we need to be able to control people more.
We have less time, so we need to know what’s happening. In fact, the opposite seems to be true. By being clear on the tasks that need to be done and the deadline for when those tasks need to be done, you can create a buffer of flexibility in a way that allows people to work in a way that works for them. What’s really interesting in the research is that what people are doing in their non-work time is leading to a positive transference across to their work.
People are being more physically active, they’re sleeping more, they’re reporting lower levels of stress, and that’s because they’re able to craft their time in a way that is successful for them. The last psychological need that we have is human connection. In fact, human connection may be the single most predictor of long-term human health and disease according to the Harvard study for human development. We are inherently social creatures.
It’s unsurprising, therefore, that as burnout rates are rising globally, that also loneliness levels within the population are also rising. A recent poll by Gallup reported that one in four young people are reporting feeling lonely, and a meta-analysis of 125,000 people has found that each generation is getting more lonely than the one before it.
What’s driving that? It’s a new phenomenon, particularly amongst young people. But when you think about it, if you think you don’t have enough time, you are going to become tunnel visioned, and you’re not going to look above the parapet. As a result, you’re not going to be able to help and reach out and support others. More importantly, you’re not going to be able to get support for yourself.
We often think in the world that we’re quite alone, but we are part of an inherent social fabric, particularly in workplaces, and actually, we have the biggest potential resource that we can access in the form of teamwork and collaboration in order to fulfill that psychological need while also working fewer hours.
In 4-day week organizations, what we find is that there is a heavy focus away from individual performance towards team performance. There is a much bigger focus on collaboration and building psychological safety and trust within teams. As a result, you see people leading to higher levels of commitment towards their workplace and putting their best foot forward.
The Importance of Work-Life Balance
I would like to be able to leave you with the thought that reducing working hours alone isn’t going to help create work-life balance, but it’s a fundamental change that we see happening within people’s organizations and in their lives that leads to that transformative change.
What we are trying to do is get people to work smarter, but not longer, tipping the balance back. Today, by placing doubt on your own ways of work, you’re at that first stage of change. Much like my grandfather, who worked in harmony with his needs, maybe it’s time for us to free ourselves of the industrial shackles of my father.
“I don’t have enough time,” or so the saying goes. What if we dared to create more time for ourselves? In this pursuit, the quote, “It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well,” can cease being a hope of a philosopher long gone and instead become our reality. The opportunity is in our reach, and there is no time like the present. Thank you.