New Delhi: A situation post coronavirus pandemic has drastically changed across the world. The service sector and Production sector have been affected more than anybody can even predict, but there is one country in the world – called Iceland – that has changed its working style and seeing impressive success in the country. Iceland is located in Europe.
A special report conducted by the think tank Autonomy and the Association for Sustainability and Democracy in its research found that negative markers like burnout, stress, necessary over time, and disconnection with friends and family all went down, as would be expected, but that productivity remained at worst unchanged, and often improved in those working shorter hours.
For those who don’t decide their working hours in Iceland, a trial of a 35-hour workweek without a corresponding drop in compensation among 2,500 workers in Iceland has shown the ole’ punch clock’s feeding schedule may truly not be the most productive form of labor.
The trials were such a success that following their conclusion in 2019, mass renegotiation by labor unions means that 86% of Icelanders are now working non-traditional work weeks which could include 5-6 hour working days or four-day working weeks.
Will Stronge, director of Autonomy said that “the world’s largest-ever trial of a shorter working week in the public sector was by all measures an overwhelming success. It shows that the public sector is ripe for being a pioneer of shorter working weeks—and lessons can be learned for other governments.”
Icelanders, unlike their Scandinavian neighbors, tend to work more even though the 21st century has been categorized in that part of the world with an increase in productivity paired with a decrease in working hours.
The principal theory is that “burnout” depletes the ability of workers to be productive. The lack of production will occasionally necessitate over time, especially by managers, further increasing burnout and decreasing productivity. In those who cannot afford to be less productive, like nurses for example, the burnout simply results in negative health outcomes.
Hoping to see if they could replicate the productivity gains in other countries, the Reykjavik City Council launched this trial, mostly at public offices, but also in private firms, to measure performance and worker well-being for four years.
Compared with non-enrolled firms or offices, productivity remained the same or was elevated in those participating, but it wasn’t free. Instead, as necessity is the mother of invention, a sort of mass re-imagining of operations was needed to achieve production or service goals with the reduced hours.
This involved, as the report details, the shortening or ending of meetings, reorganization of shifts, and often a total re-evaluation of work processes to find where redundancies or inefficiencies could be removed.
A manager of one official said that“For instance, we changed our shift plans. This changed the way of thinking in the workplace somewhat automatically, you know, you start to re-think and become more flexible. Instead of doing things the same, usual routine as before, people re-evaluated how to do things and suddenly people are doing things very differently.”
Experienced workers will know these kinds of changes can sometimes destroy an operation, but the reward of shorter working hours without loss of pay was, in general, more than enough of a unifying force of collective desire to ensure that firms made the most of the reduced hours.
Since the dawn of time, humans have been figuring out how to do more with less. The 9-hour, the five-day workweek was pioneered in a time with limited technological assistance compared to what’s available now. Cloud storage, file sharing, instantaneous communication, the internet—these have all reduced the amount of time it takes to complete tasks in the workplace.
Yet humanity has not moved on from the days when writing meant using a typewriter, and one had to be sitting next to the phone to answer it. We are long overdue for a 35-hour working week, as technology more than compensates for those five lost hours. In another 20 years, when machine learning and bio-tech interfaces become more common, we’ll probably be able to do the same in a 30-hour workweek.
