There are a lot of articles out there talking about how the 40-hr work week is DEAD. No offense to them, but I think they’re jumping the gun a little bit…

Because the 40-hour work week is clearly not dead. If it were, why are so many of us still working on it? But, if you ask me, it is dying. Slowly. Companies recognize that not requiring a 40-hour week anymore—in addition to flexibility at work—are recruiting perks more than anything else nowadays. Beyond that, though, productivity experts and works alike are realizing that it’s just not the best way to work. But it’s a hard AF habit to break…

We’re going to get to that in just a second, but let’s go ahead and start with where it came from.

how the 40-hour work week came to be…

The 40-hour work week was created following the Great Depression as a way to maximize productivity for male factory workers and to address unemployment. Prior to that, during the Industrial Revolution, factory workers were putting in 80-100 weeks. They attempted to mandate an 8-hour work day cap after that, but the cap wasn’t initially passed. This was in the late 1800s.

Slowly, individual states started passing legislation mandating 8-hour workdays, but there was a lot of backlash from employers. In a nutshell, they didn’t want to play ball, thinking that it would hit their bottom line. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Corporations are historically always stupidly resistant to changes like this.

It wasn’t until Henry Ford popularized the 40-hour work week that it really started to gain traction. He did a ton of his own research and found that there were only small increases in productivity when people worked longer and that those increases only lasted really short periods of time. IT was through his own research that he decided to reduce work weeks in his factories to 40-hours, which became a super powerful recruiting tool, bringing the best and brightest to his Michigan factories. This was in 1926.

It wasn’t until 1940 that FDR made the 40-hour work week a US law.

why it needs to change…

Now, you can see in our little history lesson there that: a) corporations were super resistant to change, b) that change took years, and b) that it took someone being crazy enough to just go for it to make it happen. But there’s another really important distinction here that we also really need to address: we’re still talking about factory work. We’re still talking about physical labor. That’s not the day and age we’re in anymore, is it?

Mental work is completely different than physical work. One could arguable it’s more exhausting, but really, I would argue it’s a different kind of exhausting. With physical work, the things you need to do to recover are arguably easier to do—you need to take a physical break, rest, etc. If you do physical work, sitting down and vegging out in front of the TV is great recovery. But, mental work requires very different forms of rest that are much harder to get in. See this blog post here about the different kinds of rest.

That’s the challenge we’re facing when it comes to our work right now. We’re not getting the rest we need, whether because we don’t know how OR because we’re not stopping! I think that’s the other big challenge we’ve been facing. You can’t bring physical work home with you. When you leave the factory, the worksite, the shop, etc. the work can’t come with you. It’s not physically possible. But with the knowledge work, not only can the work come home with you, but it often does. You might find yourself mulling over that work problem from the end of your day during dinner with your family without even meaning to!

And that’s why the 40-hour work week needs to change for knowledge workers. Because productivity skyrockets with less time spent working. When you’re rested and refreshed, you get more done in a shorter period of time

Arguments against ending the 40-hour work week:

Alright, I’ll bite and make sure I address some cons before I get into the pros of nixing the 40-hour work week.

• We know with absolutely certainty that working more than 40 hours a week is detrimental. There are tons of studies on it and we know that people who regularly overwork or work overtime are:

  • More likely to make mistakes

  • Less healthy

  • Less productive compared to those who work only 40-hours a week

• Most workers are working, on average an additional 7 hours a week anyway! This has become such a problem that the French government actually passed a law requiring companies with more than 50 employees to establish “off-limits” hours for emails. I know! Crazy, right? But there are legit rules in some parts of Europe forbidding bosses to contact employees after hours.

There’s less agreement on the studies that have been done on shorter work weeks, but that’s also because there’s so few companies out there that are doing shorter work weeks for us to study!

Arguments for ending the 40-hour work week:

• We’re forced to be creative to be more effective with our time when we have fewer hours to get things done. That decreased time forces us to explore automation and other new technological advancements/tools that might help us do our job faster!

• Sharpens focus. I read a book all about shortening work days and one of the most compelling arguments in it was that most humans can only focus for a maximum of 5 hours per day on something intensive!

• The most productive companies are not the ones that work the most hours. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development did a study and found that countries with the highest average number of working hours were some of the least productive. Whereas Luxembourg, the most productive country, had an average work week of just 29 hours. 😲🤯

• You’re saving on heathcare costs—not to mention the costs of employee turnover due to burnout. The healthcare costs of burnout are in the millions of dollars—with one source saying it’s $260 million per year in excess healthcare expenses attributed to burnout-related turnover. This doesn’t even account for the estimated $4.6 billion in costs other studies have found that healthcare organizations alone attribute to burnout, including reduced productivity from vacant positions and costs associated with replacing

  • Long hours increase the risk for chronic disease

  • Sleep, stress, and anxiety issues are also all tied to the way we’re currently living and working

• It nixes perfectionism. I have no data to support this, but I believe that shorter work weeks will help decrease perfectionism in the workplace. If we’re working less, that inherently means we have less time to perfect the insignificant details of a presentation. We have to be more effective with our time, which means we have to adopt more of a “done is better than perfect mentality.”

• It helps with employee engagement. Perhaps one of the coolest stats I found was that employee engagement actually peaked during the pandemic, according to a Gallup poll. That’s cool, but what’s event cooler is that this is the first time employee engagement had increased since Gallup began tracking in 2000. So, for the first time in 20 years, people were more engaged in their work. What’s the theory as to why? We were able to make our own schedules, try new hobbies, and—gasp—not waste time commuting!

• It gives people permission to disconnect. Some of the most common issues I hear from people, even over holidays or when they take time off is they feel like they can’t disconnect because they know other people are working. After my speaking engagements with LinkedIn this past summer, employees their hailed their mandatory shut down in August, for the most part, because the entire company was disconnected, which made them feel it was more okay for them to disconnect to.

• It gives high-achievers the space to find something in themselves that isn’t about their work. You know how I mentioned a second ago that employee engagement was up during the COVID pandemic? If you didn’t read that whole bullet, one of the reasons for that was not only flex time and lack of commute but also that people were trying new hobbies. For most high-achievers I encounter, they struggle with downtime because they don’t know what to do with it. In fact, just yesterday in a Self-Care Session I host for my membership, one of the members immediately started listing off “Well, I could put lights on my tree or clean out my desk drawers.” These were all things that she felt she “should” do, but when I asked her what just outright felt good and relaxing to do right now, she couldn’t think of anything. That’s how disconnected most achievers are with rest and play. We almost have to impose that upon ourselves as achievers until we figure it out.

So, these are my reasons, but I have one last thing I want to add.

a note on entrepreneurs & business owners…

If you’re a business owner, you may have joked—or at least thought at one point in time—that you traded your 9 to 5 for a 24/7 job. That’s often what entrepreneurship feels like. And it makes sense. For most entrepreneurs, their 60-80 hour work week is self-imposed—not because they want to but out of fear and scarcity! Most of us come from the mindsets of…

• “But I need to work to make money.”

• “Only I can do it best…”

• “Slowing down will make me lose my edge…”

I get it! I get all of it! But, if you impose some limitations on yourself as a business owner, I think you’ll find some of the same things happen as with corporate workers. If you force yourself to work less, you’ll likely find that it forces you to not only get more creative with your systems, perhaps implementing some better automation, templates, or streamlined workflows, but it also forces you to create more creative with your passive income streams.

Because if you’re an entrepreneur or business owner who hasn’t put some sort of passive income in place in your business, your biz isn’t sustainable. Trading time for money is not a sustainable way to build a business.

Similarly, if the idea of working less terrifies you, I might ask you this: is there something you could change financially in your business so that the idea of working less doesn’t seem so detrimental? Could you raise your rates for custom or 1-on-1 work (as you should)? Could you cut down on business expenses somewhere? What financial adjustments could you make in your business so that you’re being rewarded more for your good work and so that you’re losing less on the expenses end of your business?

Entrepreneurship and being a business owner does not and should not mean that your business runs your life. Because I’m going to assume you got into this work because you wanted more freedom, not less!

The 40-hour work week is dying, as it should!
Now, we just need to figure out how we can shift our mindsets—as corporations and entrepreneurs—to better adopt it!

Are you interested in hearing how you can move to a shorter work week in your organization?
Drop a comment below!