A Four Day Work Week

Work just four days a week –and still earn a full-time paycheck? As summer winds down into fall, and Labor Day passes, the idea may hold some appeal - not just in terms of having the ability to redistribute some free time, but by saving a bit of money in weekly commuting costs that may soon be needed to be spent just staying warm this winter. The concept behind the movement…and it is slowly becoming a kind of movement…is for employees to work just two extra hours a day for four days, making up a normal eight hour shift and then take one weekday off to compensate for the shift in hours. For many companies, that can mean having the ability to be open longer hours every day, say 8:00 am – 6:00 pm, without hiring any more people or incurring any overtimes costs. For employees, it can mean a four day work week. For the environment and municipal infrastructure, it could mean less gas expended and fewer rush hour traffic jams (which is a good thing on so many fronts….). The idea of alternative work arrangements isn’t all that new. In this country, it first surfaced during the 1970’s gas crises and sputtered around as something to talk about over the water cooler into the 80s and 90s, as the Internet and cell phones really came into force and the idea that many jobs could be done as easily and efficiently from home as they could be from a set office location. Several corporations, such as IBM, soon realized that not making all employees come into work every day also meant that they could save a lot of money on simple things like office space and utility bills. Many workers went from having set offices or cubicles to having a key to non-designated work areas to use on those occasions when they were actually in the building. Some smaller companies realized that having a set office location wasn’t even all that necessary, as employees all just worked out of their home offices and “networked” together when they needed to. Some would go so far to observe that the rise of Starbucks and other comfortable coffeehouse environment keyed right into this need to have a place to meet professionally – without actually owning a conference room. Developers even began to realize the value in creating not just office sites for a given company, but shared professional spaces, where clients could “rent” by the day or even by the hour, and still have access to cutting edge IT services and facilities to meet clients in. The Age of Telecommuting was born and really beginning to flower when, BANG, gas got reasonably cheap again some of the steam to change from the old “9 to 5” mentality was lost. Too bad, we could have been a lot farther down the road now that gas hovers around the $4.00 per gallon mark. Nationally, more than 27 million people have adapted a more flexible work schedule and, again, employers are looking for ways to deal with severe commuting woes that are impacting their ability to hire and keep good workers. Whether a more flexible work schedule would work for your company isn’t an easy question to answer, as every company is a bit different. Locally, it has seemed to work best for service-oriented organizations, like the Dutchess County Regional Chamber of Commerce and a couple of town governments, who found that they could really benefit from being able to increase the hours they were open, just by shifting to a four day work week – and staggering their staff times. It also seems to work well for some manufacturers, who could keep the line open two longer hours each day and then even shut down an extra day, keeping the same output, but saving on some operational costs. But, it’s hard to say if such a scheme would work for everyone is hard to say. Child care issues would have to be worked out on a regional scale, for example, and every company’s business situation is a bit unique. Still, with energy prices unlikely to go down – and stay there – there might be no time like the present to seriously think about it.