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Why Every Weekend Should Be a Three-Day Weekend

Posted on July 23, 2014

There are already big companies (like ESPN, for instance) where employees may work four 10-hour shifts each week as opposed to the standard five eight-hour shift model.

It sounds revolutionary, but many experts are on board with the idea.

Let’s take a look at why this non-traditional approach may actually work.

  1. We know, pretty conclusively, that people are not as happy at their jobs as they should be. Employee engagement is way down over the past decade or so.
  2. A lot of people end up staying at the office a little bit later here and there, whether that's for "avoiding rush hour" or "finishing projects" or whatever else. Remember, being busy is in some ways the currency of the modern era.
  3. It’s a standard, long-held argument: when you're primarily at work M-F, you tend to do your errands -- i.e. dry cleaning, shopping -- on the weekends, which is when everyone else is also doing them.
  4. The work week is probably too long at 40 hours right now if you actively consider that we're in a knowledge-based economy presently, as opposed to a strictly industrial one. For a good explanation of why we currently have the five-day, 40-hour structure, read this.

Here's how a "4 x 10 structure" - or four 10-hour days - fixes some of these issues. You create a situation where everyone gets a "regular day" (weekday) off to tend to errands/responsibilities. You create a stronger work-life balance, and therefore, help engage employees once again.

Assuming the "off-day" is generally a Friday (it would have to shift among employees in order to accommodate working with partners and clients who are working a full five days) then you automatically have three days off per week, and most of them are three-day weekends.

Also consider this: It's 3:46 p.m. on Friday. How much tangible work do you think is getting done at that time?

The answer: Not much.

Friday is a check-out day for a lot of people anyway. It's almost always the day that gets chopped in half for "summer Fridays" or "beer o'clock." If you condensed the work into four days, it might be more effective and engaged as a result.

Obviously, the concern with this idea is that competitors might be working 40-hour weeks, which means it's more like 60-hour weeks for the Type-A employees among those competitors. If you slip down to four-day weeks, you might fall behind.

The other way to look at would be to focus on finding people with better time management skills who could work well on this schedule.

Health-insurance wise (because that's always an elephant in any business decision room), you could do 4 x 10 (40 hours a week) and keep coverage for those people, or let people go 4 x 8 (32 hours a week) and determine the coverage level to be 32-35 hours. Some companies cover above 28 hours/week, so this is somewhat flexible within management discussions.

If you want people to be engaged, if you don't want them to leave, and you want them bound to your organization in some way beyond compensation/contract, then consider giving them back some of their life and trusting them that they can accomplish the same goals in four days that others do in five days.

Several companies already do this -- we mentioned ESPN above, where the author of this post used to work -- and there’s also Treehouse, Beholder, and the state of Utah, among others. Treehouse’s CEO wrote a guest post for Quartz on this topic a little while ago, and noted this:

  • 50% more time with our family and friends. I get to spend three days a week, instead of two, with my family. 50%. It’s insane. For those on the team without kids, they get to spend this extra 50% on their hobbies or loved ones.


Trust. Communication. Work/Life balance. Aren't those three wonderful things in building an organizational culture?

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