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WHY A GLOBAL THREE-DAY WORKWEEK WOULD BE GOOD FOR INNOVATION
The world’s second-richest man, Carlos Slim of Mexico, recently proposed the concept of a global three-day workweek at a business conference in Paraguay, arguing that working three days a week for a longer period of our lives — potentially up to age 75 — would better reflect the underlying economic and demographic reality of the modern world.
He’s got a good point.
Nobody seriously expects to retire by the age of 50 these days, so working until 70 or 75 no longer sounds as outrageous as it might have sounded a decade or two ago. We’re living longer and, therefore, requiring more savings for retirement. Moreover, there’s a strong argument to be made for the three-day workweek on economic productivity grounds. The OECD has produced a number of very compelling charts showing that worker productivity starts to decrease when you work too many hours a week. This intuitively makes sense: Companies don’t want to hire more workers than they have to, so they try to squeeze more hours out of workers, and that leads to further productivity trade-offs.
But the real argument for the three-day workweek comes when you think of its ability to boost the innovation potential of individuals, companies and even nations. Working fewer hours a week frees up time to take on personal creativity and passion projects. That was the original logic of Google’s 20 percent time, which stipulated loosely that workers should dedicate 20 percent of their workweek to dreaming up new projects and tinkering. Other companies also have experimented with giving workers more time to dream up innovative new products or developing side projects. You can think of corporate hackathons as another way that companies are trying to give workers more time to come up with innovative ideas. Giving workers four days off a week basically eliminates any excuse for not launching that new business or product you’ve been talking about for years.
And, as Slim pointed out, “Having four days [off] would be very important to generate new entertainment activities and other ways of being occupied.” That almost sounds like a throwaway line – isn’t it obvious that if people are only working three days a week, that they will have to fill their time with other activities? On one hand, you can imagine people heading to the beach for a never-ending series of four-day weekends, or using those four days to binge-watch the latest season of “Game of Thrones.” On the other hand, you can imagine people actually creating those new entertainment activities and ways of being occupied.
(BASULTO, Dominic Basulto. Why a global three-day workweek would be good for innovation. The Whashington Post, Whashington, July 30 2014. Disponível em: <At:http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2014/07 /30/why-a-global-3-day-workweek-would-be-good-for-innovation/>. Acesso em: 10 fev. 2015)
In the fragment “This intuitively makes sense: Companies don’t want to hire more workers than they have to, so they try to squeeze more hours out of workers, and that leads to productivity trade-offs.”, that refers to:
