Why We’re Working Ourselves to Death

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1:30Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk to some of the brightest minds about everything surrounding the written word. That's everything. That's from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Before we dive in, make sure to follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to leave a review. Good or bad, I want to hear from you. I want to hear whether you're enjoying it or where we can improve. And I can take the hits. So let me know. If you don't like something, say it straight. Now let's get into it.

2:13Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining us today is Juliette Shure. She's a bestselling author. She's an economist and a professor of sociology at Boston College, which is a phenomenal school, by the way. So hang out there. I went to Tufts. I was a Boston College wannabe, Juliet, but we'll talk about that later. The title of the book, Four Days a Week, The Life-Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving Well-Being, and Working Smarter. I don't think anybody in the world, Juliet, despite everyone, your demographic is everyone. Everyone wants to be less stressful, work smarter, and certainly me.

2:53I would love to work four days a week, although I feel like I'm working eight days a week. But anyway, great to have you on the show. You had a 2022 TED Talk that we all watched. I made people at Skybridge watch it, The Case for a Four-Day Workweek. And now you made it a book, which is even more phenomenal. Tell us a little bit about your background for our newer listeners. Tell us a little about you and why you think of Four-Day Workweek. And by the way, I believe it's coming, by the way, particularly with the advent of AI. So tell us about your theory here, if you don't mind. Yeah, absolutely.

3:28Well, thanks and great to have the opportunity to talk. So I, as you said, I'm an economist. I was teaching in the economics department at Harvard just soon after I got my degree many years ago. And I started thinking about working hours. And why was it that we weren't getting more free time as our economy was getting so much more productive. And even, you know, as far back as the 50s, people anticipated a four-day week. Richard Nixon talked about it in his campaign, in that vice presidential campaign back in the 50s. And people expected a crisis of leisure time. Well, when I started digging into the numbers, lo and behold, beginning in the late 60s into the 70s and 80s, working hours in America were going up, not down.

4:22So that was a puzzle. I wrote a book about it, The Overworked American, The Unexpected Decline of Leisure. And it was a bestseller, a lot of interest in shorter work time. But then the issue kind of fell off the table until the pandemic. And during the pandemic, you know, people were so stressed out, just managing everything, the schooling, but also just life with a pandemic, the stress of the pandemic. We had the great resignation. And I was asked to lead trials of groups of companies who were going to go to a four-day week with no reduction in pay, 32 hours, but they were going to spend a couple of months before they started figuring out how to save time and how to keep people as productive in four days as they were in five.

5:19And that's what the book is about and the incredible research that we've done since the beginning of 2022, which is when the trial started. And we've had hundreds and hundreds of companies, thousands, over 10 ,000 workers go through this program. And the results have been phenomenal. Are we overworked as a society? Americans, for sure. We work so many more hours than other countries that are not even as wealthy as we are. But if you look at the Western European countries, 400 more hours a year than the Germans, 300 more than the French, the Dutch, the Nordics, pretty much everybody, even the Japanese.

6:09When I wrote The Overworked American, the Japanese were the world's workaholics. Today, the average American worker puts in more hours a year than the average Japanese. And there's another piece to this, which is really important. We have long working hours. We have very little vacation compared to other places. We have a lot more on call. There are countries in Europe where people have the right to not have to be called after regular hours. So we've got that 24-7 availability in a lot of jobs. But we also have a much more demanding homework situation in terms of the amount of time that people spend doing unpaid housework and child care is much higher in the United States than in other places.

7:01So households are really squeezed coming at it from both sides. It's long working hours for pay, long working hours without pay. So I'm Italian by background. I obviously am an American born. My grandparents were from Italy. When I go back to Italy, Juliet, my cousins tell me that I'm not Italian and it breaks my heart. And I say, what do you mean I'm not Italian? I'm Italian. No, no, you're American. You guys think you're going to live forever. And so you work around the clock. He said, we already had our empire a couple thousand years ago. You know, we're slicing an extra piece of cheese. We've got an extra bottle of wine.

7:41We're taking a nap at three o 'clock in the afternoon. And I walked out of the lunch thinking he's right. I'm American. So this is part of the Protestant work ethic that imbued the society several hundred years ago. So my question to you is related to how do you break that psychological cycle where you, you know, And by the way, I'm a neurotic. I'll just be honest with you. I mean, you're cheaper than my therapist, so let me just talk to you very openly. I'm a full-on neurotic. And so if I feel like I'm not working, if there's some anxiety related to that, how do you break the psychological addiction cycle that we're all in?

8:22Well, I used to be that way a bit myself, maybe not to the extent that you are. Uh, but I think, uh, one of the, one of the things both about this research that we've found, but I think also I can say from my own life is when you are in that mentality that you're talking about, having to work so hard all the time, not, not living a life in which you're caring about quality and sort of spending your time more intentionally. I think you're less productive. I mean, one of the things I have found over time is if I slow down, get a little bit more methodical, I actually can produce better work in less time.

9:08And I think that this sort of always on culture that many Americans are in, which is also a culture of distraction, because when you're so busy like that, you're juggling multiple things at once and you're just not really focusing in a way. This is one of the lessons that many of the companies in our trials found, which is that they reduced the meetings that people had to go to, and they created a lot more focus time so that people weren't interrupted. And when you are not interrupted, and when you really focus on something, you can get it done much faster, but also you produce a much better product.

9:52So I think it's, that is that idea of working smart, you know, figuring out how to, to do it right. But that also there's pace issues there, but there's also volume. One of the things I talk about in the book is, is that, that sort of fact that often creativity comes when we're not doing anything. And if you don't have enough of that, not doing anything time in your life, you're going to be less creative. And there's a lot of research on that. I found while I was writing the book, I exercise in the morning and there's like a cool down period at the end of the class I do where you're just lying there and, you know, meditating, relaxing, whatever, letting your mind wander.

10:39That's when I got often really good ideas for the book. So I just rushing around like a chicken with your head cut off the way so many Americans do. it's not a good way to work aside from a terrible way to live. This episode is brought to you by ExpressVPN. Ever heard of a data broker? They're the people scooping up everything you do online. Your searches, your browsing history, even your location, and they sell it off. Not just to advertisers, but to companies and agencies you'd rather not share your information with. That's why you've got to use ExpressVPN. Here's how it works. Data brokers track you through your device's IP address.

11:17Express VPN hides that IP and encrypts all your internet traffic. So your activity stays private, even on public Wi-Fi. It works on all my advices and it's with one tap. I'm protected. I've used it while I'm traveling to make sure my data stayed mine. And honestly, the peace of mind is worth it. Protect your online privacy today by visiting expressvpn.com slash open book. That's expressvpn.com, E-X-P-R-E-S-S.com slash open book, and you can get an extra four months free, expressvpn.com slash open book. Let's talk about implementation. Let's say that you were my spiritual guru, and I want to move Skybridge, my office.

12:03We've got several billion dollars under management, 25 employees. I want to move Skybridge to a four-day work week. Right now, my producer's cheering. I can see her doing a backflip in the green room. How would I do that? What would you recommend to me? What would be the steps that I would take? Okay. How many employees do you have? 25. Okay. So we had a lot of firms of that size that have done. I have more dependents than employees, Juliet. That's one of the problems I have in my life, which is why I'm always working. But go ahead. Let's start with the employees first. Good one. Okay. So the first thing you do is you bring the team together.

12:41You tell them they're you're interested in doing this. You create a subcommittee that's going to lead the project and you figure out how you're going to do it. Is it, you know, is everybody going to take the same day off and what is it in your industry? I would suggest Friday because finance, there's like really cool evidence showing that there's a lot less finance activity in the financial sector on Fridays. So you decide you're all going to do Fridays. You also decide you're all taking it off at the same time. Why? You don't want people in the office, while some people are out, creating lots of work so that when those other people come back, the next day they've got too much to do.

13:26Then you figure out, you empower your whole team to figure out where can you cut? What is it that you're doing that isn't, you know, absolutely efficient. So the vast majority of white collar firms are looking at meetings and they're looking at focus time and distraction. So that's sort of the easy part. And you're going to do that and you're going to save some time there. You're also going to save some time because you're going to go through a process, sort of a process engineering where you're going to look at everything that you're doing and you're going to figure out where are we, what are we doing that we don't need?

14:08So are there, are you putting out too many newsletters to your clients? Are you, you have too many forms that you don't need? Are there some ways today I can help you, of course, these days? And you get some other stuff there. The other thing you do, and there's a, I've got case studies in the book for all of these kinds of things, whether it's manufacturing companies or marketing. We have a lot of finance companies in the sample.

14:40To look at the different layers of your firm. So I'll give you the example of Kickstarter, which is a technology firm. It's bigger than you are, but I think there's still an issue here. The senior leadership and the sort of people at the customer service and the developers and stuff, they went through different processes. The senior leadership discovered that they were losing a lot of time because it hadn't figured out exactly what it wanted when it gave an assignment to the product development teams. That's the example. So senior leadership had to go through a process of figuring out how do we get more clearer about what we want when we ask the people below us to do something.

15:29That might be something, you know, that might be something just for you to figure out, or maybe you have a team that you work with. So those are the kinds of things that companies are doing. The other thing is there are some that are sort of like moving off whole areas that they're involved in, because when they really sit down and analyze what's happening, they discover, yeah, a lot of time, but not much value coming out of that, that activity. You know, there's a climate argument here too, though, right? I mean, reducing the work week also, I mean, think of it. I mean, listen, if you looked at the admission levels during COVID, and obviously I'm not, COVID was a horrific period of time, particularly for me, but if you look at the admission, it was way down.

16:18If you cut people's commuting by 20%, which is taking a five-day work week to four, just to address a little bit of that, I think it would also improve the quality of the air in these urban areas, right? I mean, people don't realize how much brake dust Juliet is in the air. And every time a person squeezes on the brake, it emits brake dust, you're walking around breathing it, you know? Yeah, absolutely. So the studies show, it's interesting, we don't get quite a 20 % reduction with the commuting because to some extent people will maybe take that fifth day. We're studying this. We're seeing a little bit of what we call a travel rebound.

17:00So some people may use that fifth day to travel somewhere else, like visit family is what we're hearing. But for the most part, you're going to get about a 15 % reduction in emissions if you go from five-day to four-day commutes. The other thing we're seeing a little bit of is some people, because they're sort of less stressed for time, might shift to a slightly more, to a more time-intensive travel mode. So we have got a little bit of a shift from people driving a bit less and walking and cycling a bit more. So those are the main things that we're seeing with people. We are in the process of analyzing some cool data.

17:43We got people to upload a carbon tracker app for their credit cards and their spending. And then we're looking at sort of before and after they went on a four-day week to see if there are any other spending patterns that are changing. But we don't have those results yet. I think that would be a huge uplift for everybody. Let's go to the concerns about AI and job elimination and the balance between eliminating jobs, but then potentially not eliminating jobs, but just reducing time at work, which I think would be enormously beneficial for the society. Yeah. I mean, AI gives us, I mean, let me just start by saying there are a lot of really scary and I think problematic things about AI, but But there's also, in the workplace, AI gives a lot of possibility for saving time, people's time, and possibly a magnitude that's more like what we saw with the first industrial revolution, like a really massive time-saving technology.

18:50And, of course, many people believe that it is going to lead to even a three-day, three-and-a-half-day week. good. So what are we going to do with all that? How are we going to approach that time saved? So one thing is we could just lay off tons of people. And then we're faced with the social consequences of that. And I think the much less optimistic scenario that we've seen in the past, which is, you know, those people end up getting reemployed. I think economists have really started to shift their thinking on this. And it's not so obvious we're going to be able to re-employ all those people.

19:30And that presents tremendous problems if we can employ people. And I think we also have to ask the question, workers get a lot more productive with AI? Well, should the owners of the firms be the only ones who benefit from that? Shouldn't the workers benefit too?

19:52And so you can either, you know, have some benefits to the workers that remain and the people who pay the price are the ones who lose their jobs. Or you can say, you know what, we're going to keep people on and reduce their hours of work. And that's how we're going to give that benefit of AI to people. I mean, it's socially a much more productive thing to do. It gives people something they desperately need now, which is time. And the other thing that we're starting to study this now that we're starting to see is that AI adoption and use is a lot better in companies with a four-day week. And it's both because people are less resistant to it because they're less worried about losing their jobs.

20:42But we've started to do some research at an AI company itself. They make an AI product. It's really interesting. The CEO of it contacted me and said he put everybody on a four-day week because the work was so mentally taxing that people just couldn't do it for five days. and this is something about the knowledge, a lot of the knowledge workers that we haven't recognized, I think. I mean, we think of the physical work as the only taxing work, but knowledge work can be really taxing too, and you could end up getting a better output in four days than five. Let's talk about the government. So you are now, I put you in charge, Julia, God forbid for you and your family, but I am putting you in charge for the sake of this conversation.

21:32What do you do from the government in terms of the implementation? So the first thing I do is I set up some big trials where the government gives an incentive for companies to participate. Maybe it's a tax incentive, maybe it's a wage subsidy. That's what they did in Spain. They started a three-year trial where the government pays that fifth day's wages at the beginning and then in each year it goes down. And this way I get a big random sample of companies I can get manufacturing, all the companies that think they can't do it. And I take away the risk for them at the beginning. And I randomize them into, you know, so it's really as rigorously scientific as possible.

22:24And I then see the results of that and show, I think, that any company can do this and that it'll work over time. Employees will be better off and the companies will thrive with it. That's what we're finding in our studies. I mean, the employee well-being is off the charts and then you get a lot of social benefits from it. For example, with the nurses who are getting four-day weeks, they stop quitting. They stop burning out and leaving the field after you spent a lot of social money to train them. So that's the first thing I do. And then after that study, assuming it shows the same thing that our results have, then I pass a law for a four-day, 32-hour work week.

23:10And if people work more, they get comp time, no reduction in pay from their current 40-hour week. That's my program. Okay, I like it. It's very well thought out. Be careful. Be careful. I can see the bumper stickers. Okay, vote for Juliet four days. It'd be a happy camper. Be careful. What do you think? I'm trying to decide between the four-day week and the three-day weekend. Which do you think is going to go better? Well, three-day weekend. I think you pitch that i mean i think you focus on the vacation time or the leisure activity more than the work week right i think it's much better three-day weekend vote for professor juliet okay so uh what what do you say to business leaders or politicians who feel like oh man i can't do that i don't want our country to fall behind this will reduce productivity you've made the case It made the case to me, but for the skeptic, give me a few more paragraphs, like how to emphasize.

24:14And I'm with you. When I'm unplugged, I feel like it's a control alt delete for my mental computer and it helps me reset and reframe where I'm going. I think that would be true even if I was in a productive capacity in an assembly line somewhere. But give me a few more paragraphs. I'm the politician that's not convinced. How do you win me over? So I think the first thing is to note that historically, I mean, long before this four-day week movement, countries with shorter hours of work have higher hourly productivity. And there are two reasons for that. One is as you get richer, people get more free time.

24:54But as you reduce hours of work, people get more efficient and can do better in those shorter number of hours. We have self-reports of productivity. We have what the companies are telling us. We have a work smart scale that shows when people shift from five to four, their smart working goes up. So I think productivity is it's it's it's something that you have to understand is intimately connected to hours of work. And part of the reason there's sort of two big reasons. One is what I call the forcing function of the four day week. when you have less time, and you know who knows this more than anything?

25:38New parents. When you have less time available, you get so much more efficient with your time. No question. Yeah. And so that's the forcing function that the four-day week gives. And I think because we've been stuck at five for so long, 85 years, and because, you know, hours just keep creeping up. We've got that Parkinson's law problem, which is work just fills the time. That's the first thing. The flip side of it is that people are so much better off on the four-day week. They sleep more, they are less tired, they're less anxious, they're less burned out, they're more eager to come to work, and they just do better work.

26:16And that's what we're hearing from the companies too. So it's sort of from both the company side and also the employee well-being side, you've got sort of two dynamics which are leading to either maintaining, which we're seeing in some companies, or improving productivity. And then there's one last thing, which is we have a lot of quitting going on in this economy, people leaving jobs and companies having difficulty filling them. Now, that's changing a little bit in some places. And we've got this massive stress problem in our workplace. I mean, the stress levels that peaked in the pandemic have come down, but not anywhere near where they were pre-pandemic.

27:04They've plateaued at a really high level and quits are really high too. And this is, you know, the four-day week takes that away. People stop. People do not leave four-day week jobs. Now that's a competitive advantage at the moment for the firms that have it. if everybody goes to it, it'll be different. But for any business person who is thinking about this now, that's one of the things to realize that you get so much more motivated, loyal people who are not going to leave. Okay. So we're down to the last part of this. Okay. I have five words that me and my producer called from your conversations and your book.

27:48I'm going to say the word and then you give me a reaction, be one or two sentences or even a word. Okay. So if I say the word burnout, Juliet, what do you say? Four day week reduces dramatically. 70 % of people on this program are less burned out. Okay. I say the word time. Value it. Don't waste it. Don't use it. Five day week is wasting time. Yeah. Again, your point is if you give me four days, I could probably do the exact same output, if not better, more efficiently than elongating it to five. What if I say work? What do you say? Work is wonderful. This is not an anti-work program. I mean, it's really about working better.

28:37Working in a way that... Your theory is you're forcing efficiency into the conversation, which will also lead to better quality of life for people. Yes. So I want to emphasize both. It's not just an efficiency program, although it is that. It's also one that, one of the things I noticed about the CEOs I talk to and the companies we work with, they actually care about their employees. It's really important. It's just important in itself. It's also important for having a good company, but work. I mean, these people are loving their work. I mean, they're just, they're a lot more into it than they are on the five-day week.