Monday — Friday: Making the most of the workweek

0:00This message comes from Charles Schwab with their original podcast, Choiceology. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind people's decisions. Download the latest episode of the latest. Now is your dream big delivered at Ted conferences to bring about the future. We want to see around the world to understand who we are from those talks. We bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're going to find challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy and even change you? I literally feel like I'm a different person.

0:43Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading from Ted and NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Back in the late 90s and early aughts, companies that were churning out new software and internet tools had to start making business decisions just as quickly. And so a new ethos for business was born. You've probably heard of it. Move fast and break things. The mandate being handed to entrepreneurs was to sprint. And if you hit some things with your tail along the way, that's just the cost of doing business. This is leadership coach Anne Morris. Anne saw this, at times, reckless strategy play out again and again.

1:34This ethos of move fast and break things was encouraged and rewarded by the people writing the checks. So the venture capital community at this time was very clear that it was growth that mattered, speed of growth that mattered, and everything else was secondary. And your job as a company builder was to deal with the collateral damage later. And later eventually arrived about five years ago. Yeah, I mean, the moment was when the phone started to ring. Anne and her wife, Harvard business professor Francis Fry, started getting these calls. You know, Uber called, Riot Games called. WeWork called too.

2:19Anne and Francis, can you help us clean up the wreckage here? That's when we got involved. CEOs were imploding. Their rash methods stopped working once their companies were established. They'd built businesses, but no sense of trust. And so Anne and Frances started studying how successful CEOs were approaching the changing market. The most effective change leaders were not moving fast and breaking things. They were moving fast and fixing things. And they were moving with urgency and building trust at the same time. Anne decided to turn their approach into a method, one she could teach to CEOs or anyone who was struggling at work.

3:04This is really for anyone who wants to solve problems and has them, which describes most of the people on the planet. We spend so much of our lives working. In the U.S., the average person will put in about 90 ,000 hours during their lifetime. And most of us would like to make all that time at work better. So on this episode, Monday through Friday, ideas from the front lines of work. From how we structure the work week, why we valorize work, and what we can do to give our work meaning. So let's get back to Anne Morris and the method she developed. It's a playbook for fixing problems quickly. She frames it around the work week.

3:50Each day, a step towards a big change. It's Monday through Friday. Each day has a distinct agenda that builds on itself. And the headline is that you earned the right to move fast by Friday by moving through these steps. And the payoff is speed. So let's start with Monday. Good morning. It's Monday. Your job today is to identify your real problem. Which may not be the problem that you thought you had just a minute ago. Here's Anne Morris on the TED stage. As human beings, we tend to be overconfident in the quality of our thoughts. particularly when it comes to diagnosing our own problems. My investors don't get it.

4:33My Gen Z employees are entitled. My dog is mad at me. The thing that's going to help you out most today is your own curiosity. So turn that original diagnosis, my Gen Z employees are entitled, into a question rather than a statement. What's going on with my Gen Z employees? Now, your next move sounds obvious, but you might be surprised to learn how infrequently people actually do it. Talk directly to the other people who have a stake in your problem. Ask them things you might not normally ask in polite company, things that require a little courage on your part. Sometimes just a single brave conversation can reveal an entirely new structure to your problem.

5:14Some of you will discover, for example, that you have a role to play in creating the problem that you're now solving this week. You might discover it's you who feels entitled to burn them out and pay them less than what they're worth. simply because that was the broken work contract that you put up with at their age. Whatever it is you learn today, you're going to be closer to understanding what's really getting in the way of the relationship or the organization or the life you want. All right, excellent first day, everyone. Get some rest. It's Tuesday, Anne. Oh, it's Tuesday. All right, what do we do today?

5:53Tuesday, we're solving for trust. The mission of today is really to create a good enough plan to strengthen the relationship at the center of your problem. So we call it learning day or experiments day. We really want you to be in a learning mindset on Tuesday. Can we apply this to an example? Like, let's say someone wanted to figure out why they were passed over for a promotion. Yeah. So ideally on Monday, they would have learned the reason they were passed over for promotion. And that probably took a brave conversation because it's easier to conclude someone knew the hiring manager. It was political.

6:34That's an easier conclusion than the harder work of figuring out, okay, well, what was my role in the outcome here? So let's say you have a conversation with your boss and she's pretty direct. I wasn't convinced you could do the job. And so then on Tuesday, you need to do some brainstorming, come up with a plan. Absolutely. So here's a stretch assignment I think I could do. Let's try it. Let me show you what I'm capable of. Let me lead the next staff meeting. Let me go out and bring in a new customer. Why don't you come with me on the next sales call and I'll show you what I can do? Literally set up experiments that have the potential to solve the problem.

7:23Okay, so we've identified the problem. We've come up with a plan. Now it's on to Wednesday. On Wednesday, your job is to do something that adults generally don't like to do. It's to make new friends. But the research is really clear that whatever problem you're trying to solve this week, you're going to be better at solving it with people who don't already think like you do. So describe your good enough plan, the one you came up with yesterday, to someone whose life experience has been materially different from yours. If you've been at the company for a decade, talk to someone who started last week.

7:58If you're a white partner, talk to a black partner. If you're queer like me, talk to the straightest person you can find. Contrary to what you may have heard recently, they're everywhere.

8:14And when you're done with that conversation, have another conversation with someone else who's different from you on some other gorgeous dimension of the human experience. This is going to take you all day, and some of you are going to be surprised to discover that it's your favorite day of the week. At the end of the day, you're going to be smiling, and your good enough plan is going to be an even better plan.

8:38Good morning, it's Thursday. You're so close. Your job today is to tell a good story. Why is that important? Who am I? Telling a story makes it sound like I'm making something up, but that's not what you're asking us to do. No, I think there's two levels. I think when we're working in systems like an organization, stories, they help us make sense of change. They help us find our place in what we say, the script of it. but they also help you to activate and focus all the other people you're going to need to help you with that change. At the individual level, stories also give you a really strong why as to why are you going to go to all this trouble to change your behavior?

9:21It's not easy for humans to do, so it helps a lot for us to get in touch with the payoff. We did some work with Uber when it was going through its very public crisis in leadership. And when the new guy came in, the new CEO, and hosted his first all-hands meeting, he committed to retain the edge that had made Uber a force of nature. Now, this line was met with thunderous applause, the applause of relief. Listen, Uber had serious problems to solve, as anyone reading the news could figure out. But the people in that room had built something extraordinary. And they had something real to lose in an uncertain future.

10:03Instead of setting himself up as some kind of company savior, the new guy honored that complicated truth. Honor the complicated truth of the people around you, the ones who aren't so sure about all your big plans. Then tell us why you want to change things. Finally, tell us about the future in vivid and specific language. Tell us what it's going to feel like when your story becomes our reality. Okay, TGIF. TGIF. This is the payoff day, Manoush. Now you get to do stuff. Now you get to go as fast as you can. You've earned the right to go fast because you're far more likely to succeed and you're far less likely to break things.

10:45Can we go back to the example you gave about a boss who's trying to figure out why their Gen Z employees aren't happy? What is that boss doing on Friday? Yeah, so maybe one of the things that surfaced in your conversation with your Gen Z employees is that they're impatient to make progress in their careers. What they're saying is, I came here to get real skills. I came here to get in touch with my ability to make a contribution. And I don't want to wait. and after doing the hard work, you got in touch with, I don't wanna wait on Monday. You came up with a plan on Tuesday. You got some great ideas on Wednesday from maybe people who weren't at the table at the brainstorming table on Tuesday.

11:36You told a whole story to the company about why this is important and also helpful to the business. And now you do it. These are projects that matter enough that we're going to speed them up and they're going to move past all the other projects because they matter. And I think that's really an opportunity to signal this is a priority. It's a priority for me as a leader. It's a priority for the business. I've heard you and we're going to make this happen. I can imagine someone also saying, this sounds great. I really need to clear my calendar for Monday through Friday approach sometime very soon.

12:13But gosh, not now. We're so busy. My calendar's packed. I can't take the time to do this. We hear that all the time. People ask all the time what the right time to start is. And the answer is always, you know, what about now? Now seems like a pretty good time. I mean, but you're saying clear your calendar because none of that work matters? Is that what you're saying? No, no, no, no, no. Listen, you have my blessing to take longer than a week, Manoush. Oh, okay. What I don't want you to do is to take months and even years, which tends to be our timeline for solving hard problems. That's Anne Morris.

12:55She's a leadership coach and author. Her new book is called Move Fast and Fix Things, The Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving Hard Problems. You can see her full talk at TED.com. On the show today, Monday through Friday, I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.

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14:46Find Fixable wherever you listen. This message comes from the Hartford. Every day, they create unique risk solutions for unique businesses. They understand the challenges businesses face today and are ready to anticipate the risks of tomorrow. Their teams know the ins and outs of specific industries, so The Hartford can help provide insurance solutions for midsize and large businesses. If a business needs it, chances are they've got it and get it. Connect with your underwriter at The Hartford or visit thehartford.com. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. And today on the show, Monday through Friday, making the most of the work week.

15:27But what if that meant working Monday through Thursday? Exactly. The five-day week is less sensible. It's seen as something that is antiquated that we need to move beyond. This is economist Juliette Shore. And I am the lead researcher for the four-day week trials being organized around the world by Four Day Week Global. You may have heard about companies experimenting with a four-day workweek, some by trying to pack 40 hours into four days. Juliette's model is a bit different. I should stress that this is a 32-hour workweek, not a compressed, not four tens, but four eights. But before we talk about working less than five days a week, let's go back to a time when workers were trying to work less than seven days a week.

16:22The movement actually started in the U.S. The U.S. was out front on work time reduction in comparison to other industrialized countries. That really started in the 1870s. We were the first to get to a six-day week, and then we were the first to get to a five-day week, which was originally passed in 1938. Now, over eight decades later, Juliet thinks American workers are at another breaking point. employers have pushed people too hard. They've pared back their staff, and that means more work for the people who remain. They've increased the levels of insecurity that people are operating with. The levels of distress and what we call ill-being rather than well-being have really skyrocketed in many, many labor forces around the globe.

17:20When you raise a four-day week with people today, it feels not only feasible to them, but it feels necessary. Here's Juliette Shore on the TED stage. A growing number of companies are offering a four-day, 32-hour week, but with five days of pay. Sound pretty great? But, hmm, is it realistic? Well, actually, yes. In most cases, they are as productive in four days as they are in five. With colleagues, I'm studying four-day week trials now in progress in the United States and Ireland, the UK, New Zealand, and Australia. We have thousands of employees participating. Now, a key part of the model is that in return for the gift of a day off, people are willing to squeeze all their productivity into four days.

18:22So while they may be spending less time at work, they're not necessarily doing less work. The secret sauce is work reorganization, cutting out the least productive activities. Meetings are a prime target. Most companies, yes, I see everyone nodding. Most companies reduce their frequency and length and the number of attendees. People save time by messaging colleagues rather than making phone calls, which inevitably includes some social chatting. They shifted personal tasks like doctor's appointments to the off day. And yes, the pace of work at the office does go up. But people have adapted and they prefer getting their downtime as a whole day off rather than in snippets.

19:14Okay, so you have all of these dozens of companies trying this out. Let's talk about your findings and how you measured whether they were successful or not. So let me start with the employee data first. We have a large number of well-being outcomes. We ask about stress, burnout, positive emotions, negative emotions, anxiety. So people are just much, much better off. They are also doing things like exercising more and they're sleeping better. Family conflict is reduced. and 97 % of them want to continue with the four-day week. I can also tell you how much it's worth to them financially. We ask people, if you were to think about your next job, what would you need in terms of salary changes to go back to a five-day week?

20:17We've got about somewhere between 11 % and 13 % who say no amount of money would ever induce them to go back. We've got a sort of similar number who say they need more than a 50 % increase. So a huge increase. And then the biggest group are in the sort of 25 to 50 % increase. So it's worth a lot to them. Okay, so that's the employee perspective. What about the employers and their bottom line? Yeah, employers have been really happy with this. Only a few companies out of all of these scores of companies that have gone through these trials have decided to go back to a five-day week. Companies are rating the trial slightly lower than the employees, more like about an 8.5, but still that's a very high rating.

21:11We are tracking revenue, which tends to increase over the trial. We're seeing absenteeism fall. We're seeing new hires go up and we're seeing resignations fall. So it's working. What about jobs that are not based on the amount of work you get done, but are based on people who are paid for showing up? Yeah. These are what we would call really high-intensity workplaces where there really isn't slack in the work process. But these are many of the professions where you see people burning out. Teachers, doctors and nurses and other healthcare professionals, maybe social workers. I don't think you can increase the intensity of their work.

21:58I don't think you can squeeze out 20 % and have them do as much in four days. You don't want to do that. they're already working too intensively. What you want to do is give them a break. In 2014, the city of Gothenburg in Sweden gave nurses at one of its facilities a six-hour day. As expected, the nurses' health and overall well-being improved, as did productivity and patient care. They hired new staff for the hours that weren't being covered. The striking finding was how much lower sick pay and unemployment benefits helped offset those additional salaries. Now, the Swedish case raises a bigger, more existential question.

22:46How much time should we be dedicating to work? In many countries, jobs are getting more, not less demanding. And scarcity thinking, the idea that even rich countries need to tighten their belts, has taken hold. But really, we should be heading in the opposite direction. As digitization and artificial intelligence offer the chance to reduce work time, we should be doubling down on restoring the quality of life and our social fabric, especially in wealthy countries where we already produce enough for everyone to have a good standard of living. And yes, we're going to need government help if we're going to move beyond the innovative companies that already see its virtues.

23:34But as the three-day weekend spreads, we can realize everyone deserves a right to free time. The four-day week is a down payment on a new way to live and work. So what do you want to see happen with this study? Like, what do you think happens next? If you prove that it's doable, that it works for both employees and employers, what's the goal? So you use the word proof. We would like a stronger standard of proof than we have right now. We would love expanding beyond the kinds of companies that have been most likely to do this now. So, yes, this is a disproportionately white-collar sample. So we want to have more companies that are in manufacturing and construction and that have more blue and pink collar workers.

24:31And we would like to see a more diverse labor force in terms of race and ethnicity than we have. And sort of more lower wage workers. We have hourly workers. We have lower-wage workers in this sample, but not as many as they are present in the labor forces. I think that every kind of job in the economy is compatible with a four-day workweek, but there are sort of different pathways to get there for different kinds of jobs. One kind of job that's notorious for long hours, low wages, and exhaustion is restaurant work. In this industry, burnout is real. Burnout is really real for chefs and salaried managers in particular.

25:22And when people burn out, you lose really talented, well-trained people. Howie Kiebel manages a group of Italian restaurants in Albuquerque, New Mexico, called Matucci's. The restaurants hit the mark of making people feel at home, comfortable. It's the kind of place you can spend two, three, four hours with your friends at. So a few years ago, Matucci's decided they needed to make a change. We did an internal measurement of our turnover, and we were at just over 40. Regular, casual restaurants, 80 % turnover. So we were already doing much better than most restaurants. of our caliber, but still, 40 % is a lot.

26:08Most were working five to six days, 60 hours a week. We were aiming to cut that down to 46 to 48. So we didn't have, you know, the drop in hours that, you know, corporate America would typically experience. They decided to give the four-day workweek a try, even though they knew it would be tough. There are going to be nights where managers have to stay super late. Chefs are going to have to prep overtime. But what we wanted to do was guarantee three days off a week. And in our industry, that is really rare. We hired one extra manager to handle this entire thing. And the results were really good.

26:53After our eight-month trial, we had not lost a single manager in eight months. that's really unusual our retention rates were awesome 100 managers would say well i finally get to plan like these road trips new mexico is a wonderful place within an hour of mountains and desert and it's gorgeous so they're taking a lot more road trips but they've also said you know just having that chill time on the couch with my kids uh you know an extra day every week has just made my commitment to my work so much stronger. As it is, we're getting talent from all kinds of other restaurants. We have managers and chefs applying and saying, I want to be a part of what you're doing.

27:44Juliet, would you say that switching to a four-day work week, yes, it's about rethinking how work gets done, But also, it's about getting people to rethink how they use the time when they're not at work. Absolutely. The four-day week touches everything. It touches what's happening in the workplace, of course, but it touches our health. It touches our relations with people outside the workplace. It gives people time to be active in their communities and to care for other people. We've also been looking at the climate benefits of a four-day week, the reduced commuting that's involved. Reduced work time is a very potent climate policy.

28:30So it's really something that has a big impact far beyond the workplace. It's a really positive social innovation. And I think that part of why people feel so excited about it now is that it feels feasible in a world in which the problem seems so big. Here's one solution that really matters, that has a big impact, and that it's pretty clear we can institute right now, today. Juliette Shore is an economist and sociology professor at Boston College. You can see her full talk at TED.com. On the show today, Monday through Friday. So Juliet wants to prove that you don't need to work long hours to be a hard worker.

29:21But why is that so difficult for us to believe? We tend to see this automatic connection between effort and moral value. Azeem Sharif is a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia. And what I've been studying is the moral worth that people attach to work. In other words, why do we see people who work hard at anything as better people? When we look at the work that people do, we're making a whole lot of assumptions about their character, about their moral character. People who work hard are seen as virtuous. To test how we judge people, Azeem did a study where he asked participants about two hypothetical guys.