Working less, working better

The second approach is the true ideal of the four-day week, namely the 32-hour week: shorter working hours thanks to increased productivity. It has been implemented in Southern Europe (Spain, Portugal).

This formula is based on the idea of maintaining work productivity by identifying and reducing unproductive time, streamlining certain processes, notably reporting and participation in meetings. Working less, yes, but above all working better. It would in fact limit everything considered superfluous. That said, putting the organisation on a diet reduces its ability to adapt to rapid changes in its environment. For example, we now know that “down times” facilitate the exchange of information between teams.

This approach is deeply embedded in the idea that technology will compensate for any loss of productivity, a recurring theme since the publication of The End of Work in 1995 by American essayist Jeremy Rifkin. The arrival of generative artificial intelligence has brought the concept back to the forefront. Bill Gates even talks about the imminent arrival of the three-day week.

Since the advent of the industrial world, organisations have constantly sought to optimise working time. For many years, it simply kept pace with the production line. Working time and time at work were perfectly synonymous. Today, we don’t have to go to the office to work: work has moved into our personal spaces. Working time has become detached from office time. With the four-day week, the aim is to frame work in terms of time rather than space. Sarah Proust, an expert associated with the Fondation Jean-Jaurès, explains:

“What is at issue here is the organisation and distribution of work, rather the place we intend to give to work in society.”

Toward a new work paradigm?

Instead of focusing on the volume of hours, shouldn’t we be talking about the very nature of work? In the words of economist Timothée Parrique, we need to stop predicting the future of work with ideas like the four-day week, and start inventing the work of the future.

A growing body of research, notably in the wake of anthropologist David Graeber, is highlighting the loss of meaning at work, the rise of “bullshit jobs” and the “revolt of the top of the class”, to borrow the title of journalist Jean-Laurent Cassely’s book.

Unfortunately, reorganising working hours will not be enough to reengage one’s workforce. Working time is above all a “hygiene factor”, as psychologist Frederick Irving Herzberg explains. It cannot deliver the motivation so hoped-for by managers. It can only temper employee dissatisfaction. As a source of personal fulfilment and satisfaction, highers-up need to activate genuine “motivational factors”, such as by valuing the work accomplished, employees’ autonomy, or making work tasks more interesting.

Perhaps we need to create new utopias of work along the lines of Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston, Ernest Callenbach’s book (1975) that imagined three West Coast states seceding from the USA to establish a radically ecological way of life. In it, Callenbach imagines a new model of society where people only work 22 hours a week. This utopia depicts economies where a large proportion of the available hours are devoted to social, political, cultural and environmental activities. Ecotopia advocates personal and collective fulfilment before individual success. Businesses are self-managed, public transport is free, education and health are accessible to all, criminal violence is absent, universal income is in force and recycling, sobriety and degrowth are the rule.

Callenbach wanted to give us a glimpse of a world he believed to be better, not only for the environment, but also for the individual balance of each person. As we live longer than ever, and as work occupies less time in our lives, we need to imagine, not a new way of working, but a new way of living.