Can Sweden make the case for a 6-hour workday?

From tech start-ups to nursing homes, Sweden is experimenting with less time at work.

|
Melanie Stetson Freeman / The Christian Science Monitor / File
Commuters make their way home at the end of the workday in Gamla Stan in Stockholm, Sweden, on March 11, 2014.

Sweden, birthplace of ABBA, IKEA, and Volvo, may soon have another celebrated export: the 6-hour workday.

The practice is not yet universal, but companies across multiple sectors report positive results from the shorter day.

Brath, a tech startup, made the move three years ago for its 22 employees. Maria Bråth, the CEO, says her firm has tracked productivity and found that her team exceeds output when compared to similar tech shops. One of the biggest advantages is that it helps them hire and keep employees, Ms. Brath writes in a blog post:

We also believe that once you’ve gotten used to having time for the family, picking up the kids at daycare, spending time training for a race or simply just cooking good food at home, you don’t want to lose that again. We believe that this is a good reason to stay with us and not only because of the actual impact longer hours would make in your life but for the reason behind our shorter days.... We actually care about our employees.

"I think the eight-hour workday is not as effective as one would think," says Linus Feldt, CEO of Stockholm-based app developer Filimundus, which adopted the 6-a-day practice last year, in an interview with Fast Company. "To stay focused on a specific work task for eight hours is a huge challenge."

He continued, "In order to cope [with an eight-hour shift], we mix in things and pauses to make the workday more endurable. At the same time, we are having it hard to manage our private life outside of work. We want to spend more time with our families, we want to learn new things or exercise more. I wanted to see if there could be a way to mix these things."

Mr. Feldt adds that the change hasn't really made a major difference in how people work. The leadership team just asked people to stay off social media and personal distractions, and eliminated some standard weekly meetings, according to Fast Company.

Shorter days aren't limited to the tech sector. Toyota service centers in Gothenburg changed from one nine-hour workday to two six-hour shifts 13 years ago, while maintaining full salaries but cutting break times. Prior to making the change, employees reported burnout and customers complained of long wait times. Since making the switch, the shops "haven’t looked back," The Guardian reports.

Employees in Sweden's public sector, particularly in nursing, have experimented with fewer hours as well. In a recent experiment, nurses at a government-run retirement home were able to switch to a six-hour day for the same pay. In that case, it did cost more money, but the costs were offset by better care for patients because nurses were less exhausted, the study found.

Recent decades have seen several other experiments with the six-hour day for a full wage in Sweden. In Kiruna, a mining town in the far north, home care for the elderly moved to a six-hour day in 1989 so the working lives of female carergivers would better correlate with those of their husbands in the mines, according to The Guardian. When a new political administration took over in 2005, they ended the initiative, citing costs.

After a century in which working hours were gradually reduced, holidays increased, and retirement reached earlier, recent years have seen an increase in hours worked for the first time in history, says Roland Paulsen, a business researcher at the University of Lund. 

"Politicians have been competing to say we must create more jobs with longer hours – work has become an end in itself," Mr. Paulson says. "But productivity has doubled since the 1970s, so technically we even have the potential for a four-hour working day."

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Can Sweden make the case for a 6-hour workday?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2015/0930/Can-Sweden-make-the-case-for-a-6-hour-workday
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe