Making work more efficient, with Juliet Schor
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My dad works in B2B marketing, but I never really knew what that meant. Then one day my dad came by my school for career day and told everyone in my class he was a big ROAS man. Then he just kept saying things like, the bigger the ROAS, the better, over and over. My friends still laugh at me to this day. I think it means calculating a return on ad spend.

One thing's for sure. I'll be known as the ROAS man's kid for the rest of my days. Why couldn't you just be a fireman? Or a lawyer? Why?

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Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good morning. This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.

Today's episode is going to be a longer one, part of the series where I interview fascinating people about how they take their days from great to awesome, their expertise, and any advice they might have for the rest of us. So today, I am delighted to welcome Juliette Shore to the show. She's a professor at Boston College, the author of several books, including The Overworked American, and a new one called Four Days a Week. So, Julie, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Great to be here. Yeah. So why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and your work? So I'm an economist originally, and I worked on issues of work time. I was in the Harvard Economics Department when I sort of got intrigued by a sort of theoretical error in a philosopher's book. I mean, it's kind of a strange way to get into it, but it got me looking at American work time.

And I was surprised to find that contrary to what everyone believed would happen and was happening, Americans were actually starting to work more and more. So that book came out in the 1990s and it cataloged a couple of decades of rising work time, high levels of stress, burnout, etc. And since then, I've done much more research on work and work patterns and

And in 2021, I was invited to be the lead researcher for a pathbreaking series of trials that ended up taking place all around the world with companies who were giving their employees a four-day, 32-hour workweek. So not a compressed workweek.

with full pay, but with an attempt to try and maintain their productivity. So a lot of the kinds of things that go under the rubric of personal productivity, of course, that you work on and so forth, these companies were trying to implement some of those ideas in the workplace. And

The results have been phenomenal, like very, very successful, huge increases in people's well-being and great successes for the company. Well, let's talk about...

Let's talk about that successes for the company, because, you know, I have many people here who are probably individual contributors listening to this. I also have people who are managing companies, running companies who are wondering, like, OK, I can see why, you know, your average worker might enjoy having a four day week. What's in it for the organizations? Like, why were the organizations willing to try this out?

Yeah, I think there's sort of two categories. And I talk about these in the book. The founder of the organization that ran the trials was an entrepreneur in New Zealand, a man named Andrew Barnes. And he tried it at his own finance company. He called it the 180-100. So 100% of the pay for 80% of the time.

But he asked his employees to all sign a contract saying they would get 100% of their work done in those four days. He believed there was a lot of slack in his organization. And many of the companies are in that model. So what's in it for them is they're able to maintain their productivity or maybe even increase it. And we can get into a bit more about how that happens. I think a key point of this is

Although individuals do make changes in how they do things, there's also a full organizational effort. I mean, often by teams, sometimes by the whole group together and, you know, depending on size of organizations to figure out what they're doing that isn't efficient. You know, where are they wasting time? Where are they putting a lot of time into low value activities, etc.?

And so the organization maintains its productivity, but it gets big well-being impacts for its employees. And that has multiple impacts. One is that often they report better quality of work because people are rested. They're not burning out. They are looking forward to coming to work on Monday morning. Many of them take Fridays off, Saturdays.

They don't get the Sunday scaries, et cetera. So there's that piece of it. But that also leads to the other interesting phenomenon that I call the 18080s.

100% of the pay, 80% of the work. We're not asking you to do anything more. We're not asking you to get more efficient. Why? You're already crazy efficient. You are a nurse in a hospital with no wasted time. You're the chef at a restaurant who's just working a really long day and you've already optimized out anything time-wasting, but you're burned out. And so you just need a day off to recharge.

And so for those companies or organizations, they're stopping the bleeding of the burnout, the resignations, et cetera. So for example, with some of the nurses in our studies, they rescinded resignation letters when they heard they were going to get a four-day week. And for these people, it's just life-changing because they're kind of on the edge. So

It's a paradox, I argue, because it's the low-intensity organizations that could actually

You know, they got a lot of slack there and the really high intensity that at the beginning are sort of the early adopters here where it's very easy to see how they might benefit. Yeah, well, especially on that latter one, because what I think a lot of people don't understand is the toll that turnover takes on productivity. That, you know, if you have your five member team running at full tilt, that's great, but

But when one of them leaves, you are suddenly not running at full tilt until you can, you know, hire a replacement, train that person, you know, for the first however much time they are not, you know, operating at where that person was who left. And you're also encouraging management costs in training the person. And so from an organizational perspective, if you can cut that at all, you boost productivity, even if the average person is working fewer hours. Is that what I'm hearing you say?

Absolutely, Laura. I mean, that is such an important point. So I have a sort of deep dive into a company where that was so interesting what happened. And the book is both a lot of, you know, kind of statistical findings, but also those deep dives into individual companies that represent different ways, strategies, experiences. So

This one is a global marketing company and advertising and marketing. They were the, the person who ran the trial, the manager saying like 30 to 40% turnover in that industry. And they,

So what she figured out, she did a lot of calculations with their accounting people to figure out how much it costs. But when she went, the company, which is a lot, and she said on her team, she had a 57 person team, they're constantly onboarding, hiring, training, et cetera. And when she put in the four day week, she went to zero resignations, zero turnover. Okay. And that we hear that from, you know, quite a few of our companies, but

And then what was so fascinating about it was she began to figure out, I can monetize this in my contracts. So she put in, we get a bonus if no one leaves the team. And the clients just couldn't believe it because like, what? I'll never have to pay that. Yeah. And-

Sure enough. And so it's, yeah, it's really, I mean, there's very cold, hard cash here sitting on the table, lying on the table, if you will, if you can stop those resignations in those high turnover places. And that's why we're hearing from like social service agencies, restaurants, healthcare. I mean, these are many of the places which have had these big turnover problems in recent years.

years. And, you know, of course, advertising and marketing, there's a lot of those kinds of companies in our sample. Absolutely. Well, we're going to take a quick ad break, and then I will be back with more from Juliet Shore. Hey, Before Breakfast listeners, we know you're all about making the most of your time. So here's a question. What if your lunch break could actually help you level up? Check out Front Row Seat with Ken Coleman.

Every Tuesday, Ken sits down with top experts to unpack the real questions that help you thrive at work, at home, and in your own head. We're talking questions like, what are the 10 best foods for your memory? How can you ask for the raise you want and actually get it? What's the key to finally changing your life? If you love thoughtful advice and practical strategies, just like you get here,

Front Row Seat will give you the clarity and confidence to get better, move up, and lead well, personally and professionally. So take a smart step forward today. Search Front Row Seat with Ken Coleman and listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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My dad works in B2B marketing, but I never really knew what he was doing.

I never really knew what that meant. Then one day my dad came by my school for career day and told everyone in my class he was a big ROAS man. Then he just kept saying things like, "The bigger the ROAS, the better," over and over. My friends still laugh at me to this day. I think it means calculating a return on ad spend. One thing's for sure, I'll be known as the ROAS man's kid for the rest of my days. Why couldn't you just be a fireman or a lawyer?

Why? You ruined my life, Dad. Not everyone gets B2B, but LinkedIn has the people who do. And with ads on LinkedIn, you'll be able to reach people based on job title, industry, likelihood to buy, and more. Start converting your B2B audience into high-quality leads today. We'll even give you $100 credit on your next ad campaign. Go to linkedin.com slash customer to claim your credit. That's linkedin.com slash customer. Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn, the place to be, to be.

Well, I am back talking with Juliette Shore, who's the author of the new book, Four Days a Week, looking at the results of a broad experiment with a number of organizations that experimented with a four-day workweek. So, Julie, we were talking about very intensely structured organizations where reducing turnover had a positive benefit. Now, we mentioned that there's also some organizations that have a fair amount of slack, right?

in how people are working. And I'm sure you and I have both seen the time diaries of people at some organizations who are in meetings all day or who are switching applications frequently as they're constantly interrupted. What's going on in those organizations and how are they sort of thinking about becoming more productive instead of just assuming that there's kind of an infinite number of hours that you can put at a task?

Yeah. So that's probably the more common kind of organization among the hundreds that we have been studying. So for them, I would say Ground Zero has been meetings. And that's a kind of well-known problem in these kinds of organizations. So when a company joins one of these trials, there's a

They're sort of groups of companies doing it together and they do two months of onboarding and what we call work reorganization, where we figure out with them, they go through these trainings and so on and forth. They get peer mentors, people who've done it before, figure out where they're wasting time. So meetings is a key place and a lot of them make their meetings more productive. They

reduce their numbers of meetings. And there's a huge amount of literature now on meetings and sort of how they're affecting productivity in many organizations. The flip side of that is the focus time because of that distraction problem. So many of these organizations also set

set times in the day when people will have focused time and they shouldn't be bothered and so forth, and there will be no meetings, et cetera. Other people can do that sort of individually.

But then there are other sorts of things that they do to figure out how to make it work. So in some of the manufacturing companies, they do like a process engineering exercise where they go through every stage of their process and figure out where are they wasting time, where could they slot one thing, one task into a dead time with another task. If they, you know, the brewery that I talk about in the book, they have many different tasks going on at once.

But the same thing can be done in white collar organizations where you sort of follow the chain of decision making or you follow a form going through all the steps. And so they do those sorts of things. One interesting one at Kickstarter, which was the lead company in our first US trial,

was that they realized the leadership team was not giving clear enough instructions to the programmers, you know, when they wanted them to do something and they would get stuck or go down the wrong fork for a while. So leadership team figured out how it could make its intentions clearer to itself to begin with and then

give better instructions to the programming teams, and then kind of just let them run with things. One other thing really important in certain kinds of businesses

We had a broadband provider that got a massive new contract at the same time that they went to the four-day week. And we did, in addition to all the serving, we did before and after interviews with this group. And when we came back to them, we were like, well, how did you make it work? You had this huge influx of business. And mostly it was like dealing with customer service problems, connecting and so forth. And

What they explained was, well, they finally got serious about documentation. They said, first of all, no, the four-day week is what made it viable. Otherwise, everybody would have burned out. But they got serious about documentation. And this is a more general point. If you don't put the time in up front to save you time later...

you're going to get overloaded. And so, you know, their people had previously been reinventing the wheel with customer service, but now they document it. And that's a more general point to which I think many of us, you know, don't do it, which is you get some new piece of software equipment, whatever, you don't spend the time at the beginning learning how to make it more efficient for you, because you just want to get going. And I

I call it the forcing mechanism of the four-day week because it forces you to get more efficient earlier on. Yeah, well, just in general, I think a lot of people and probably organizations too just don't treat time as valuable. And it's one thing if you're paying somebody by the hour because then obviously you know how many hours they are working and there's a natural accountability on that. But for people who aren't,

There just isn't that accountability. That's why you see one of these things. But with that, I think you mentioned in the book that it was harder for managers, though, to adopt this sort of schedule. Especially the senior. Especially senior people. The senior managers, yes. So what we heard a bit more from them is more... Some of them took that day off and that was it. So I don't want to make it seem like none of them were successful with this. But...

What some of them would do is use it a little bit as a catch-up day because nobody else was working. So this is another key thing. So you don't have any meetings. You don't have any meetings and you don't have people giving you work. Yeah, yeah.

And that's also an important principle when companies think about how are you going to do this? Is everybody going to be off on the same day? Because that's one way of making sure that people don't just get overloaded when they come back because their co-workers were putting more on their plate. They use it as a catch-up day or they work a little bit on that day. They can't take it totally off. But part of what that means is they don't have to do as much work on weekends and nights. So,

So they are getting a break. It's just a little bit different. I remember one interview I did, she talked to me about how she would work from home that day and she'd feel free to put in laundry, pick up her daughter, this, then that, which on a regular work from home day, she wouldn't feel she could do that. And so it was just, it

It was a huge blessing to them as well, even if they didn't manage to reduce by the full eight hours that many of their co-workers do. Yeah, well, I wonder, and I think you talk a little bit about this, that there's some drifting toward this, especially as...

You know, if you think about summer Fridays or more people sort of working from home on Fridays, not that they're not working. I mean, I want to put that out there. I'm a big fan of working from home. People working from home generally are working. But there probably is a tendency to leave a little bit earlier on a Friday if it's a work from home day, for instance.

And we are seeing, yeah, this is great. I call it the evolution of Fridays. We are seeing this showing up in hard numbers, interesting numbers, like in finance numbers, where like stock traders and other kinds of people, there's less activity going on or studies of business people responding to surveys, right?

And this is actually one of the interviews of a guy, a marketing...

the head of a marketing company, talked to me about how by taking Fridays off, there really wasn't as much going on on Fridays anyway. So Friday is no longer a sort of 20% productivity day in lots of places. And then I, you know, I've got a lot of anecdotal stuff in there about how things really have evolved to be different on Fridays. And

It's just it is evolving into less of a workday, especially Friday afternoons. Well, there's I mean, there's obviously some caveats here. I mean, people are like, well, OK, four days. Great. How about three? How about two? You know, I mean, there's there's some limit on this, obviously, of how much productivity we can we can wreak out of the ring out of the system. And then also with that, one of the caveats being that.

I imagine one of the things that makes this extra weekday off useful is that places are open that you could then go. I mean, one of the things people are doing is they're doing their grocery shopping or they're going to the doctor or they're doing those life maintenance things, which we couldn't then have every place only open a certain limited number of days or we'd lose that benefit. Oh, absolutely. I mean, there are many organizations in our community

trials that are 24/7 organizations and they're still 24/7s or that are five days. That marketing person I was just talking about, his company went to half teams on Monday and Friday because they wanted a full 40-hour availability for their clients, for example.

You know, another message of the book is that there isn't one formula for this, that each of these companies sort of figures out what's going to work for them based on their business, what their employees want, you know, a lot of different factors. But yeah, absolutely. You need to, if you're an access business person,

Good chance you're going to keep that access. Yeah, yeah, that people are counting on that. We're going to take one more quick ad break and then I'll be back with more from Juliet Shore. Hey, Before Breakfast listeners. We know you're all about making the most of your time. So here's a question. What if your lunch break could actually help you level up? Check out Front Row Seat with Ken Coleman. Every Tuesday, Ken sits down with top experts to unpack the real questions that help you thrive.

At work, at home, and in your own head. We're talking questions like, what are the 10 best foods for your memory? How can you ask for the raise you want and actually get it? What's the key to finally changing your life? If you love thoughtful advice and practical strategies, just like you get here, Front Row Seat will give you the clarity and confidence to get better, move up, and lead well, personally and professionally.

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Well, I am back talking with Juliette Shore, who is the author of the new book, Four Days a Week. So, Juliette, we always like to hear about how people manage their own personal productivity. I mean, you're obviously, you know, leading research and writing books and being public intellectual about things like that, and I assume have duties at your university as well. Do you have any routines that make you more productive?

It's funny you ask this because we were just talking about the Friday evolving thing. I mean, I often get asked, when I wrote The Overworked American, I was always asked, how many hours a week do you work? And at that point, I was like the poster child for needing...

a makeover by you, which was I was in the office long, long hours, and many of them were not productive. I mean, it was okay. The office was also my socializing place. I didn't have kids. I wasn't married in those early days. So with this one, of course, I get asked how many days a week I work. And I always used to say, well, I just work when I want and I don't work when I don't feel like it, etc, etc. But I noticed

About two weeks ago, someone asked me that. And I was like, you know what, Friday is evolving away from a workday for me. So productivity. Yeah. So I do think taking that Friday has really helped me. I'm feeling pretty relaxed, despite, you know, juggling a lot of balls today.

When I am writing a book or articles, I start first thing in the morning after exercise. So I have started a morning exercise routine. I do my exercising first thing in the morning. I actually run exercise classes. I'm not the teacher. I just put on the tape and do the Zoom room. But it means I have that accountability to the other people who come. Yeah.

Um, and then I, then I, you know, go trudge up to my third floor and start writing. I do find that first, uh, period of the day, the morning is most productive. I write until I just peter out, you know, if I'm writing a book, for example. Um, and that works really well for me. I just do that.

what are some of my other tips? So I think those are the two most important things. Like I have a dedicated place and time for my most, and you said that you made that point about try to do the hardest thing first. I always do that now with writing a book. I always start with my hardest chapter and dedicated time place and

exercise routine. And then I think also that point I started with just making sure I have enough rest time and relaxation and that I'm not feeling like I work all the time and I don't have time to do other things that I want. I just, I just, you know, I'm lucky because I control my own time basically. So I take as much time as,

non-work time as I feel I want. And that also makes the working so much easier because I'm not feeling like, oh, I have to work all the time. Occasionally during the semester when I'm teaching, I sometimes feel like, oh, why am I working so much? But that's, you know, that's the part of my job I can't really control. Yeah, well, that comes with the territory. Yes.

and dealing with people's messages and questions all the time, I am sure, in that role. Well, I always ask guests something, and maybe we can talk about the things maybe that you do in your non-working hours. What is something you have done recently to take a day from great to awesome? The delayed Mother's Day celebration. So my favorite thing to do is to take a bike ride on a Sunday.

Took a bike ride with my son, which was really wonderful, and then went out with son and husband, sadly daughters on the other coast, to our favorite vegetarian restaurant and had an awesome meal. And then...

play a basketball game for my wonderful team that sadly lost the Boston Celtics. We can guess where you are. And yes, sadly, well, I'm not a Boston fan myself, but I understand. I understand the feeling. The Sixers here have been a long string of disappointments lately. Yeah, for sure. Oh, well. Some year, some year. And what are you looking forward to now? So,

So two big things. One is we are extending our research into looking at the relationship between the four-day week and AI.

So our hypothesis is that four-day-a-week companies are better at adopting and using AI. There's some survey evidence that suggests that might be true, and we're going to be able to get some sort of harder evidence about that. We now have companies all around the world, hundreds of companies,

tens of, you know, more than 10,000 employees that we can go back to and find out what they're doing now. So that's pretty exciting. And I also do a lot of research on climate change and the impacts of working hours on climate change and how countries are

or places, I've done research across the U.S. too, that have reduced their working hours, actually also reduced their carbon emissions. So I've got some new papers coming up on that too. I guess that would make sense. I mean, you know, if you're not driving to and from work on Friday, that's at least one less time. And then probably the, you know, electronic activity that's going on with that too. Fascinating. Yeah, well, the AI thing, I mean, you know, people...

There was always the idea that technology would be able to reduce hours without reducing, you know, lifestyle and product because of the productivity statistics would still be high. I mean, just real quick, this is a whole separate topic, but you think that that might finally be the case with AI? Yeah.

Well, we don't know what's going to happen. I mean, I have a chapter in the book on AI. The first industrial revolution had tremendous productivity enhancing machinery and technology, and it led to big increases in hours of work. And with AI, I just think we could go down two paths. I mean, one is we could go down a similar path in which what companies do is they just lay off lots of workers and

And they buy that AI and they use it more intensively and the people they have work more intensively. And it took a long time to reverse that upward trend of ours.

from the first industrial revolution. That could happen with AI. The alternative, and the one I argue obviously for in the book, is we could actually use technology to reduce hours of work and not just lay people off, but actually share out the work more equitably and reduce hours per job, keep more and more people in work with incomes and meaningful lives,

from that work, but we're going to have to, that's going to have to be a social choice and not just something

where the companies just see the incentive. We know Microsoft just laid off a lot of workers. Yeah, absolutely. So that's going to be a really bad social outcome. We will see how it plays out. Yes, we do not know. Well, Julia, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you to everyone for listening. If you have feedback about this or any other episode, you can always reach me at laura at lauravandercam.com. In the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening. And here's to making the most of our time.

Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at laura at lauravandercam.com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

I've seen a lot of stuff over 30 years, you know, some very despicable crime and things that are kind of tough to wrap your head around. And this ranks right up there in the pantheon of Rhode Island fraudsters. I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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The one thing that can't stop you or take away from you is knowledge. So whatever I went through while I was down in prison for two years, through that process, learn. Learn from it. Check out this exclusive episode with Ja Rule on Rock Solid. Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Rock Solid, and listen now. This is an iHeart Podcast. ♪