Thursday, June 25, 1998

Why companies should consider a 30-hour workweek

By DAVE MURPHY / San Francisco Examiner

You don't have to be Don Corleone to make your employees an offer they can't refuse. Just tell them that if they can come up with a way to improve productivity, you'll reduce everybody's workweek to 30 hours -- without cutting pay.

Even if they can't come up with a plan, you can bet they'll try. And try. And try. While they'd be doing it to increase leisure time, consider how a 30-hour workweek might help your business:

Attracting -- and keeping better workers.

Company A pays $800 a week for working 40 hours. Company B, its competitor, pays $800 a week for 30 hours. Where would you apply?

Sure, lots of energetic workers will want to work 40 or 50 or 60 hours a week. Great. But at Company B, they know they can cutback to 30 if business is slow or their personal life is hectic.

And when Company B employees choose to put in those extra hours, they can work at home or in the office or at a bar, for that matter. Whatever works best.

Although the 30-hour argument is more compelling for white collar jobs, it has also succeeded in manufacturing. In an excellent story about the 30-hour workweek last October, U.S. News & World Report pointed to improvements at Metro Plastics Technologies in Indiana after it switched to a 30-hour week. The quality of the product improved dramatically, and now there are hundreds of applicants for jobs that used to stand vacant for months.

The shorter week also should dramatically reduce job turn over. You'll waste less time on recruiting, interviewing and training, and existing workers won't spend countless hours covering for missing people and getting new workers up to speed.

Things have changed, obviously, since the 40-hour workweek became the standard in the 1930s.Cities are more crowded, so commutes take longer. Both parents usually work, either by choice or necessity, so child care is more complicated and housework usually has to be done by people who have already worked a full day. Technology has made work less demanding physically, but more challenging mentally.

The National Safety Council estimates that stress causes 1 million people a day to miss work. The American Institute of Stress says 40 percent of employee turnover is related to job tension. Do you think the 30-hour week would reduce those figures?

Have you at least thought about whether the parents in your company might do better if they had, say, five six-hour days so they could be home when their children are? Or that others might do better in three 10-hour shifts?

Creativity often comes in bursts. People start a great project and they're willing to work like mad because it's fun. But then they reach a plateau and the energy isn't there anymore. So they sputter until the next good idea comes along.

The 30-hour week gives them more time away from the office until they feel refreshed. Not only does that help them, it keeps them from distracting other workers who are on great projects.

If your company has trouble coming up with fresh ideas, maybe it's because you don't have any fresh people. In many careers these days, employees are tired long before they're retired.

Even in busy workplaces, people waste an awful lot of time, and not just on water cooler conversations. They make personal calls, run errands on company time and call in sick even when they're not. They're preoccupied with things like making sure their kids get home from school and hooking up with a plumber and checking out the help wanted ads.

Can you blame them?

An awful lot of things in life can be done only from 9 to 5, Monday through Friday. If workers had one free day a week, they could take care of those things on their own time, keeping the office focused on work without making you look like a tyrant.

If you give employees the challenge of figuring out what works best, they'll get rid of the wasted time -- even if they can't cut back to 30 hours -- because they have a strong incentive. But they won't volunteer those ideas now because they figure you'll just use it as an excuse to lay people off or pile on more work.

The U.S. News story pointed to what happened at J.W. Pepper & Son, a Pennsylvania sheet music distributor. For the 29 slowest weeks of the year, Pepper employees work four 7 1/2 hour days. The rest of the year, they work five 7 1/2 hour days, and they have been trained to handle several tasks so they can shift from department to department as needed. In the first six years of the new structure, sales doubled -- without adding employees.

Your workers also will be the ones putting pressure on people who waste time or call in sick excessively. After all, if one or two people forced everybody else to work an extra 10 hours a week, don't you think coworkers would, uh, gently correct them?

Employees will feel appreciated -- and so will you.

You're giving workers a strong say in how the company is run, and a vested interest in whether it succeeds. While others pay lip service to letting their workers have balanced lives, you're actually doing it. Gee, do you think that might help morale?

For your part, you have to do only two things: Give your workers a chance, and promise them in writing that you won't use their suggestions as a way to lay people off or make them work harder during a 40-hour week.

This is your chance to be the hero for a change. Don't blow it.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)