Latest news with #Schor
CNBC
8 hours ago
- Business
- CNBC
3 ways companies successfully shift to a 4-day workweek, from a researcher who's studied hundreds of cases
The four-day workweek is no longer a pipe dream: In the last five years, hundreds of companies have piloted a four-day, 32-hour workweeks with no pay cuts to some 8,700 workers around the world. The results have been overwhelmingly positive: Workers love it (they're less burned out and more engaged) while businesses have reaped the rewards, too (with boosted profits and less turnover). Companies who successfully made the shift used three key strategies to get as much work done in less time, says Juliet Schor, an economist, sociologist and lead researcher on the experiments. Schor recently detailed the trial results in her latest book, "Four Days a Week," and told CNBC Make It about the companies' keys to success: The first is implementing productivity hacks, especially shortening or deleting meetings, making meetings more efficient, and adding protected focused time. During a typical 9-to-5, employees are interrupted every two minutes by meetings, emails and other pings, according to recent Microsoft data. The businesses Schor studied had a lot of ways to cut down on meetings. Some did a calendar audit to determine if recurring check-ins were really necessary, could be done less frequently or could be shorter. Some meetings were deleted and replaced with written status updates. Meetings that remained had to include advanced reading and an agenda so participants spent their time together discussing solutions rather than going over summaries. Finally, many businesses set meeting-free days or calendar blocks to help workers protect their schedules and get focused work done in peace. While more effective meetings and communication help white-collar offices cut down their work schedules, those who work in factories did so through process engineering, Schor says. For example, at Pressure Drop, a U.K.-based brewery that Schor studied, leaders encouraged employees to "own" the process of making their work tasks more efficient. Brewing involves a lot of tasks, but one person can do a few of them at a time if they set themselves up well. For example, it takes hours to clean machinery, but there are 30- to 45-minute periods where the operator is waiting around. Instead of letting that dead time go to waste, workers learned to start setting up the next packaging run, lining up kegs, and getting cans ready for the feed line. At Advanced RV, a motorhome manufacturer near Cleveland, Ohio, the company figured out which people were best at certain tasks, and then changed their division of labor accordingly to let people do the job they were best (and faster) at. When workers feel like they have ownership about how they get their work done, it helps them feel more capable, Schor says. This, in turn, helps them feel more satisfied in their jobs and in their lives overall, she says. Finally, many businesses went deeper to question the tasks and projects they focused their time on, and whether they lined up with their company mission and overall strategy. One company re-evaluated the purpose of one of their newsletters, Schor says. "They spent a lot of time on the newsletter and realized it just wasn't really giving them anything, but it was extremely time-consuming." The team realized they were only creating and sending out the newsletter as often as they did because they'd always done it, Schor says, though it wasn't delivering the results they wanted. So, they ended up sending it less often, thereby freeing up the time for the newsletter team to work on more high-impact projects. This level of intentionality, plus the reward of more time off work, leads employees to value their jobs more, boosts their motivation and yields company success, Schor says.
CNBC
2 days ago
- Business
- CNBC
The real reason a 4-day workweek makes people happier in their jobs—it's not just more free time
It's not exactly surprising that workers support moving to a four-day workweek. In the last five years, hundreds of companies have piloted a four-day, 32-hour workweek with no pay cuts to some 8,700 workers around the world. People experienced less burnout, stress and anxiety, and better mental and physical health. Employees rated their work-life balance higher, and even business profits grew. There are two major factors for the boost in workers' happiness, says Juliet Schor, an author, economist, sociologist and lead researcher of the 4 Day Week experiments. One, of course, is that people have more time for their families, friends, sleep, hobbies, health and communities, Schor writes in her latest book, "Four Days a Week." The second factor, however, is that workers are happier even while they're on the clock. Simply put: The four-day week makes people feel much more effective at work, and that makes them happier in general. Trial participants self-reported that they were more productive than ever after moving to a shortened week. When faced with the task of getting their usual amount of work done in less time, workers and teams found ways to cut out busywork, streamline processes and determine what work was actually most important, Schor writes. Some said they felt more stress trying to cram everything in, though those situations were the exception, Schor writes. Beyond maintaining productivity, "people just feel so much better," Schor tells CNBC Make It. "They feel on top of their work and their life, and they're not stressed out. They feel recovered when they come to work on Monday morning. They feel more eager to do work. They feel like they can get it done." When workers feel like they're good at their job, they feel good overall, and that spills into their personal lives. "That productivity bump they get, of feeling so good about their work quality, that has a big positive impact on their overall well-being, which we never expected," Schor says. The four-day workweek could also make people feel better about their jobs because it signals a new contract between themselves and their employer. The typical five-day, 40-hour workweek has been the national standard by law since the 1940s. When companies introduce a shorter workweek without a pay cut, the flexibility can be seen as an exclusive benefit or reward. It signals that management is willing to give up some control over how people structure their time, Schor says, especially if part of the goal is to explicitly improve employee well-being. The move can additionally strengthen teams when colleagues band together to work smarter in less time. The four-day week "makes everyone super motivated to implement [process] changes, which aren't easy," said Jon Leland, who previously helped Kickstarter through a four-day workweek pilot. "It makes the stakes really high, because you're not only gaining these efficiency gains just for yourself, but you're doing it for everyone else around you," Leland told Schor in her book. "This accountability to co-workers is an important part of why people are willing to make the extra effort to find efficiencies, forgo goofing off, and do the hard work," Schor writes. "They develop more team spirit."
Time of India
5 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
A 4-day workweek could boost productivity and wellbeing, says economist. But why won't we try it?
In a world still recovering from the psychological whiplash of the pandemic, the dream of a better work-life balance no longer feels like a utopia — it feels necessary. Juliet Schor , a Boston College economist and sociologist, has been advocating this shift for decades. Her latest work as lead researcher with 4 Day Week, a global initiative studying the impact of reduced working hours , suggests the idea may finally be catching on. Speaking to CNBC Make It, Schor recounted how her 1992 bestseller The Overworked American first sparked debate about overemployment. But it wasn't until COVID-19 forced a radical reevaluation of daily life that serious momentum began building. 'People realized it was more important to be living the life they wanted… not one of overworking, stress, and burnout,' she said. Explore courses from Top Institutes in Please select course: Select a Course Category Data Science Digital Marketing Design Thinking Data Analytics Public Policy PGDM Technology MBA Data Science Healthcare others Product Management Leadership Cybersecurity healthcare Project Management Finance Operations Management CXO MCA Artificial Intelligence Others Management Skills you'll gain: Data Analysis & Interpretation Programming Proficiency Problem-Solving Skills Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence Duration: 24 Months Vellore Institute of Technology VIT MSc in Data Science Starts on Aug 14, 2024 Get Details Skills you'll gain: Strategic Data-Analysis, including Data Mining & Preparation Predictive Modeling & Advanced Clustering Techniques Machine Learning Concepts & Regression Analysis Cutting-edge applications of AI, like NLP & Generative AI Duration: 8 Months IIM Kozhikode Professional Certificate in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Starts on Jun 26, 2024 Get Details The 4-Day Formula: Less Stress, More Success So what happens when companies trim the workweek to four days — without slashing pay? According to Schor's latest book Four Days a Week, which compiles insights from pilots across 245 organizations and 8,700+ employees globally, the results are not just promising — they're transformational. Participants in the pilot reported better work-life balance, less stress, and improved mental and physical health. 'The big jump in self-reported productivity is striking,' Schor told CNBC Make It. 'People feel more on top of their work and their lives. They're not coming into Mondays drained — they're eager, focused, and satisfied.' Even employers had reasons to cheer: productivity stayed stable or even rose, profits ticked upward, and employee turnover practically vanished. You Might Also Like: Bill Gates predicts 2-day work week as AI set to replace humans for most jobs within a decade — TEDTalks (@TEDTalks) So Why Isn't Everyone Doing It? Despite the evidence, the five-day workweek remains stubbornly intact in most companies. Schor attributes this resistance to one key issue: control. 'Giving people more time back feels like a loss of control to some managements,' she explains. 'It's not about performance — it's about power.' Add to that the fear of being seen as radical or deviating from the norm, and many businesses choose to stick with the status quo. However, Fridays, once sacrosanct, are already evolving. As Schor notes, most companies informally allow for 'Summer Fridays' or shorter hours at week's end. The four-day shift may simply be formalizing what's already happening. Will AI Do What Policy Can't? Enter Bill Gates — tech visionary and co-founder of Microsoft — who recently made waves on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon by predicting a two-day workweek within a decade, driven by the explosive rise of artificial intelligence. You Might Also Like: It is not just Narayana Murthy: UK venture capitalist says a 7-day workweek is the price to 'win' amid China's '996' culture Gates believes AI will soon be able to perform the bulk of tasks currently handled by humans. 'It's kind of profound,' he said. 'It brings so much change.' That change, he imagines, could free up time for creativity, caregiving, and rest — if managed ethically. Schor echoes this possibility, suggesting that AI-induced productivity gains could justify shorter hours without sacrificing pay. 'We can either lay off people en masse or reduce hours per job,' she says. 'Giving people more free time, while preserving income, is the smarter path.' Between burnout metrics that remain stubbornly high and rapid technological shifts, the traditional workweek may be on its last legs. But what replaces it — and who benefits — remains the central debate. The vision is tantalizing: a world where AI supports rather than supplants, where a four-day week is the norm, not the exception, and where people work to live, not live to work. As Juliet Schor reminds us, 'We're already on this path. The question now is, how fast can we walk it?'
CNBC
5 days ago
- Business
- CNBC
The most surprising benefits of a 4-day workweek, from a researcher who's studied thousands of cases: 'We never expected' it
Juliet Schor has been studying the benefits of working less for decades. She published her first book on the topic, "The Overworked American," in 1992. It hit a nerve: The book landed her on the The New York Times' bestseller list, into rooms with big-name CEOs and on the phone with policymakers in Washington, D.C. Then, the issue died; plans to experiment with shorter workdays and workweeks didn't pan out. The events of 2020 change everything. The Covid-19 pandemic and widespread loss of life, combined with a reimagining of how people live and work, led many to realize "it was more important to be living the life they they wanted to lead, and that was not a life of overworking stress and burnout," Schor tells CNBC Make It. In recent years, Schor, an economist and sociology professor at Boston College, has been a lead researcher with 4 Day Week, a global group of business leaders and experts studying the impacts of a shortened workweek on companies and their employees. By the summer of 2024, 245 organizations and more than 8,700 employees across the U.S., Canada, Ireland, the U.K., Australia and more had piloted 4 Day Week experiments, which primarily uses a four-day, 32-hour week model with no reduction in pay. Employees rated their work-life balance higher after shortening their weeks; they experienced less burnout, stress and anxiety, and better mental and physical health. Business profits grew and turnover disappeared. Schor compiled these findings in her latest book, "Four Days a Week," and spoke with CNBC Make It about her research. Here, she covers the experiments' biggest surprises, why more companies won't try the shortened week, whether it could lead to pay cuts and how AI advancements fit in the picture. CNBC Make It: What are the most surprising results you've seen from four-day workweek trials? Schor: The big jump in self-reported productivity is pretty striking. Beyond maintaining productivity, people just feel so much better. They feel on top of their work and their life, and they're not stressed out. They feel recovered when they come to work on Monday morning. They feel more eager to do work. They feel like they can get it done. That productivity bump they get, of feeling so good about their work quality, that has a big positive impact on their overall well-being, which we never expected. I thought that second job-holding would go up. It doesn't. In fact, on average, it falls. People really are taking that day for themselves. The pace of work didn't speed up. You'd think everybody just works really hard on those four days to get everything in. But it's a company-wide work reorganization. If the four-day workweek is so good for businesses and employees, why don't more places do it? I think the answer to that is the same answer to: Why is it that so many companies are trying so hard to get people back in the office when they don't want to go back, and when the companies have been really successful with work from home? I think there are two things: One is there's a sense in which the companies have to give up control if they're giving people more time back. Management doesn't like that. For some of these return-to-office mandates, they're really more about control than they are about performance. Second, it feels radical and risky. That's why it helps for these companies to go through a six-month or year-long pilot and see how it goes. The five-day week is very ingrained. On the other hand, Friday is kind of organically evolving in a way that is pretty clear. There's less and less work being done on Friday. Most companies don't reorganize things for Summer Fridays, they just give people that time. You're not losing a whole day's worth of productivity, because it's already a less productive day. We are evolving away from the full Friday workday. I think we need to accelerate that process. Could the four-day workweek lead companies to pay their employees less? To be in our trials, you cannot reduce pay at all. That's a requirement. I don't think cutting pay would work. People hate pay reductions that are not voluntary. Some people may ask for a trade-off of working less for less money. But for the most part, people have commitments for the money they have at any current time. Many people in our economy aren't earning enough, and so they're struggling to meet their needs. I think management would be very foolish to just try and take money away from people, because they will hate it. The standard payment model says people should get whatever their productivity is. So with this four-day week where you're not seeing a reduction in productivity, you shouldn't have a change in pay. We also see people stop quitting four-day-week jobs. The resignation rates just pretty much go to zero in many of these companies. That's where management could maybe take advantage and decide to give lower wage increases over time. I think that's possible as more companies do it. But the countervailing trend to that is they're adopting AI that makes people a lot more productive. And so the standard models say they should get wage increases as a result. Could AI speed up the four-day workweek? Could it eliminates jobs? It's really hard to keep everyone in jobs if you're displacing labor with technology. And increasingly, economists are finding that the job-killing potential of AI is really high. We're faced with two possibilities. One is: We lay off huge numbers of people, and I don't think we're going to be able to re-employ them all in a timely fashion. Then we have an economic catastrophe on our hands. Or: We gradually reduce hours per job so that as people get more productive, we're not cutting employment, we're just having people spend less time at work. If you have that productivity increase from AI, it can go to give people more free time, in which case their income stays more or less the same. Or it can go toward more work and more money. But if you have so much productivity growth, the companies can't necessarily expand that much. So what if you can suddenly produce twice as much? Is there somebody there who's going to buy that twice as much? Where's all that demand going to come from? The labor market doesn't seem favorable to workers right now. Does the four-day workweek really have momentum in the current environment? It's a very mixed picture in the job market right now. For some occupations, for AI reasons or others, it's hard to get a job. But there are others where employers are having difficulty filling positions, and they're not getting people back into the office. The latest data around hours worked at home are really steady. They are just not going down. Of course, if we have a big recession, then lots of things change. But I think we're still on a path toward moving in that direction. If you look at the numbers on stress, burnout, disengagement, people struggling in their jobs and so forth — they were at record levels during the pandemic, and they have come down since then, but not by that much. And I think that creates ongoing momentum to normalize a four-day week. Is the goal of these experiments ultimately to make the four-day workweek the national standard by law? I reached out to the head of a manufacturing company that was in our trials about possibly testifying on Senator Bernie Sanders' bill to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to set the statutory workweek at 32 hours. This person's response was: I believe very much in this. It's been really great for my company. But I don't believe in legislating it. Typically you need more momentum to get a big change like this in labor law, where you're seeing more of that practice across the economy. Like with Family and Medical Leave Act, many companies already had instituted it before it became a national standard. So we need more big companies to show how viable it is. And then my personal view is that you need legislation to pull the laggards along.
New York Post
25-06-2025
- Business
- New York Post
French toast: A taste of Montreal's best restaurants Michelin forgot
Purveyor of good taste and restaurant elitism, Michelin Group at long last debuted its inaugural guide to the province of Québec last month, and its Montréal selections have gone over about as well as day-old poutine. Despite being the province's largest city (population 1.8 million), with more restaurants per capita than New York City, Montréal received a paltry three ratings at the one-star level. Meanwhile, the province's much smaller capital Québec City (population 557,390) received four one-star ratings, and one two-star rating. 4 Caribbean fare lives at Casse-Croûte Sissi et Paul. Sissi & Paul The skewed results continued in the guide's other categories. In the Bib Gourmand category, which gives affordable restaurant recommendations, seven nods went to Montréal, and eight went to Québec City. In fact, just 43 of the province's total of 76 'recommended' restaurants are located in Montréal. And despite its reputation as a world capital of urban agriculture, low-impact sourcing, and surprisingly sippable natural and biodynamic wines, not a single Montréal restaurant received a 'Michelin Green Star' for sustainable gastronomy. But Québec City got one, and so did the rural communities of Saint-Mathieu-du-Parc and Stanbridge East. 'People have been pretty surprised that Québec City got more recognition because our food scene is much more prolific,' said Mélissa Simard, founder of Round Table Tours, which offers food tours of Montréal. The difference might have something to do with the capital's French roots feeling more familiar to Michelin Guide inspectors, she says: 'Québec City tends to be a little homogenous and traditional, and Montréal is very cosmopolitan.' 4 You'll find haute share plates at Helicopter. Helicoptere Montréal restaurateur Ari Schor scored a Michelin recommendation for the restaurant he co-owns with his brother Pablo — still he wasn't sure that the guide's offered the best snapshot of the city's food scene. 'A lot of what these inspectors look for is consistency, which can be tough for restaurants like ours which change our menus all the time,' said Schor. Beba's rotating menu reflects the brothers' Mediterranean, Argentine and Canadian roots, with decadent ingredients like caviar, beef tongue and foie gras making frequent appearances. 4 Feast upon fusion fare at Bar Saint-Denis. Matthieu Goyer He worries that a city whose food scene champions creativity, diversity and vibrancy might be at odds with the Michelin guide's framework. 'You can come to Beba three times in a week and have three completely different meals,' said Schor. 'We were super stoked we got recognized, but I'm not sure that recognition is what we strive for. What I do know is that we probably sell more caviar than any restaurant in Montreal.' Chews wisely These are the Montréal restos local critics love — but Michelin missed. 4 Italian cooking is Impasto's specialty. Courtesy of Impasto Impasto House-made pastas and southern Italian specialties make this Italian fine dining spot a standout amongst the many excellent restaurants of Little Italy (48 Rue Dante). Alma Should you really trust the French to with Mexican food? Sí, senor. The Culinaria Mexicana's Gastronomic Guide 2025 just named this Outremont hotspot the world's best Mexican restaurant outside Mexico (1231 Ave. Lajoie). Chalet Bar-BQ Montréal has a serious love for rôtisserie chicken, and Chalet does some of the best. Think golden skin, crispy coleslaw and a healthy dousing of brown gravy (5456 Rue Sherbrooke Ouest). 'People have been pretty surprised that Québec City got more recognition because our food scene is much more prolific.' Mélissa Simard, founder of Round Table Tours Hélicoptère The bounty of Québec takes center stage at this Hochelaga eatery, where an inventive, ever-evolving menu of share plates highlights local ingredients paired with natural and biodynamic wines (4255 Rue Ontario Est). Nouilles de Lan Zhou Don't fear the line at this Chinatown noodle shop: Watching the kitchen hand-pull noodles here is a mesmerizing experience (1006 Boulevard Saint-Laurent). Bar Saint-Denis A little French, a little Canadian, a little Mediterranean — the menu here represents Montréal's diverse approach to Francophilia. Think boudin with apples in red wine sauce, and fresh razor clams sprinkled with tabbouleh (6966 Rue Saint-Denis). Casse-Croûte Sissi et Paul A robust Haitian population makes Montréal a solid spot for Caribbean cooking. This takeout-only joint serves some great griot pork shoulder marinated in spices and citrus (2517 Rue Jean-Talon Est). Snowdon Deli There's a rich tradition of Jewish delis in Montreal, and this one has been slinging potato latkes and Montreal's signature smoked meat sandwiches since 1946 (5265 Boulevard Décarie).
