Work

Last week I read that a study Microsoft conducted in Japan determined that working fewer hours increased productivity by 40%.  It made me think of “summer hours” at my last college, when employees worked longer days Monday-Thursday in order to have Fridays off. I knew the long weekends were a great benefit (for the employees, how it affected our ability to serve students is an issue for another time). But I never believed the longer hours were productive. If this kind of research were available perhaps we could simply have moved to a four-day work week, but that was impossible for a publicly funded institution at that time. Even if hours did not equate to outcomes, we had to show that taxpayers got their money’s worth.

A few days later I read an article in the NY Times, “What if You Had a Four Day Week? Why Don’t You? ” by Niraj Chokshi, which explored the reasons why even evidence like this would not likely result in Americans working fewer hours.  One of the authors Chokshi cites is Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt, author of Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream. “We value work more than any other culture in the history of the world,” he says. “We value work as an end in itself.”  Fifteen years ago, my daughter was working in New Zealand. One reason she loved it there was, she said, “They worked to live, rather than living to work.” Work was what you did five days a week so you could spend the weekend fishing, hiking and enjoying the outdoors. Which is not to say that I didn’t meet work-obsessed businesspeople from New Zealand.  It just wasn’t the dominant culture.

As many of my friends consider retirement, they talk about their fear of being adrift without their work identity. Not only do they wonder how they will fill the hours, but even more profoundly, who will they be? At the other end of the work spectrum, millennials entering the workplace appear to have some different values. They see work as part of life, and they won’t sacrifice family and other interests.  According to Hunnicutt, “My generation, the baby boomers, may be the last true believers in this really bizarre belief that work can really answer all of our questions as human beings.”  

I hope he’s right.