Resilience and the Four-Day Work Week with Professor Sir Cary Cooper

My somewhat illustrious returning guest today is Professor Sakari Cooper CBE , the 50th anniversary prof of organizational psychology and health at Manchester Business School , University of Manchester . Sakari , welcome back to the show . It's a pleasure to have you back on today .

I'm a chair of the National Forum for Health and Well-Being at Work , which is mainly over 50 employers , very senior people in it , directors of health and well-being , hr directors , chief medical officers of global companies based in London yeah , and , we look at health and well-being .

We actually do things rather than just sit and talk about them , and I think well-being is a big . It's now a strategic issue for many organizations , not just the global ones . It's becoming quite big in the SME sector , but particularly the EMS , and gradually we're filtering down even to the smaller organizations .

In your opinion because you're the expert you know Is the 4D work week , is that a way to ensure better work-life balance or does it actually offer its own stresses ? So , for example , employees working longer hours during those four days , scrambling to get tasks done so that they can have that fifth day off ?

So , okay , and the studies that have been done in Iceland , and so many studies already been done . The first one was done in Gothenburg in Sweden , where that was public sector workers . Half of them were put on a 30-hour weekend , half of them on a 40-hour , paid the same amount of money , and that went for two years .

That was a big one , right , and the ones who were working 30 were much more productive , more job-satisfied , etc . Okay , but again , it was local authority workers , all right , working for local government , okay . So there are studies and the studies tend to be reasonably positive , but they're not a representative sample of all the sectors that we have . Okay .

So my take on this is the following we are , by the way , in the US and Canada . They've always had the short working week option in many companies , that is to say , you could work for 10 hour days I'm sorry for 12 hour days or whatever .

You could do something like that , the shortened working week , rather than a 30 or 35 hour week where you get paid the same as you paid for a 40 hour week . That's what the 4D working week as a concept is . More it's more . On that , you know we're gonna pay it the same as you work 40 , but you only have to work 30 .

My own view is , if you're a really advanced organization , you talk to your employees and see what they want to do and not why is there one size fits all . Can you imagine telling everybody you will now be working a 4-day working week because the evidence is that , on balance , that's a more productive thing , gives you better work-life balance ?

What about talking to your employees and saying what would you like to do , given our sector , given what we do , what works for you , and then let's see if it works for our clients , our customers , and works for us as an employer , and come up with some kind of model . And even within a company it might be .

Some should be working , would like to work a 4-day working week , and it's possible given their function , their functional role , and some might want to continue to work with 5 days a week . Some might want to do a short , compressed working week , you know , for 12-hour , 4-10-hour days , I mean it .

There's no one size fits all and every sector is going to be kind of different . But isn't it about communication between management and and their staff ? That's what it should be about , and then you could work something out .

I think , if you impose the 4-day working week , saying the evidence is first of all , the evidence doesn't hit every sector at all and it's very limited that we have the sectors that are the companies that are participating in the studies that you're seeing . So I would say this is HR .

Again , hr should , rather than pick up what let's do the trendy thing because it'll get people more flexible , it'll get people better work-life balance . But once you find out from your employees what they would like , they may come up with something extremely novel , and it may be . Some workers should be 4-day working .

See , I have problems with the people who are in jobs where they can work hybridly . Right , because they get better balance . No , not hybridly . Forget the word hybrid , let's use the word flexible . Hybrid tends to mean in our vernacular , since post COVID , tends to mean 2 plus 3 .

You go in two days a week or you go in three days a week , right , and that's nonsense . It should be flexible . It should be . This is what I would like as an employee . You're the employer , what do you like ?

We reach a psychological contract of what suits us both the days I you want would like me in , the days I would like to not come in , or come in and you develop it . And that's what HR should be , in my view , should be about . So the flexible people who can do that , who are in personal services and service-based thingies . They can work that way .

What about the people who have to be at the cold face five days a week Nurses , doctors , bus drivers , pilots what about them ? What about all those people who have to be at the cold face ? And for people like that , probably a four day , particularly people who are on stressful jobs like working in a hospital , for example .

Maybe those people should be on a four-day working week Again . Talk to them about it , because they're under intense pressure and that's emotional labor . That's scary . You're working in a job which has to do with people's lives day in and day out . Even a porter in a hospital sees people dying , sees very ill people . That's emotional labor . Should those people be ?

What kind of arrangement would you like with them ? What would help them with their work-life balance , with have healthy living where they don't burn out ? And in that context , maybe a four-day working week for those kinds of jobs very stressful , driving buses in London , driving buses in LA , in New York , cab drivers , I mean who knows .

But the point I think I'm trying to make is there's a difference between people , because at the moment I think the flexible working arrangements probably don't necessarily require a four-day working week because people are working partly from home , partly from a central office .

They balance their work-life balance quite nicely and maybe don't even have to work , maybe aren't actually working five days a week because they made it up in the loss of commute time big time . You drive into a city like New York , in and out of it from Connecticut or wherever you're going , or LA or whatever . You're taking up two or three hours commuting .

Right , you're working from home . You don't have to work a 40-hour week in a way , if you're going to be working from home , not fully but flexibly . So it's not either , or Either there's a four-day working week or a five-day working week . Talk to your employees , figure out what suits them and within an organization , there's going to be big differences .

The more you engage them , the more you involve them in decision-making , the more they're going to commit to you because they think you trust and value them and you're going to listen to them .

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It focuses on how orgs are coping with the challenges of low growth , energy insecurity , higher levels of longer term sickness due to stress , etc . Can you tell us a bit about the book ?

, you know . And what is organizational resilience it's about ? It's just like individual resilience . It's like do I have a sense of purpose , can I work flexibly , do I feel valued ? How do we create , how do we create cultures in organizations like that ? How do we give our people a sense of purpose ? How do we make them feel valued ?

Not just the American bullshit , have a nice day type stuff . But you mean it . When you develop people , you encourage them , you recognize them when they do a good job . You don't . It's not a command and control culture and it's about that . It's about giving people a sense of purpose , allowing the kind of flexibility , making him feel part of it .

And I think we ought to be considering more often now Employee involvement in the business itself . I mean the organizations in the UK and other European countries , for example , that have some share ownership and you get that . In smaller Organizations they get much more .

The SMEs tend to do that and I think that's really useful way of Retaining really talented people , making them feel part of the business . I don't think that's going to happen very much in North America , well , at least in the United States , maybe in Canada more , but I'd like to see more of that .

I think we I think that would be a nice thing to do small organizations understand that's a one way you retain really top talent and you create a much more resilient organization .

I mean , I enjoy writing and I enjoy editing , because what you do when you edit a book is Is you're getting academics from different parts of the world , like I did a book called flexible work and I did that prior to the pandemic . It came out in March 2020 .

I was very lucky man , oh , in May 2020 , but we had done it prior to that and I went to academics and that's when flexible working People wanted it but weren't taking it because it were frightened that their employer would feel they were less committed . So we went , I went to Australians and Americans and review the evidence .

Academics and said review the evidence on this . Tell me , in your part of the world , is Flexible working contributing to the bottom line ? And the answer overwhelming . Who was yes . Then the pandemic hit and Then we were working a hundred percent remotely and then we realized we could do it and then it became okay to do it .

So we they wanted to do it 10 , 15 years before that , given that ? No , about 10 years , given the technology was around to enable us to do it . It was only from the pandemic that we learned we could work flexibly because we had the technology to back us up . And so I like editing books , because you're getting a perspective from different people .

They could be practitioners , doesn't have to be just academics . What do practitioners , what do HR directors think ? And some of my books have HR directors in them Telling us what they think we should be doing in the space of well-being or in flexible work or whatever , and you learn a lot from listening to people .

You know what are the metrics and there are objective and subjective . So the objectives were what's the sickness absence rates ? What's the present he is some rates ? What's the labor turnover rates ? What's the talent retention rates , etc .

Then there's subjective how you perceive how you're managed , how you perceive whether you can have flexible working with you wanted or not , how trusted you feel , how job satisfied you are . The metrics are right . Then we need to change the organization .

We do need at the at the board of all companies and all public sector bodies Like , by the way , in the National Health Service we have in the UK . Every hospital has a non executive director on the board of that hospital . Who's responsible for employee health and well-being , because somebody has to look at those metrics .

Those metrics , by the way , should also be in the company accounts so that not only are they looking at the bottom line indicators profits , turnover profits etc but they're looking over what is labor turnover here ? Are we losing good people ? What's our stress-related ill health record for absenteeism , etc , etc .

If we had those indicators and somebody at the top table who's responsible , some non-executive director on the board of a company , on the board of a public sector body , who could say who's responsible ? Hey , I just discovered our labor turnover in that important part of our business is horrific . We're losing good people , full turnover , we call it People .

You can't afford to lose that . Somebody should say , okay , now , director of health and well-being or HR . What are you doing about it ? Let's get this sorted . Why are we losing those people ? Why do we have mental health ? Why is depression and anxiety so high in our sickness-absence figures ? What the hell is going on here ? What are we doing wrong ?

We're not doing something's wrong here .

I think if you talk strategic , it's no longer about mindfulness at lunch , sushi at your desk , mental health , first aid . What we need to do is not the low-hanging fruit in the well-being arena . We need to have the right organizational structure and accountability at the top table .