The five-day workweek is outdated.
In the U.S., the five-day workweek is nearly 100 years old. Henry Ford was an early adopter when, after decades of pressure to dignify laborers’ working conditions, he implemented a two-day weekend in his factories in 1926. It was mandated by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.
Today:
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Real GDP is over 17,000 times higher
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Labor productivity has increased by more than 300%
As of 2020, white collar workers in the U.S. spent just 45% of their work hours on their primary job duties. With a 40-hour workweek, that works out to only 18 maximally productive hours.
When asked what gets in the way of work, workers’ top response was wasteful meetings, followed by excessive emails.
The average knowledge worker performs the essential functions of their job in significantly less than 40 hours a week, so for many employees, a 40-hour workweek is an anachronism based on century-old standards. The professional workplace of today bears little resemblance to the workplace of the 1930s, so it’s time for the workweek to evolve too.
