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Should You Ditch the 40-Hour Work Week?

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According to the September 2022 Digital Etiquette: The Reinventing Work Report from Adaptavist, 58% of workers want the 40-hour work week to end. Also, 47% want a 4-day work week. Additionally, approximately 60% of respondents say the quality of work should be used to measure productivity rather than the number of hours worked.

This research shows how workers are shaping and adapting to their workplaces. The survey covered issues such as collaboration, communication tools, health and well-being, and the future of work for both hybrid and onsite workers.

The results indicate the changing shift from traditional workweeks to modern setups that better fit employees’ needs. This indicates that hybrid and remote work should be here to stay.

Discover why the 40-hour work week should be shortened to meet modern-day employee needs.

Changing Employee Needs

When the 40-hour work week began, most women stayed home to provide childcare, cook, clean, and run errands. Today, this concept no longer is reality.

According to an April 2022 news release from the U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Statistics, 70% of women who are mothers currently engage in paid work. Most of these women also handle the majority of childcare and household needs.

Working for 40 hours each week while trying to maintain a household puts unreasonable stress on employees. This increases the odds of employee burnout. As a result, the 40-hour work week must change to accommodate the changing needs of the workforce.

Increasing Employee Burnout

A 2021 joint report from McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.org showed that 42% of women and 32% of men were experiencing burnout. Although many employers recognize growing employee exhaustion and overwhelm, the issue of burnout continues to worsen.

A significant source of employee exhaustion is the drastic changes in sleep patterns resulting from chronic stress due to the coronavirus pandemic. Many employees are staying up later to take time for themselves. This interferes with the ability to get productive sleep.

Another source of employee exhaustion is mothers who put in increasing hours of both paid and unpaid work each week. Lacking time for necessary self-care and sleep increases feelings of overwhelm and depletion.

As a result, burnt-out employees tend to feel less empowered, be less productive, and not perform their best at work as compared to other employees. They also have lower odds of being promoted.

Leaving behind the 40-hour work week would give employees more time to take care of their personal needs. This would increase employee engagement, productivity, and performance.

Reducing the weekly number of hours worked also would elevate employees who are mothers into more senior roles. This is especially important for companies that have few women in leadership positions.

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Communication Strategies to Improve Team Collaboration

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Effective communication and collaboration skills are important for your team. Your team members need to share, develop, and implement their ideas in order to solve problems and complete projects. This is why it is important for you to provide the appropriate tools and support to facilitate communication and collaboration among your team. The following examples can help reach this goal.

These four strategies can promote communication and collaboration among your IT team.

1. Provide an Agile Collaboration Tool

An agile collaboration tool facilitates team communication and incremental steps to finish projects. It lets your team members assign and prioritize tasks. This lets your team know what needs to done right away and what can wait. It also keeps them informed about individual and team objectives, due dates, and milestones. It also keeps your team on track and working toward the same goal.

Your team members can share information, see their progress, and determine whether there are any issues to resolve. They also can provide feedback and measure performance. Because the project is delivered in increments, there should be faster movement and more flexibility for planning and responding to change.

2. Use a Messaging Hub

A messaging hub collects your company’s digital messages and stores them in a cloud database. This includes emails, voice over internet protocol (VoIP) phone calls, Tweets, and more.

Your team can access the information from anywhere without having to streamline their operating systems or devices. They also can more easily navigate their emails to determine which messages to pay attention to and which messages can wait. Plus, your team can search for the information or files they need and determine whether multiple messages are related. This helps reduce information overload, especially when your team is remote or hybrid.

3. Encourage Instant Messaging

Your team can use instant messaging for casual conversations. This helps your team members get to know each other and find common interests. They can stay current on the latest events in others’ lives and share what is going on in their own life. These interactions promote trust, camaraderie, and cohesion. They also make it easier for your team to have serious or difficult conversations centered around work.

4. Set Limits for Your Meetings

Invite to your meetings only the team members who truly need to attend. Keep the number of topics on the agenda to a minimum as well. These actions help keep the conversation focused.

Encourage the attendees to collaborate on the agenda. This helps them understand their part in sharing relevant information or leading discussion topics. Hold the attendees accountable for delivering their materials or insights to keep the agenda moving forward. These actions help improve collaboration.

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Upskill Your Workforce and Bridge the Skills Gap

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Finding new candidates who have highly sought after skills is challenging. Competing for them is even tougher. But you don’t need to join the pile and wrestle your competition for every single new candidate. Instead, you can bridge the skills gap by upskilling your employees. 

 Upskilling allows you to train your current team in these in-demand skills while keeping them in the same role. 

You Can’t Hire Your Way Out of the Skills Gap 

One reason upskilling (and reskilling) is so important is because it’s physically impossible to hire your way out of the skills shortage. The problem is too vast, and in-demand skills change too rapidly to ever keep up. One statistic says only 20% of today’s workforce has the skills needed for 60% of the jobs that will arrive over the next five to ten years. 

What’s more, hiring for technical skills won’t necessarily work. You can teach or pay for upskilling in cybersecurity or engineering.  But finding those candidates doesn’t mean that they’ll also offer essential soft skills, like communication and creative thinking. And those things can be much harder to teach. 

Upskilling Contributes to Professional Development 

Surveys suggest that employees are already upskilling, but they’re doing it on their own time and without support from their employer. You might think that’s good news, but it’s not. 

Employers who don’t offer the kind of professional development that keeps teams learning, growing, and preparing for the future find themselves with unengaged employees.  

Employee engagement is critical for your business’ success, but as many as 70% of employees aren’t engaged at work. Disengaged employees are less likely to be invested in their work, and when they do upskill, they’re more likely to take all their handy new skills to your competitor. 

By actively pursuing upskilling programs, you’re making your current employees more valuable to your company and you’re making them feel more valuable. You’ll see that value quickly: companies with engaged employees have revenues that are 2.5x those companies with low engagement levels. 

The Best Time to Upskill is Now 

Upskilling your employees will help you bridge the technology skill shortage and make you more competitive. Not only does the practice address the root of the problem, but it’s also a valuable investment in your company’s biggest assets: your workers. 

So, what are you waiting for? It’s time to start thinking about your plan for upskilling to complement your hiring practices. 

Are you looking for the right expertise for your team? Ready to add new skills? Want to know how we find and place skilled candidates with the clients who need them? Get in touch to learn how our RightStone 360 program can help you do all of the above.