Joe O’Connor, CEO at 4 Day Week
Joe O’Connor is a driven and dynamic campaigner and communicator, with extensive leadership experience, and a passion for social justice and progressive change.
Joe is currently based in New York City, where in addition to all his work for 4 Day Week Global, he is conducting a one-year research fellowship with Cornell University, leading a research project on working time reduction.
He was appointed as CEO in March 2022, taking over from Charlotte Lockhart. Previously he was 4 Day Week Global’s pilot program manager, where he is coordinating pilots of the four-day working week in Ireland, the United States and Canada, with almost 50 companies signed up to participate in six-month coordinated trials early in 2022. Pilots are being planned later in 2022 for the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Israel.
Joe is also the chairperson of the Four Day Week Ireland campaign, having founded the coalition in 2019, and coordinated the successful launch of a pilot program and government-funded research project in 2021. He has been active on the issue of working time reduction since 2018, when he organised a major international conference on ‘The Future of Working Time’.
Previously, Joe worked as Director of Campaigning with Fórsa Trade Union, Ireland’s largest public service union, where he led the design, development and rollout of several ground-breaking, successful and award-winning campaigns, as well as playing a leading role in driving a significant organisational change management project.
He is a former political party chairperson and political campaign director and adviser, having managed several successful national political and electoral campaigns. He is also a former President of the Union of Students in Ireland, and held a number of high-level governance and policy directorships in the field of third-level education.
In 2020, Joe co-founded The Doorstep Market, a voluntary initiative set up to support small, independent Irish businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic. This virtual multi-vendor marketplace acted an online ‘one-stop shop’, enabling Irish consumers to ‘stay home and shop local’, from a selection of over 300 small Irish businesses and more than 1,000 products.
He holds an MBS in Strategy and Innovation Management and a BBS (Honours) in Accounting from the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, as well as an Advanced Diploma in Employment Law from The Honorable Society of King’s Inns.
Connect with Joe on LinkedIn.
TRANSCRIPT
Rita Trehan: [00:00:02] Welcome to Daring To, a podcast that finds out how CEOs and entrepreneurs navigate today’s business world, the conventions they’re breaking, the challenges they faced, and the decisions that they’ve made, and lastly, just what makes them different.
Rita Trehan: [00:00:18] So, Joe, welcome to the show. I’m delighted to have you on here discussing a very important topic. I’m currently in the UK. You’re currently in the US. For our listeners from around the world, it was a long weekend here in the UK to celebrate a particularly important historic occasion. But for the first time, people are taking a Thursday off. It wasn’t like a Monday holiday. It was a Thursday holiday. Suddenly, we were like experiencing this almost like massive sort of, I don’t know, it was like jubilation, and I don’t think it was just to do with the historic event that came on.
Rita Trehan: [00:00:58] And interestingly enough, Joe, just so that the listeners know who you are, so Joe O’Connor, welcome, the CEO of the 4 Day Week organization, an interesting organization, 4 Day Week Global, I mean, that in itself kind of tells us a little bit about what you may be doing. But it seems to me that you’ve always been passionate about causes and events, and changing maybe what our kind of societal views and opinions in a positive way that have an impact on people’s lives, because you’re a recently appointed CEO, but you’ve had quite an interesting background.
Rita Trehan: [00:01:37] So, tell me a little bit about your student years, because it seems like you’ve always been someone that is a proponent of like, I guess, challenging the status quo. Let’s start with that. Quickly tell us a little bit about like your background. And before we get into the real meat of the 4 Day Week Global, which it’s really the heart of the topic, but I want to kind of figure out where it started from.
Joe O’Connor: [00:02:03] Sure. So, I’m originally from a place called Kilmore in County Roscommon in the west of Ireland. It’s a really small village. I studied in Galway and did accountancy, and later, a master’s in business strategy and innovation management. And then, I ended up taking kind of the union route, which maybe my studies wouldn’t be a natural progression into that, but it was really the students union that got me into that. I ran for president of the students union during my time in Galway, spent a couple of years there, and then went on to become the president of the Union of Students in Ireland.
Joe O’Connor: [00:02:41] So, the Irish equivalent of the NUS in the UK, and later then, went on to become director of campaigning for Forsa, which is Ireland’s largest public service trade union. And yeah, I guess it was definitely the student movement that got me interested in campaigns, causes, making economic and social change, which although my current role probably involves much more engaging with businesses and engaging with leaders, I think fits well with what we’re trying to do at 4 Day Week, which is really change the way we think about the world of work.
Rita Trehan: [00:03:19] So, changing the way we think about the world of work is not an easy task, let’s be honest, right? And you’ve been—you have publicly said, the new frontier for competition is quality of life. But if we think back through the COVID pandemic, post-pandemic, the great resignation, that actually corporations need to be rethinking about how they think about the workplace and what’s important to people, and quality of life means really understanding what people actually want.
Rita Trehan: [00:03:49] And live this week, going live, it’s been massive in the news headlines everywhere. And if anybody in the UK hasn’t looked at it and seen how like the 4 Day Week and the companies that are being involved in what is a very innovative pilot. Your comment was the greatest risk of the companies is our greatest risk, risk of trying a four day working week in our business and failing, or is it being unwilling to actually try it? So, this is something that actually started outside of the UK. You’ve been involved in it for a while.
Rita Trehan: [00:04:24] It’s not something that just suddenly cropped up. There’s been lots of discussions about a four-day working week. Are people really going to be productive? Like we’ll be paying them to do like four days, but we’re paying five days’ work, how can I justify that from a productivity standpoint? So, tell me about what the passion was around sort of, I guess, campaigning the understanding what can we learn from actually having companies commit to signing up to be part of the pilot around trialing the four-day working week?
Joe O’Connor: [00:04:57] Well, it started for me back in 2018. I organized a conference in Ireland, an international conference on the future of working time. My motivation behind this was twofold. First of all, our members in the union I was working for at the time had just had an additional 2 hours of the workweek imposed in lieu of a third pay cut during the austerity measures as part of the financial crisis in Ireland.
Joe O’Connor: [00:05:23] We were getting a lot of feedback from members that there didn’t seem to be a productivity or a public service rationale behind this and it was almost an arbitrary introduction in ours. And also, we ran a survey of our own members at the time asking them about their attitudes towards work time reduction, work-life balance. The four-day workweek, which at the time, although Ireland was going in one direction, we were observing pioneering movements like Perpetual Guardian in New Zealand and the Gothenburg trial in Sweden of the four-day workweek.
Joe O’Connor: [00:06:02] And one of the biggest things that came out of that, which really, really struck me was the amount of predominantly women, so the amount of working parents coming back off maternity leave, but predominantly women who had taken a reduction of hours to a four-day workweek for work-life balance reasons, for childcare reasons, and we’re obviously on 80% pay.
Joe O’Connor: [00:06:24] And the common narrative that kept coming back from literally hundreds of people in this situation was that their expectations in the job were the same, the output that was required of them was the same, their responsibilities were the same, not just as was the case when they were on a five-day workweek, but the same as their as their five-day colleagues, which told me two things.
Joe O’Connor: [00:06:46] First of all, we have a gender equality issue in the workplace, but secondly, that in a huge amount of occupations, Parkinson’s Law holds true, which is that the amount of time available to complete a task, that it expands by that amount of time. So, that definitely got me interested in trying to shift the narrative away from the hours you spend at the office, at the desk, or on the clock and onto output, and what are people actually getting done while they’re at work?
Joe O’Connor: [00:07:16] And I think the pandemic, as you’ve mentioned, has been the great disruptor in that regard. When you’re talking about something as deeply, culturally, and societally embedded as the five-day workweek, which obviously, as we know, has been around for a century now, it takes a great change, like the pandemic, to really shift mindsets and to shift horizons, and we’re seeing that at all layers of the organization.
Joe O’Connor: [00:07:41] We’re seeing leaders getting attracted to this because of the potential competitive advantage that could flow from this in terms of recruitment and retention if they can pull it off. We’re seeing managers are much more open-minded to it, because they’ve learned through the remote working revolution that they can trust their workers and they’ve learned that actually they need to figure out a better way of measuring results than just presenteeism.
Joe O’Connor: [00:08:07] And then, also, at a worker and at an employee level, there’s a huge demand behind this. We saw a survey here in the United States recently which suggested over 90% of workers would pick the four-day workweek as the biggest incentive for them in terms of changing jobs. So, this is largely down to the fact that people’s horizons have shifted, something that maybe they thought wasn’t possible three to four years ago, they now believe that this can be done, and people’s priorities have changed as well in terms of the place for family, the value for community, the value for spending time caring for children or elderly relatives. I think people’s priorities have really been realigned as a result of the impact of the pandemic.
Rita Trehan: [00:08:52] So, let’s talk about that. I mean, it’s been launched globally. You’ve talked about some of the countries that have already been involved, Ireland, the US, New Zealand, Canada. I mean, most of the continents have been involved in some shape or fashion. And we’ve seen the launch across 70 companies across the UK. Over 3000 workers are going to take part. And what is—tell us why you chose to pick a six-month pilot.
Rita Trehan: [00:09:17] What’s the basis of choosing a time period to do a pilot for? What are you hoping that it’s going to reveal to those organizations that are taking part in this pilot? But also, how do you think it will help inform those thousands of companies that have yet to be convinced and/or who are reluctant to take that risk at this point in time about the value of the four-day working week?
Joe O’Connor: [00:09:46] So, in terms of the timeline, my organization 4 Day Week Global has been supporting companies to trial or transition to this reduced hour productivity-focused model of work. Since about 2019, we’ve worked with hundreds of companies in different industries all over the world, and our experience is that we’ve seen companies do three-month trials very successfully and make a decision at that point that they want to make it permanent, but we find that with the six-month trial, it does two things. First of all, the quality of the data in terms of the research that we’re doing alongside this is just much better with a six-month trial vis-a-vis a three-month trial.
Joe O’Connor: [00:10:22] And it also allows more time for no matter how much planning and preparation that you’ve put into the trial, that’s part of what we support companies to do in terms of design, and having a measurement and assessment framework in place, there are going to be things that you’re going to learn as you go through the trial. So, we felt that six months allows more time for you to adapt, to respond to maybe teething issues, or perhaps, the schedule, some of the operational decisions you made in planning, you realize a month or two, and actually, there’s a better way to do this.
Joe O’Connor: [00:10:54] So, it just allows for more time to adjust on the fly and to give some time for those changes to take effect, so you can make a really informed decision at the end of the six month trial as to whether this is something that’s sustainable for your business or not. And on the second part of your question, what do we hope that this will do? So, we developed this pilot program for a few reasons. First of all, it was really a demand-led thing. The momentum and the interest in this got to the point that we felt that we needed a program that would allow us to support a lot of companies collectively at scale rather than just company by company.
Joe O’Connor: [00:11:31] Secondly, we were hearing a lot of feedback from companies who had done this, who are saying, it’s quite a lonely space. A few years ago, if you were a four-day workweek employer, you might be the only one in your area, or in your industry, or in your sector, so creating this kind of network that allows companies not just to learn from us, but from each other in terms of sharing ideas, collaborating, sharing different approaches to shared challenges. We felt that there was some value in that.
Joe O’Connor: [00:12:01] But the other thing is that from an advocacy standpoint, we have seen that this can work if it’s done the right way. And we took a view that if this is going to go to the next level and move from being something that’s, I think, a growing niche concept, growing very rapidly, but still a niche concept, to something that’s a very mainstream part of the conversation around the future of work, we need to try and demonstrate that the very positive outcomes we’ve seen companies experience can be replicated on a much broader scale in lots of different companies, in lots of different industries all over the world.
Joe O’Connor: [00:12:36] And that’s what we’re hoping that these trials will do. We have an independent research project that runs alongside the pilot programs. And while we can’t know for sure what the outcome of that will be, based on our experience of working with companies in the last few years, our expectation will be that it will bear out the other studies we’ve seen globally that it’s not a question of, can the four-day workweek work anymore? It’s a question of, can it work for your business?
Rita Trehan: [00:13:02] Right. And the research that you’re doing sort of in parallel to this and the engagement, I would say, of like research organizations and universities around the world suggest that there is a global need to sort of address the future of the workplace and what that looks like. And there is much more intensity around CEOs and stakeholders actually paying real attention to, how do we think about the future workplace? The pandemic was something that maybe accelerated some things that were already in play, and exacerbated, and perhaps, highlighted the need, addresses of many people around the world, and initiatives like this are hoping to address that.
Rita Trehan: [00:13:46] So, clearly, there is, as you’ve said, a real global appetite for that in the organizations. Some states may say, this is great, this will work well in certain industries, but it won’t work in mine, like it can’t work in, let’s just pick an industry, I don’t know, the energy industry, or the banking industry, or certain—well, I would say more traditional sectors that may say. This is fine if you’re in an industry that can afford to have people working four days, not five days a week, and/or don’t have restrictions. What do you say to those skeptics around that sort of thought process that may exist?
Joe O’Connor: [00:14:30] Well, our experience is that while every company is different, very few companies are unique, and there are very few kinds of industries and lines of work where we couldn’t point to an example somewhere in the world where this has been done successfully. And I think the important point is that when we talk about the four-day week, the four-day week is the headline, it’s the conversation starter.
Joe O’Connor: [00:14:53] But really, what we’re talking about is reduced hours working. We talk about this 100-80-100 concept, 100% pay, 80% time, 100% of the productivity, and that can take a huge amount of different forms. So, I think one of the most common misconceptions that I think maybe we’re starting to overcome was when I started talking about this a number of years ago, people thought that it effectively meant by default that the company would move to a four-day workweek.
Joe O’Connor: [00:15:20] But in actuality, in the vast majority of scenarios, we’re not talking about that. We’re told that employees move into a four-day workweek and figuring out a way to ensure that you’ve got that service coverage throughout the workweek in order to be able to maintain customer service and so on. And that question comes down to, if you’re a business like, let’s say, a marketing agency or an advertising agency, if most of your work is deliver X for Y client in Z time frame, and it doesn’t really matter when the work is done, as long as it’s done within that time frame to the right standard, then you can probably shut your office on a Friday.
Joe O’Connor: [00:15:56] And it probably will actually benefit your business, because by having a universal day off, it will mean that your employees are more available to each other over the other four days to collaborate on this kind of projects. But if you’re a sales company, or if you’re a company with a significant retail or customer service aspect to your business, then of course, that won’t work. Of course, that won’t be feasible.
Joe O’Connor: [00:16:17] So, it’s about figuring out shifts, it’s about figuring out rosters in order to ensure that you can make that work for your business. And a lot of this does come down to leaving this over to your employees to figure out the parts. Some of the failures we’ve seen of companies who have come to us with the ambition of running a trial or with the ambition of moving to a four-day workweek who haven’t got to the point where they felt comfortable with launching a trial, a lot of it has come down to overthinking it in the C-suite.
Joe O’Connor: [00:16:45] This idea that CEOs think that—let me put that a different way. The most detail-oriented CEO in the world does not know the day-to-day intricacies of each of their employees’ jobs well enough in order to be able to set out how they need to redesign their workday in order to make this possible. So, leadership’s role is very much setting the direction of travel, setting the targets, the measurables, what are the key objectives that need to be maintained or hushed in order for this to be a success and sustainable for the business, and then really delegating the details, leaving it over to team leaders, to departments, to staff to figure out, because this is less about individual productivity than it is about collective output.
Joe O’Connor: [00:17:34] If you think about the kinds of things companies do in order to do four days’ worth of output in five. It’s things like better meeting discipline, eliminating distractions and interruptions in the workday, improving processes, making better use of technology. None of those things can be done in isolation by one member of the team. These are all collective structural inefficiencies that require a lot of collaboration if they’re going to work.
Rita Trehan: [00:18:02] So, I always have like that sort of like—I don’t know, that spark moment that comes on the podcast, and that was the spark moment for me there of like—which I would encourage listeners to go back and just replay that, just those last couple of minutes around how you talked about how to really think about the application of what is termed under the four-day working week. Because actually what you were really talking about and I think the essence of it is like collectively, how do you get things done in a way that works, that delivers what the end goal is, in a way where people actually feel they’re contributing, and adding value, and achieves the end goal?
Rita Trehan: [00:18:44] So, I can’t help but think that the 4 Day Week kind of globalist organization as it stands today has a much bigger agenda than, really, the essence of the tagline of a four-day week, which is really about changing how we think about how organizations function, and how people get intrinsic satisfaction and contribution from what they do. Is that part of the game plan? It seems like there’s something there in that, but I could be wrong.
Joe O’Connor: [00:19:18] Yeah. Well, I mean, I think from our point of view, as an organization that believes that this can work, we need to be very clear about the fact that if you introduce a four-day workweek in isolation. So, in other words, if you reduce hours and do nothing else, I don’t think that would work. Like we’re not saying that would work. What we’re saying is that this is not about one of the fears that people have is if you reduce hours, if you move to a four-day workweek, but expect the same output, then basically, it’s going to be about cramming the same work into four days rather than five.
Joe O’Connor: [00:19:49] It’s going to increase intensification. It’s going to increase stress. It’s going to increase burnout. So, far from the fact that there isn’t really a lot of research evidence to suggest that that’s actually the case in the companies that have done this so far, this is not about the same inputs. It’s about the same outputs. So, it’s not about doing the same work in the same way in four days rather than five, it’s about just getting much clearer and sharper about what you’re trying to achieve, and then empowering people to make the changes within the business that will allow you to work smarter, allow you to work more efficiently. And our view is that in 2022, that we have the productive capacity and the technological tools in order to be able to make this happen.
Joe O’Connor: [00:20:30] But the beauty of the four day workweek is that it provides this really powerful framework. If you try to—like it is a change management initiative. It requires cultural change within organizations. It requires process improvements. If you try to do all of these things in your organization without having such a powerful quid pro quo as the four-day workweek, I’m not sure you’d get as far as some of the companies we’ve worked with, because this is so transformative for people in their daily lives.
Joe O’Connor: [00:21:02] The kinds of stories you hear about what this means in terms of being able to do the school runs, being able to spend more time with grandparents, being able to take up a new hobby or learn a new skill that you previously didn’t have the time to do, people value that time so much. You’re giving them something which does not have a financial value. You can’t put a price on it. So, people are so incredibly—not only are they better rested at work, but they’re incredibly focused and motivated. It aligns the company’s interests with the individual employees’ interests in such a powerful way if you really frame this right within your organization.
Rita Trehan: [00:21:41] So, obviously, you’re helping organizations to think this through, because most, I would imagine, would go to the very tactical, oh, I’ve got to reorganize everyone’s employment contracts, I’ve got to like change this, just means they’re working like Monday to Thursday, or Thursday to Wednesday, whatever it might be. And they think very much in that sort of what they know, that certainty that they like, but what you are suggesting is actually kind of rethinking everything as to how they do it, and then fundamentally saying, how do you put that to work? So, what kinds of tools or frameworks are you helping a child teams, executive teams, and employees kind of navigate through what this actually looks like in practice and how you get there on this path, so they start to see those tangible benefits really quickly.
Joe O’Connor: [00:22:29] So, the way our program works is we support companies who sign up to participate for roughly about 2 to 3 months before the trial. So, our experience is that the vast majority of companies that get to the point at which they launch a trial, over 90%, probably over 95% make a success of it and end up making it permanent. Where we see the dropoff is in the pretrial phase, so a lot of our support is frontloaded.
Joe O’Connor: [00:22:56] It’s the planning, the preparation, the design, putting the measurement framework in place. So, some of the workshops that we run would range from quite broad sessions, which are masterclasses with different leaders from different companies, from different industries that have done this often in very different ways in recognition of the fact that this is not a one-size-fits-all model. So, our organization, we don’t see our role as here’s the toolkit that will tell your organization exactly how you need to do it, it’s more of a menu. It’s more of here’s lots of different ways.
Joe O’Connor: [00:23:28] So, maybe they think that the communication strategy, the perpetual guardian use is right for their firm, but the way that uncharted measured their trial makes more sense for their company. And then, we kind of drill down into some of the drivers, which are really closely related to a four-day workweek being a success, things like time management, things like productivity hacks, things like reinventing the workday. Because part of what makes this a success is about being much more deliberate about how you spend your workday.
Joe O’Connor: [00:24:01] So, being much clearer about, what time do we set aside for collaboration, for meetings? What time do we set aside for administration? So, for Slack, for email. What time do we set aside for really carving out focus time on key high-value priority tasks? And what time do we set aside for rest? And being much more defined about that within the workweek is a really critical part of making this a success.
Rita Trehan: [00:24:28] And obviously, you’re seeing some success, because there’s been a big take up like across the globe of companies that are really wanting to be part of this pilot, and engaging, and sort of communicating that, and sharing that around the world. But I mean, you took on—I mean, you’ve been involved in it for a while now, but you took on the role.
Rita Trehan: [00:24:47] Let’s go back a little bit now and kind of talk about you in the role, because you took on the role of CEO in March of this year, and then seeing this expansions actually grow in terms of organizations wanting to be part of that. What does that feel like for you to step in? I mean, you’ve been kind of co-leading it, but now, like you are the sole kind of front person for it. What does that feel like? For those budding CEOs out there or individuals that are about to step into a similar kind of position, can you share some of what that feels like for you?
Joe O’Connor: [00:25:25] I mean, it definitely feels like a little bit of we’re building the aircraft while it’s in flight. We’re in a very—there are not too many organizations our size, so we have seven people as an organization right now, which is up from three this time last year. And we expect to grow further by the end of this year and probably further again into next year. So, there are very few organizations that are our size that are at the coalface of the kind of global interest in a particular topic like we are, but also, that we have, right now, people like Andrew Barnes and Charlotte Lockhart, our co-founders, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, who’s written extensively on this topic and works with us as program manager.
Joe O’Connor: [00:26:09] So, we’re in the interesting space that we probably have more people acting as thought leaders, and experts, and leaders than we do administrative support. So, we’re trying to really build up our own capacity in order to be able to deliver more and more programs in more and more countries, where our target is that by early next year, regardless of where in the world your business is and regardless of when you’re hoping to run a trial, that we will have a program that can facilitate you.
Joe O’Connor: [00:26:37] So, it’s a really fast-moving, interesting journey to be on, and yeah, it’s exciting. Sometimes, you get really caught up in the numbers of, every trial we’re running seems to be a little bit more popular, more companies participating, but when you look underneath that, the feeling of getting off an executive team meeting, where they make a decision that as of two months’ time, all of their 250 and 300 employees are going to be moving to a four-day workweek, sometimes, we do remind ourselves the individual—you can get caught up in the macro, but that is something that really is changing people’s lives in a whole lot of ways that we don’t even know about. So, I think that that’s the kind of motivation that really keeps you digging.
Rita Trehan: [00:27:33] So, passion for purpose. I’m a great believer that you follow your passion in life and that passion has to be connected to a purpose. So, did you always dream that you were going to be CEO of an organization, and that, somehow, it would connect in a way to a passion that you are passionate about? I mean, has that been a dream of yours as you’ve kind of grown through it? Have you fallen into it, and said like, hey, it just so happens that I’m in something that I really care about. What’s your own personal journey around this?
Joe O’Connor: [00:28:06] Yeah. I mean, I can’t say that that it has been. I took up, initially, the program manager role in 4 Day Week Global just last September. I was doing some research on work time reduction, which, as you know, is a topic I’ve been interested in and passionate about for a number of years, so an opportunity came up to study that here in Cornell University in the US. In parallel to that, I had developed this pilot program in Ireland, which 4 Day Week Global wanted to roll out a version of internationally.
Joe O’Connor: [00:28:39] So, at the time, I probably saw this as a really good, timely opportunity to do something for a while, but obviously, I’m invested in this now, because I can see that the potential for this movement and for this organization is very, very significant. And I’m excited to see the kind of impact that we can make if we continue to grow interest in the topic and also grow our own capacity to deliver.
Rita Trehan: [00:29:11] And what do you think it’s going to be like some of the hardest challenges going forward? You’ve got this momentum. You started it, as you said, you were piloting some initiatives during COVID, and helping companies, small businesses within Ireland actually rethink how they could support and build a community, and stay sustainable businesses for the future.
Rita Trehan: [00:29:32] Now, you’re part of something that is gaining, as you say, more and more attraction, more and more sort of spotlight, more and more organizations keen to really understand it. A lot of universities and research, think tanks being wanting to be part of it as well. How do you navigate through that? Like how do you see—what do you think is going to be the biggest challenge for you?
Joe O’Connor: [00:29:56] I think if you look at the trajectory of the five-day workweek, people often forget that that wasn’t really clean, simple. It wasn’t like legislation was enacted one day, and all of a—it was a long, prolonged journey where different countries and different industries were at different stages of that slow, gradual transition. It involved corporate leadership from people like Henry Ford. It involved social struggle from trade union movements. It involved government action.
Joe O’Connor: [00:30:23] So, this is something that’s going to be multifaceted over time. It may happen a lot quicker than maybe we would have envisaged a few years ago, because of how the pandemic has really turbocharged the role of the four-day workweek in the future of work conversation. But my sense of it is that there’s going to be three stages to this. The first stage is there are industries now where it’s pretty clear to us that based on current trends and based on this dynamic where you’ve got a lot of companies that can compete in the top 1% of compensation, that may be used to offer things like flexible working, remote working, hybrid working as an incentive.
Joe O’Connor: [00:31:01] Now, that’s no longer a competitive advantage. That’s been swallowed up, because it’s now a standard expectation in that industry. They’re turning to the four-day workweek en masse. I think that could lead to industries like tech, IT, software, finance, some parts of professional services, this becoming the norm rather than the ambition in the space of a few years, then you’re getting into other industries where they might be slower to adopt, but in order to keep up with the four-day workweek being widely available in other sectors, we’ll have to start accelerating the journey.
Joe O’Connor: [00:31:37] And then, I think if you look at this on a national level, I’m someone that obviously is particularly interested in the Irish economy, like there’s no question, Ireland have benefited hugely from very favorable corporate tax arrangements for a long, long time now. And if you follow what’s going on at a European Union level in terms of tax harmonization, the writing’s on the wall for that. So, this is where I get kind of the idea that as we come out of the pandemic, offering a world class quality of life to employees is going to be a huge factor in the global war for talent.
Joe O’Connor: [00:32:10] So, that’s when watching what’s happening in Scotland, and Spain, and Portugal, what’s already happened in Iceland, in the UAE, are there going to be countries that really embrace this as a central tool of their macroeconomic policy, which I think, again, would take something that might take 10, 15, 20 years if it’s purely a private business-driven initiative, that could really move this on at pace an awful lot quicker.
Rita Trehan: [00:32:39] Do you think that we are seeing—and it’s an interesting viewpoint that you sort of bring to the table, which is this idea that governments needs to be responsible for certain things. Private enterprises used to be responsible for managing and running their own companies. Institutions, foundations, multilaterals used to be responsible for managing sort of global societal issues. Well, actually, all of those boundaries seem to be merging in some way. And in the fact that there’s an expectation that you don’t pick and choose now what you contribute to or not contribute to, you actually have to be a part of it all coming together.
Rita Trehan: [00:33:20] And this concept of like even what you’re doing on the workplace scale of understanding the collaboration, and having those people that are doing the work, and sort of actually engaging and actively solving what’s the right solution, it feels like maybe there’s some learning in there as well around how the different sort of stakeholders, I would say, look at solving some of our global societal issues that we have created over the years and are now paying much more attention to about how we collaborate together to solve them. There could be some interesting learnings from this that feed into that. What do you say to that? Would there be, do you think?
Joe O’Connor: [00:34:00] I think you’re absolutely right. I think that that’s part of the puzzle. And I think this is not going to be—this is going to require action at a number of different levels. It’s going to require labor market competition in certain sectors of the economy to drive it, as I described. It’s going to require public demand. And I think you’re seeing that growing very, very strongly in the past couple of years.
Joe O’Connor: [00:34:21] In certain sectors, it’s going to require collective bargaining, this becoming a strong collective bargaining priority in certain sectors of the economy. And then, I think it is going to require some level of government intervention. When I say that, I’m not necessarily talking about legislation. I’m of the view that we’re not at the point now where you legislate en masse for a four-day workweek. The trajectory of the five-day workweek suggests that that’s at the end of the cycle, where you regularize things for the rest of the economy when this has already become the standard or the norm in large parts of society.
Joe O’Connor: [00:34:57] I see government’s role now as being, number 1, supporting pilot programs, both through directly supporting them in public service, civil service, parts of the economy where they have control and influence, but also encouraging and facilitating private businesses to run pilots and investing in research to really assess. A lot of what we’re doing can, I think, really clearly tell you the impact at a company level and at an individual level of reduced work time. I think there’s a role for government in terms of really looking at the macro-economic, the macro-environmental, the macro-societal questions around all of this.
Joe O’Connor: [00:35:35] And then, finally, I think there’s a role for government as a facilitator through legislation, because what we know is that there can be unintended adverse consequences for employers that want to reduce hours, not just for employers, but also for their employees in terms of leave accrual, pension entitlements, because of the fact that our employment legislation is so geared around the five-day or the 40-hour workweek in most jurisdictions. So, enabling greater flexibility for companies that want to shift to reduced hours for the same output seems to me like a very valuable thing that governments could be doing.
Rita Trehan: [00:36:12] Right. So, what do you think, six months from now, the headline newspaper, what’s that going to say about 4 Day Week Global? And what do you think some of the companies that are taking part in these trials, what do you think their headline message in a newspaper will be six months from now? What do you hope it will be?
Joe O’Connor: [00:36:31] Well, all we can go off is you can never anticipate. We’re dealing with a lot of variables here. We’re talking about—if we’re talking about the UK trial specifically, this is over 70 private companies, all with their own organizational challenges, different structures, different changes that could occur over the course of the trial, and ranging from breweries to fish and chip shops, to financial services companies, to care services providers, so very, very difficult to kind of assess all of the different variables at play there.
Joe O’Connor: [00:37:06] But in the round, based on what we’ve seen from individual companies that we’ve worked with to do this and even looking at the early results from our other trials, we have health-wise, large not for profit in the US, they were shedding employees last summer and had a huge problem with retaining, a huge problem with turnover, adopted the four-day workweek last August, and effectively, their unplanned attrition has hit the floor and it’s been transformative for their company.
Joe O’Connor: [00:37:36] We’ve had early results in from the midpoint of the trials in Ireland, in the US, which are incredibly encouraging. They haven’t been publicly released yet, but they’re incredibly encouraging. So, based on that, I would be surprised if it was anything other than further adding to the evidence base that this is something that can work in a whole range of different companies. This is something that can deliver significant benefits for both the employer and the employee.
Joe O’Connor: [00:38:02] And getting back to the point that you were making earlier on, companies are going to have to start thinking about this in the context of, if we can pull this off, it’s going to give us a significant competitive advantage. If we don’t engage with this, we are running the risk that our competitors will do this first and we’ll be the ones doing the chasing, because the greatest benefits from this are going to flow to those who get their first.
Rita Trehan: [00:38:28] I mean, that’s a great sort of nugget for those organizations that have yet to sign up and who are listening to kind of think, well, why are we not part of this? What are we missing that we should—we better get on board with to understand the value that we could gain from this? So, I think there are lots of other things we could explore around this topic, which I think go much further than just looking at the topics.
Rita Trehan: [00:38:52] But I will be intrigued to have you back after the trial is over, because I think there are going to be so many applications for organizations and society at large that the research will show. But I always end this with a Daring To moment, which is to ask my guests what their Daring To moment is. So, it could be daring to do something that you’ve already done and achieve, daring to dream of something that you hope is going to happen. And what would be your Daring To moment?
Joe O’Connor: [00:39:24] Well, I think having not given this any advance thought, it would be difficult for me to say anything other than by 2030, the four-day workweek is going to become the new standard in the economy. So, when we say that, we don’t mean that the same version of the four—because the same version of the five-day, 9:00 to 5:00, which is the standard work arrangement today, of course, it’s not the only work arrangement, but we do believe that some version of a shorter workweek is achievable right across the economy with the four-day workweek as the new standard. So, I think let’s give ourselves until 2030, and if we get there earlier, all the better.
Rita Trehan: [00:40:02] That’s great. And, Joe, if people want to know more about the organization, about you, find out more about what’s going on, sort of leverage some of the research and the organizations that you’re working with, how do they do that? Website, LinkedIn. What are the different avenues and media outreach that they have that they could get in contact with you?
Joe O’Connor: [00:40:23] Sure. So, for resources, for information on upcoming information sessions that we’re running in different countries, registering interest in the pilot programs, people can go to either our website, which is www.4dayweek.com. That’s the number 4, not the letters. And also, program@4dayweek.com, and that’s the US program without the M-E at the end spelling. Program@4dayweek,com if they want to express an interest in joining a program or would like to find out some more information.
Rita Trehan: [00:40:55] So, see you guys, HR leaders, leaders around the world, whatever your business, foundation, institution, or organization that you’re with. And take note, if you like the podcast, do get in contact with Joe in the organization and also let us know what you liked about it. And last but not least, you will get to know more about some of the work that we do at Dare, but I do want to mention specifically an initiative that we’re involved in with our partner organization in the States, which is a nonprofit that we are really leveraging over the next eight weeks, which is Pivot Purposefully, which is all around helping formerly incarcerated underrepresented groups, particularly women, actually get back into the workplace by supporting entrepreneurship.
Rita Trehan: [00:41:39] So, if you are interested in helping support that, donating, and being part of that effort, which is a really important and underlooked talent resource in the world, then do get in touch with us at www.pivotpurposefully.org and sign up to be part of the change movement just like 4 Day Week. So, thank you very much, Joe. It’s been really interesting. I can’t wait to be reading more about what’s going on and telling research that I think is going to bring about a lot of change and transformation around the world. Thank you.
Rita Trehan: [00:42:10] Thanks for listening. Enjoy the conversation? Make sure you subscribe, so you don’t miss out on future episodes of Daring To. Also check out our website, dareworldwide.com for some great resources around business in general, leadership, and how to bring about change. See you next time.
