In April 2014, the government of Gothenburg announced that public sector employees would work less hours in an experiment to improve mental and physical health and increase productivity.
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Sweden has used the study by the University College of London to back up the move to the six-hour work day.
Mr Feldt has said staff members are not allowed on social media, meetings are kept to a minimum, and that other distractions during the day are eliminated – but the aim is that staff will be more motivated to work more intensely while in the office. That said, it’s entirely possible that a six-hour workday would be even better for all parties involved, and not just because I’m looking to spend more time zapping through my Netflix queue.
The idea follows the lead of the Toyota service centre in Gothenburg, which rolled out the plan more than a decade ago, with positive results. “At the same time, we are having it hard to manage our private life outside of work”, Linus Feldt, CEO of Stockholm-based app developer Filimundus, told Adele Peters at Fast Company. In order to cope, we mix in things and pauses to make the work day more endurable.
“I consider the eight-hour day at work is not similar to useful as someone thought”.
The Guardian reports that a Svartedalens retirement home in Gothenburg also switched to the shorter day as an experiment until 2016. Bauer estimated that over the last three years, overall company productivity had increased 10% to 15%. And according to a study published last month involving 600,000 people, those of us who clock up a 55-hour week will have a 33 percent greater risk of having a stroke than those who maintain a 35- to 40-hour week.
The eight hour working day was originally introduced by Henry Ford, who observed that his staff became less efficient as they worked longer hours, and so he decided eight hours a day and five days a week was the right way to maximise efficiency.
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The day when we’re all liberated from the drudgery of working life might seem very (very, very) far away, but a few businesses in Sweden are a step closer to this dream than the rest of us. The European Working Time Directive states that employers can not force employees to work more than 48 hours per week, but many encourage people with overtime. The average working week for full-time employees in Ireland, according to the CSO, is 40.3 hours, which is 48 minutes above the corresponding 2009 figure.
