Interest is unanimous across the generations of workers in four-day workweeks.
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KMPG found that 82% of employees would be interested in a 10-hour, 4-day workweek.Millennials are more likely to care about perks at work than other generations.Employees and their bosses should be thinking about how AI can reduce workload and free up time.
It’s been the same echo from employees for three years now: more flexibility, hybrid work, remote work, a four-day workweek.
The understanding and compassion from the depths of the pandemic seem long gone, as more companies rewrite policies to require returning to the office or roll back flexible policies.
As the terms of the employee-employer contract are renegotiated once again, KPMG is cautioning clients to remember that “flexibility can mean many different things to many people,” KPMG’s Sandy Torchia, vice chair of talent and culture, told Insider.
Requiring employees to give up that flexibility and return to the office has become a more contentious topic of late. For example, workers at the insurance giant Farmers Group are reportedly threatening to quit or unionize after the company’s new CEO backtracked on its remote-work policy.
One of the top demands is a four-day workweek, according to the KPMG Talent Survey of 1,035 US adults, conducted from mid-April to May 1. According to participants, 82% of employees would be interested in a 10-hour, four-day workweek, and nearly half (47%) see it as highly appealing.
Interest is unanimous across the generations of workers, but the majority of Gen Zers (55%) find it highly appealing, KPMG’s survey showed.
“Having a four-day workweek, even if you’re working longer days during those four days, enables you to have the flexibility of three days off without work. And that’s what makes it very attractive,” Torchia said.
Insider contributor Shubham Agarwal recently wrote that as work seeps into our lives and homes, a typical 9-to-5 workday has become a thing of the past. Shortening the workweek to four days gives employees the chance to rest and be even more productive when they are working.
Experiments by companies have found workers are more productive, and even Sen. Bernie Sanders threw his support behind it, citing a UK-based study. In that pilot, companies reduced the workweek to 32 hours without cutting pay.
The four-day workweek won’t work for every firm or every person, however, and others have said that the four-day week is “very much a discussion for the upper class,” and recommended consistent scheduling could help, no matter the job.
Of course, one way for companies to examine where we work is to look closer at how we work, and consider how injecting artificial intelligence into workdays could improve our efficiency and productivity.
Agarwal wrote, “as productivity tools with artificial intelligence catch on and more high-ranking executives acknowledge the importance of rest, the four-day workweek could become more commonplace.”
“I like to say that the work that we do is hard, but it doesn’t need to be hard to work here,” Torchia said, stressing that employees want to learn and do challenging work and be exposed to new ideas and ways of working — “they want to stretch themselves.”
But nobody wants to do the tasks that take a lot of time to get done. “If I found a situation where I was able to get all the work done that I have to do now, in two days, that’s awesome, because then I’d be able to use that capacity to do other more highly valuable things for my clients and for my firm,” she explained.
Besides four-day workweeks, employees also showed when it comes to perks at work, millennials are more likely to care about perks than other generations.
Gen Zers are the least interested in perks like free lunches and gym reimbursements compared with their older counterparts. Instead, they care more about online courses to learn new skills (41%) and mental well-being (35%). Boomers ranked free lunches and commuting reimbursements as the most important perks.
Torchia said that throughout the pandemic, KPMG learned that perks aren’t a one-size-fits-all benefit and “employees were demanding more differentiation.”
While free lunches might have gotten workers to return to the office, “the experience that employees have when they’re in the office is what kept them coming back,” she said.
She reminds her fellow employees, as well as clients, that career paths are all different nowadays, “it could look like a straight line, it could look like a jagged line depending upon the skills and experiences, and the opportunities you want to get.”
But “technology is the great equalizer, right?” she added. “Having a baseline understanding of technology and data is going to enable you to not only do the job that you have, but accept the job that you have and prepare yourself to do something different.”