In 2016, Blue Street Capital decided to cut the length of its working day to five hours. Over the first year, sales increased 30 per cent. Over three years, the California-based financing company almost doubled its workforce to 17 employees.
Despite reducing the amount of work time by almost 38 per cent, increasing staff and keeping full-time wages, some people were unhappy and decided to quit.
This is one discovery Alex Soojung-Kim Pang made in his book Shorter: How Working Less Will Revolutionise the Way Your Company Gets Things Done. No matter what carrots you dangle, some employees like the bragging rights of long hours, and deem it a proxy for success. Or, he says, “they think that the work required to redesign their workdays doesn’t feel worth it to them”.