Above Photo: From the White House.
Sweden has been slowly, but surely, moving towards a 6-hour workday.
Filimundus, an app developer based in the capital Stockholm, introduced the six-hour day last year.“The eight-hour work day is not as effective as one would think,” Linus Feldt, the company’s CEO told Fast Company.
“To stay focused on a specific work task for eight hours is a huge challenge. In order to cope, we mix in things and pauses to make the work day more endurable. At the same time, we are having it hard to manage our private life outside of work.”
There have been other on-going experiments in Sweden with the 6-hour working day. From nurses working in retirement homes to Toyota plants in Sweden, the less time, more efficiency model has shown real promise.
Toyota centres in Gothenburg, Sweden’s second largest city, made the switch 13 years ago, with the company reporting happier staff, a lower turnover rate, and an increase in profits in that time.
The point in the end is that most people working an 8-hour day are not working for 8 hours. They’re just getting the stress of having to be at work for 8 hours.
Even though most workers in the U.S. are technically at work from 9 am to 5 pm, not all those hours are spent actually working. The average time spent on private activities, such as online shopping, checking social media and emails, personal phone calls, and chatting with colleagues sucks up an estimated 1.5 to 3 hours per day, according to studies cited by The Atlantic. Another study by CareerBuilder shows that most workers waste at least an hour or more each work day on personal stuff.
What will these Swedes be doing with their extra time? My guess is that they will spend that time figuring out ways to destroy the moral fiber of their country.
Whether it’s their police officers showing us how to detain someone without murdering them or providing support both at work and at home for their mothers, Sweden is doing a lot of things well these days it seems.