Six-hours workday to improve productivity

Nurses at the Svartedalens retirement home in Sweden worked six-hour days on an eight-hour salary for about a year. They were a part of an experiment funded by the Swedish government to see if a shorter workday can increase productivity. The conclusion of the experiment was Yes, it does.

‘If the nurses are at work more time and are more healthy , this means that the continuity at the residence has increased,’ Lorentzon said. ‘That means higher quality (care).’ Less surprising was that the nurses were 20% happier and had more energy at work and in their spare time. This allowed them to do 64% more activities.

Svartedalens is part of a small but growing movement in Europe. Sweden has dabbled with shorter workdays before: From 1989 to 2005, home-care-services workers in one Swedish municipality had a six-hour work day, but it was abolished due to a lack of data proving its worth. The Svartedalens experiment is designed to avoid that problem: ‘This trial is very, very clean because it’s just one homogenous group of workers,’ said Lorentzon.

In Sweden’s private sector, the practice is taking root in places such as Toyota service centers in Gothenburg. I

n the UK, a marketing agency adopted a staggered schedule to allow for reduced work hours while ensuring coverage.

A survey last month found that six out of 10 bosses in that country agreed that cutting hours would improve productivity .

The key result – that productivity can increase with fewer hours worked – eliminates a major stumbling block to globalising the shorter work day .

While the Svartedalens experiment offers evidence that shorter hours improve productivity, nursing as an occupation may be more analogous to that of medical residents, rather than a desk job.

The study equates productivity with quality of care, and that may not necessarily translate to white-collar work.