Dr. Dale Whelehan – CEO at 4 Day Week Global | Boost Efficiency with a 4-Day Work Week Strategy

Frank Cottle [ 00:00:39 ]: Dale, welcome to the Future Work podcast. We’re really excited to have you with us today. In fact, I’m excited to have anybody that’s been named by Forbes and the top 50 future of work ideas last year and by time and the top 100 most influential companies with ideas about the future of work. So thank you very much for joining us today. It’s really a pleasure.

Dale Whelehan [ 00:01:04 ]: Thank you so much for having me, Frank. I’m really looking forward to this conversation.

Frank Cottle [ 00:01:09 ]: Well, I love your irish brogue, so just keep the charm up and we’ll do just fine.

Dale Whelehan [ 00:01:15  ]: Awesome.

Frank Cottle [ 00:01:16]: We’ll do know as we talk about your focus. In fact, I’ll tell you what, why don’t you give me, give our audience 130 2nd shot on what is your mission with the four day work week? I think I just spilled the beans right there, but what is your overarching mission and how do you expect to accomplish it? Cool.

Dale Whelehan [ 00:01:42
Thank you. So we are a not for profit social organization and our social mission is to create a million new years of free time.

Frank Cottle [ 00:01:51 ]: And we do a million new years.

Dale Whelehan [ 00:01:54]: A million new years, yeah. And we do that by gifting people more time off through a four day week as opposed to a five day week. We use a methodology called 100 and 8100, which is 100% pay for 80% time for 100% output. And we work with organizations to design a new way of work in order to help them achieve that outcome.

Frank Cottle [ 00:02:20]: I’m not want to be a naysayer, but I’ve always felt that you should be working at 100% all the time, no matter what, whether it’s 1 hour a day or 10 hours a day or 12 hours a day. So what metrics are you able to use for what types of job descriptions to allow a person to work 80% of the time and still earn 100% of the income? I know you’ve done a lot of research on this, so I’m challenging it for the audience as much as I am for you.

Dale Whelehan [ 00:03:03]:  Yeah. First of all, I put the point back that I don’t believe people work 100% effort no matter what amount of work, the amount of hours that they do. And I think a lot of academic research has been backed up to support that fact that we go through different levels of effort and engagement throughout the day and as the week and loads of different work variables influence on our ability to perform optimally.

Frank Cottle [ 00:03:30]: That’s based on, we’ll say, a classic eight hour workday.

Dale Whelehan [ 00:03:34 ]: Yeah. I mean, it’s based on the entire field of work psychology and organizational psychology dating back to 1911, when Taylor formed this spin of management and dissected work tasks into small itty bits that we could analyze and dissect. The reality is that we are still working off that sort of paradigm of way of working from a largely physical, laborious type of workforce, which is not married to the type of work that we do today, which is very cognitive and emotional and often abstract. So it can often be much more difficult to define what productivity looks like in today’s society. So therefore we actually use time as the arbitrary metric of productivity in many instances. So if you are working 40 hours a week, the assumption is that you are going to be productive for those 40 hours a week. But unless we actually open pandora’s box and see whether that’s the case, we won’t know. And I think we have a lot of data out there in global trends suggesting that we have high levels of burnout, high levels of presenteeism, high levels of resignations from the workforce, which all point to an issue of workforce engagement in the first place.

Frank Cottle [ 00:04:45]: Was this same data valid? And I’m kind of a data freak, so I’ll be careful here, but was the same data valid or equally valid in 2016 1718 as it is, or as you’re using today post pandemic, where we went through a material change in the way everybody worked anyway, not just shortened worked weeks, but physical relocations and remote work and all the things that everybody’s aware of. Was it the same data in 16 1718 as you’re seeing today? Or is there a material difference in what you’re seeing? That’s one question. My second question is if people burn out and they’re not working throughout the day effectively because of the five day work week, on the four day work week it’s still an eight hour day. So are they burning out at 6 hours? And maybe you need a 24 hours work week. Do people burn out with the hours during the day because you just said, relative to my comment, that you didn’t think people work throughout the entire day effectively, or is the burnout based on the number of days? Because we used to have a six day work week going back to your 1911 period.

Dale Whelehan [00:06:18]: Yeah.

Frank Cottle [00:06:23]: Six day work week. Damn it.

Dale Whelehan [00:06:26 ]: Sorry.

Frank Cottle [00:06:27]: What’s wrong with me?

Dale Whelehan [00:06:29]: Yeah, you need to catch on with the trend. Frank, your first question, I suppose what’s been really interesting in the literature is that the term burnout wasn’t published about in normal work psychology to the same extent pre pandemic as it is in post pandemic. So when I was doing my phd, which was on burnout, the topic was only really being discussed in those professions where there was a lot of vocation. So teachers, healthcare workers, Burnout has been discussed within those sort of sectors since about the, even the 80s. What really emerged from the pandemic was a lot of positive things, people kind of a collective wake up for many people that actually I’ve been living in sort of this change of the rhythm approach to work, and now I have a bit more autonomy and flexibility and I know how to look after myself a bit better. But also we saw a much more difficult ability to detach from work that didn’t exist pre pandemic. So we now have people working from their sitting rooms, which is also their office and also their relaxing space. And so dedication. And I suppose that engagement towards work is why I think we now have an issue of burnout, not just within the caring professions, but also within the general workforce. And that is not going to go away, unfortunately, because we now live in a world where everything is hyperconnected. I think the idea of work life balance is outdated. We need a new way of thinking about it, because when does work start and when does it end? And that will differ from me as it does to you and what you determine work to be. And that also feeds into social media sites that we engage in, where we’re looking at a lot of global issues happening around the world, which is also feeding into global levels of stress and impacting on economies. And all of those sort of things are contributing to reported levels of burnout within our workforce. Your second question around why a four day week, as opposed to why would a four day week do anything about that? It’s not so much. I think the reduction in working hours alone that is going to be the silver bullet for solving some of these issues. But it is the catalyst to evoke change within organizations, to redesign work in a way that’s much more congruent with human psychology and human physiology. And that’s where we look at things like what it is that motivate people within work in the first place. And similar to how we have basic physiological needs, like the need to eat, to sleep, to have shelter, research has shown we have three fundamental psychological needs for happiness and health as well. And they’re the need to feel competent in what we do, the need to feel autonomous in what we do, and the need to feel connected to people that matter to us most. And what I find in four day week trials is that you can actually redesign work true to accessing those three needs by.

Frank Cottle [00:09:40]: Stop there for a second. Is it necessary to redesign work in order to make a four day week trial successful? You can’t just shut people, okay? Everybody works four days a week. Do your best. Please don’t show up late on Monday and leave early on Thursday like you do right now. Let’s get some real productivity going. You can’t just do that. You really have to reengineer your whole workforce and your work model, I think. Is that correct?

Dale Whelehan [00:10:12]: Absolutely. And that’s why the 100 and 8100 puts outcomes, or productivity as one of the key metrics as well. So you’re getting both the employee, you’re gifting the employee something like additional time off, but you’re also guaranteeing to the employer that productivity of the workforce is not going to diminish as a result of this as well. So you put that framework to play within organizations and ask people, well, what it is. What inefficiencies can we reduce within workplaces by 20% in order to guarantee the same level of output, but also make sure we can work less time. Okay.

Frank Cottle [00:10:53]: We as a company, we as a company are very tech focused operationally, and we are always looking to do exactly what you said to gain efficiency in the way that people work, not just to set things up so that they have the ability to reduce hours or change hours. It’s all about efficiency. So making sure they have the best tools, making sure that we have the best management, all of that is critical. I completely agree on that. But let’s talk about being competitive for a minute. Let’s assume I have a competitor that is equally efficient, equally focused on the best tools and all of those things, and I’m working a four day week work and they work in a five day week. Again, are they going to disregarding that? I may be more popular than them, but maybe not. Maybe they have a bonusing system that compensates in that regard. Is my company going to grow as fast as their company. And this is very important. Not just company to company, but cultures to cultures, nations to nations. Four day work week might work great in first world countries, but will it work equally well in second and third world countries? Is it going to be equally successful in India as it is in the UK or the United States? Do they have the same motivations, or is their motivation to get ahead so strong or so much stronger to level up to a higher standard that they’re unwilling to have that extra work life balance?

Dale Whelehan [00:13:05]: It’s a very packed question there, Frank. I don’t know.

Frank Cottle [00:13:10]: I can always sneak in about three or four at the issue that I’m talking.

Dale Whelehan [00:13:18]: No, I do.

Frank Cottle [00:13:19 ]: Okay, let’s take a capitalist government business work model, and I’ll take the United States, and I’ll take, competitively, China for the moment. And if you spent any time in China, you know what the work demand is, not just the work ethic, but the striving to get ahead and to claw yourself up. How strong that is? The same in India? Different. But there’s two competitive economic models. The United States or United States and Britain and China. Two totally different. Capitalism, communism, all of those things together. How do you globalize this and find balance?

Dale Whelehan [00:14:05]: So I suppose my first point would be to say that we need to be thinking about the type of society that we want to create. And just because a country, I suppose, is growing at a rapid rate and because its staff are working longer hours, we need to be thinking about it more holistically. And what are the consequences of that on a society as well? There’s a reason why England and the US went from seven days to six days to five days. And it’s because it recognized that there was an impact on worker health and well being, and also on things like the diminished returns of output versus effort of the worker. And I think we’re just simply now trying to establish the balance in what is now a largely knowledge industry. In many parts of the western world, not all work is created equally. Physical labor versus mental labor don’t equate at the same rate. So you actually achieve.

Frank Cottle [00:15:05]: I’m sorry for interrupting, but do you create a workplace elite on the non physical labor of the knowledge worker? Do they become a workplace elitist group at a four day where the physical labor, somebody flipping burgers at McDonald’s or worse, isn’t able to achieve that same thing?

Dale Whelehan [00:15:31]: I don’t think so.

Frank Cottle [00:15:33]: Earners versus salaried wage earners.

Dale Whelehan [00:15:38 ]: Yeah, this question does come up often. I think the question is less about. I think we should be gifting everyone more time off because it’s better for people’s health and well being. But the impact or the reason why we might do that for different differs depending on the sector. So if you look at manufacturing, for example, where you might try and implement a four day week, it probably seems a little bit like that’s not possible. But it’s also one of those sectors where they have been trying to implement lean six sigma principles for decades now, and they haven’t accessed the fullest potential of those efficiency interventions because they have failed to account for human motivation as the driving force to any intervention within workplaces. So we know gifting people more time off could guarantee a return of investment and improvement and efficiencies in a more mechanical, labored workforce. Similar could apply in a service industry workforce. How you could implement AI, how you could automate more forms of working, but you can only do that with the buy in of your staff to do it.

Frank Cottle [00:16:47 ]: Let’s hit AI as a separate topic for a second and stay on the basic mechanics. Was the five day work week more productive than the six day work week? Or do you know, and if I have a four day work week, I’m human, I always want more. Okay, so four day work week, that’s just like, outrageous. It’s slavery, man. I need a three day work week because my work life balance is balanced in the wrong direction. I need four days off because that’s the balance I want, versus three days off, because that’s just not enough for me and me time and my family and the things I want to do. Where does that sacrifice and where do you get. Human beings always want more. Okay, you want more people to be in your program. I want more productivity out of my company. People within my company want bigger bonuses and deserve them. So where does this go and stop? Is there a place, or is AI a solution for that?

Dale Whelehan [00:18:01]: So, for me, I think it’s less about using time as this metric to suggest that more can be achieved, as opposed to saying, with the time available that we have, how we can self improve ourselves to be happier and healthier versions of ourselves, and work more efficiently and effectively within that time. We can’t deny human physiology and human psychology. If you focus on a task for too long, you will start to lose concentration. Yes, you can employ certain tactics to continue to be engaged or whatever, but the reality is that if you were dedicating too much time to something, you were doing it to neglect of something else. And we are holistic creatures, and in order to find actual optimal human performance, like elite sport, like aviation, any of these industries, you must factor in rest and recovery in order to achieve better performance the next time around.

Frank Cottle [00:18:52 ]: Yeah. You never want a tired airline pilot. No.

Dale Whelehan [00:18:56 ]: And the question I have is that you do not have a high performance workforce. If your workforce is reporting levels of stress or burnout.

Frank Cottle [00:19:05 ]: No, I can see some of that. I’m going to keep arguing with you. I hope you don’t mind. No, please. Because I think the points are important because they’re always in the back of people’s heads.

Dale Whelehan [00:19:17 ]: It feels like method. I feel like…

Frank Cottle [00:19:21 ]: I think. Here’s another one. During the pandemic, everybody started working remotely. Not everybody, but a lot of people started working remotely. And they found they had more time because, let’s say they were putting the same amount of work time in, but they didn’t have to commute, they didn’t have to get as prepared to get to the workplace. They didn’t have workplace social activities. It took personal time as well, all of that going on. So everybody gained an hour or two extra day. Let’s say that in work life balance, and we know a lot of people don’t want to go back to the office because they enjoy that work life balance and they want really a hybrid model of some sort, which we can discuss separately if we want. So that’s going on. But a big percentage of them did what with that extra time. They went out and got another gig. They went out, worked extra hours for someone else to make more money. How does that. Is that a work life balance because it’s optional? That’s positive? Or are they really just restressing by trying to manage two jobs in order to gain extra income as opposed to just doing their very best at one?

Dale Whelehan [00:20:54 ]: Yeah, it’s a really great question. In our trials to date, actually, in all of the western trials, we actually didn’t find that to be the case. So we asked people, what were you doing on your fifth day off? And people were actually taking time to do life admin, or they were engaging in volunteering activities in their community or taking up a new hobby. But interestingly, our most recent results from South Africa actually showed that people did take up more side gigs on that day off. And I think that probably speaks more to a question of economy as well. So, like, job salaries within workplaces are probably not enough for some to cover even some of the basic needs. And so if people wish to do more with their time off in securing additional revenue or income, I don’t think we should punish that, but I think it’s.

Frank Cottle [00:21:45]: No, I agree. If the goal is work life balance, there’s some 510, 20%, some percentage of people that are going to. Their concept of balance is getting ahead, not picking up volunteer work.

Dale Whelehan [00:22:04]: Yeah, those people I suppose exist.

Frank Cottle [00:22:06]: However you want to define getting ahead because there’s a lot of definitions for that as well.

Dale Whelehan [00:22:10 ]: Sure.

Frank Cottle [00:22:11]: Is it just economic?

Dale Whelehan [00:22:13]: It all depends on what success looks like. And for some people, if they wish to take up side gigs on the day off and set up an app or set up a startup or whatever it is and make their millions that way, and that’s success for them, that’s brilliant. But for some people success is actually being a better father and having more time to look after their kids, or it’s being able to volunteer in the local soup kitchen or whatever it is. And for many that’s what success looks like. And what we find is people nearly reevaluate what’s important to them sometimes when they have this more time off. And I think the pandemic showed us that as well.

Frank Cottle [00:22:55]: Let’s shift over to AI for a second because you propose a four day work week, higher efficiency, higher motivation and better work life balance and a better culture. I just read a lengthy report and article on the three day work week and the motivation for that was add AI to the four day work week and an individual in proper positions. And this isn’t, again for everybody. The individual can accomplish as much as anyone in the four or five day work week if the AI is properly structured for their job position, et cetera. And you could look at robotics the same way in manufacturing. What’s the impact on AI in achieving the four day work week for that productivity metric? Who will be impacted by it? Who and how will that impact come, do you believe? And because AI is scalable as an employer, will I be able to say, well, I can have five people doing a three day work week, or four people doing a four day work week, or three people doing five day work week. You make those decisions as an employer on the economics and you’re protecting your shareholder value. So large corporations, you’ve seen a lot of major layoffs occurring recently due to primarily overhiring and denial or defensive hiring, Microsoft hiring extra thousand engineers just so Google couldn’t get them. You see a lot of that dumb things, competitive things went on, but that’s real life. That’s not the academic world, that’s the real world. And individual workers can’t control the economy. So sometimes it’s more stressful than others. And sometimes your needs are met and sometimes it’s harder to meet them for everybody. Sorry for the packed question again, but take AI and think through that and share your thoughts because I know you’ve been more than flirting with this issues.

Dale Whelehan [00:25:40]: Yeah. Do you know what? It’s really been a fascinating twelve months because like 24 months ago we were talking about a four day week is never working. And then twelve months ago we showed that it could work and then boom, AI came out of nowhere with everyone suddenly being able to use it. And it has just accelerated the conversation in a way that we couldn’t have anticipated. When we’re seeing the likes of Bill Gates and the head of JPMorgan Chase saying we’re going to be working at 3.5 workday by 2030, you really have to be thinking, my God, what is happening behind the scenes in the world of AI that we’re not privy to yet? So I think that there’s two ways of looking at it. There’s the pessimistic view of saying loads of jobs are going to be lost as a result of AI. And then there’s what I hope is going to be a much more optimistic way to look at it, is that what AI can provide, that humans can provide, but currently aren’t being able to have the time to provide, is actually human connection. And that any service that we look at, and many services we have now are people based services. And I see it myself. When I get something that’s written by AI, it’s like wallpaper over me. I cannot. The information, it’s like drinking watered wine. Yeah. There’s something about it that it’s very hard to read, and it’s not the same as me and you conversing here and learning from one another. And there’s a lot of social psychology of reasons as to why. I think human connection is going to become more and more to the forefront as a business proposition for organizations in the future. So my hope would be that actually new businesses will look at, well, what can we do? Versus AI can’t do? And it will be that human cognitive and emotional aspect that AI currently can’t do. But we actually aren’t allowing ourselves to be that sort of worker because we’re already burned out from forcing ourselves to overwork in the first place. So we need to trust automation to a certain degree to free up our ability to do more creative and innovative forms of thinking, and we need to train ourselves to actually do that. We’re not naturally very good at thinking high in the sky and thinking laterally. We tend to be very tunnel visioned as people, but now we have AI who can do that for us. So we actually need to, I think.

Frank Cottle [00:28:12]: Too, the individual worker, let’s say you work, I know you worked at Deloitte a long time ago, so did know you probably were making decisions on what the systems the company was going to use and how it was going to be deployed, even to your own group overall, because that was made by somebody else in the tech world or someone else in the admin or the HR department or something of that nature. So the individual worker won’t be making that decision on AI, the AI that is used corporately. We’re doing a podcast on the future of workforAllwork.Space space. We have a variety of writers, and we were going to add more writers this year to create more content, but instead we’re using the same number of writers that are supported by AI. And we’re hiring another editor to make sure that that content isn’t just Pablo overall, that it really has substance to it and that sort of thing. So I think the shift now an editor oftentimes makes more have to higher salary than a writer. So we’re having less people, but more skilled people in our own business model. And I think that AI is going to do a lot of that. You’ll be reskilling a lot of people to take advantage of the technology, just like, sadly, I remember when the first computers were out, we shifted from hand calculators and mechanical calculators, even to computers. Nobody lost their job. Everybody changed their job and became more valuable and more productive. And I think AI is going to put us in that same position. Don’t fear the technology. Learn how to use it. Not replace, but to enhance.

Dale Whelehan [00:30:20]: I totally agree, and I think where four day week actually comes into this is so. You’re totally right. The worker is going to become much more of an executive decision maker, or some of those higher cognitive skills, and less of the automation kind of rudimentary work. But we also know that decision fatigue exists. So if you’re a person having to be responsible for hundreds of AI, or AI and human based projects, you are going to experience so much self chaos in trying to manage that many projects and that level of productivity. So we do need to be cognizant, I suppose, that if we are changing the expectations of what workers do and the level of thinking that will be required in their work, that that isn’t free. The brain is going to use energy in order to make those decisions, and therefore, we need to factor in the recovery time for that.

Frank Cottle [00:31:17]: I agree with that. It’s funny, the, when I was going to college, I got kicked out of my first college that I attended at the end of my second year and lost a quarter of credits. And I had to come back and explain that to my dad, who’d been paying for me to go to this college. And he was sort of an old farmer rancher type of guy and a real man of lot of action, but few words. And he said to me, when I explained this to him, he said, well, did you learn anything? And I had explained to him, yes, decisions have consequences. He said, well, remember it? And he walked away. That was the end of our whole conversation. For all this screwing up I’d done as a young man, and I think decision making in a company and causing in our company, we tell everybody the first day, hey, the one thing we will fire you for is not making your own decisions. You have to make decisions every day on everything. You have to do it yourself. You can ask for information, you can ask for that, but then you make the decision. If you screw it up, we’ll fix it. But if you don’t make decisions, you screw everybody else up. You slow everything down. So your comment about learning new things and learning how to make decisions, and the issue of decision fatigue, which is because of the stress that comes with making decisions, there is a definite fatigue there and a challenge to each individual. I think that that is whether it’s a three day work week or a five day work week, I think that that whole aspect of creating culture and understanding how to use your time, because that’s one of your decisions all day long, every day. How to use your time is very important and often overlooked. Often overlooked.

Dale Whelehan [00:33:20]: You’re kind of awakening something in me there. It makes sense. What a lot of organizations do when they do a four day week is actually because the time is now restricted according to Parkinson’s law, work will expand time allotted to it. Organizations are much more deliberate about what decisions need to be made by what time. And oftentimes they’ll say, well, this decision needs to be made. Close a business Thursday now, and they work backwards in their week then to make sure that that can be achieved. So if stakeholder buy in needs to be achieved, they’ll block out that time in their calendar in order to get that feedback. If they need a certain amount of deep flow work in order to get a comprehensive understanding of the topic, they’ll factor that in. Whereas what I think at the moment exists, and it’s been my case working in healthcare and consulting and academia. There is no bullseye directing people that this must be completed by this time. Even when I used to work on consulting projects, timelines were always being missed and scope creep always existed within projects. I think this is a fundamental rethink to say you can’t be apathetic towards making decisions anymore or fobbing it off to someone else. So communications are much more deliberate about who’s responsible for what, when needs to be decided by when and who needs to be involved by when. And they’re the sort of issues that really are annoying organizations at the moment anyway, and they really struggle to know how to get people motivated to fix them. And I think what we have seen is that by asking people, well, help us solve these issues and in return you can work less. That’s where we see this fundamental change in culture and kind of process improvement.

Frank Cottle [00:35:08]: Yeah, I can definitely go with that. Now, we’re running a little bit long here. Two things. First, if you could leave our audience with one overarching thought on how to make change, should they make change? What that change should be just one solid what they can do tomorrow to begin executing to improve their culture. And perhaps it’s four day work week, perhaps it’s something else. And then lastly, how people can reach you, because you’ve got some fabulous ideas and your group is at the forefront of this entire movement. So how people can reach you as well. Great.

Dale Whelehan [00:36:00]: Thank you. So my bit of advice would be to realize that leadership exists across the organization. So just because you might not necessarily be in management doesn’t mean that you can’t play a very influential role in driving some decisions within organizations. And all change requires the collective buy in from everyone in order for it to be successful. So leverage, I suppose, your network and your influence in order to try and build the case for a culture that you’re trying to create, whether that be reduced working hours, whether it be flexible working, and know your stakeholder. So if you’re talking to next person in the executive, they don’t care about the nice fluffy reason as to why.

Frank Cottle [00:36:47]: This might be good.

Dale Whelehan [00:36:47 ]: They want to see the hard numbers as to why this is going to be good for the business. I think that took me a while to realize. But make the business case for why a four day week or whatever culture intervention might work. And there is so much data out there now showing that you could reduce resignations, you could create greater levels of engagement or commitment to the organization, reduce staff sick leave. All of those things cost organizations huge money. And if you can provide part of the solution to some of those issues for the executive, then you’re much more likely to be successful. The second thing then, four day week global is the name of our organization. We’re on fourdayweek.com. We have a series of different solutions for organizations interested in trialing a four day week. Or even if you just want to find out more, please get in touch with us.

Frank Cottle [00:37:37 ]: Dale, thank you very much for your thoughts. It’s been enlightening to me. I really appreciate it, and I look forward to actually trying to run an experiment on our own.

Dale Whelehan [00:37:47]: Awesome. Thanks so much for having me, Frank.

Frank Cottle [00:37:49]: Take care.

Dale Whelehan [00:37:50]: Bye bye.