Joe O’Connor [00:00] — The idea that we’re going to race against the machine on efficiency is a complete dead end. As I see it, productivity is a two-dimensional force that involves efficiency and effectiveness. And what we can be sure of is that in the next number of years — and we’re already seeing this play out — the efficiency domain of productivity is going to be increasingly outsourced to technology. So the challenge I would have for leaders is: in this world where the speed and volume of processes and tasks and output is going to be driven by AI, does it help you to have your people overworked, or sleeping at the desk? Is it important to focus on the volume of their contribution, or is it important to focus on the value of their contribution?

Daniel Lamadrid [00:44] — Hey everyone, welcome back to the Future of Work podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about one of the most important workplace debates happening right now: whether working less can actually mean achieving more. And the guest I’m very excited to have today is Joe O’Connor. Joe, welcome.

Joe O’Connor [01:00] — Good to be with you, Daniel. Looking forward to the conversation. Thanks for having me.

Daniel Lamadrid [01:05] — I’ve been looking forward to this conversation for a while now. I was really impressed with your latest book published by Harvard Business Review, Do More in 4, and I’ve been following you for quite some time as it relates to the four-day workweek. You’re one of the most authoritative voices on this matter. How did you get into the four-day workweek? How did you first become interested in it? I’m curious to know.

Joe O’Connor [01:43] — So I’m originally from Ireland, and I actually came at this initially from the research and from the worker side of the equation, even though my work has taken me into consulting and leadership work. I was leading some research in the Irish Public Service about eight years ago, where we discovered that we had a lot of working parents, mostly women, who had opted to reduce their work time. This was very common for people coming back from maternity leave, for instance — they would drop down their hours, or they would maybe drop down to four days, and they were doing this for an equivalent reduction in salary. So let’s say they would drop down to four days and they would get 80% of the pay.

What we discovered in the research — we were interviewing their managers, the employees themselves who were affected, we were looking at the data — is that in almost every case, the employee’s job expectations and responsibilities did not change with the reduction in work time. And the amount of work that they were actually delivering within the condensed timeframe was broadly in line with what it was before they reduced their schedule — broadly in line with their colleagues who were working full time, five days.

This was really when I discovered this concept of Parkinson’s Law that we talk about in the book, which is this idea that a task expands to fill the time that’s available for its completion. And I became convinced that it was possible — that we had the tools, the technology, the productive capacity at our disposal to achieve the same or better in less time. I think that was true in 2018. It was true when I was leading the major shorter workweek pilots post-COVID. And it is especially true today, in the age of AI that we have all entered.

Daniel Lamadrid [03:25] — I started following your work before the pandemic, and since the pandemic a lot of things have changed — especially the adoption of AI that we’re currently living through. I guess what we’re going to try to figure out today is: can organizations do more — better output, healthier people, stronger retention — by working less? And what does the evidence actually show?

So on that note, I’m going to dive right in. You described the five-day workweek as — I love this — a hangover from the industrial age. Before we get into the data: what was it designed for, and why is it so poorly matched now to how knowledge work actually happens today?

Joe O’Connor [04:11] — When I first came at this, I was coming at it from the perspective that this was the next natural big leap forward in social progress. Throughout history, up until the last number of decades, we have traditionally seen technological advancements and productivity gains leading to reductions in work time, and that has stalled somewhat in recent decades. So this felt like the next leap forward. But the more I started researching this topic and looking at how the five-day workweek as we know it today came about — and of course, none of us can remember a time when the five-day workweek wasn’t the standard, unless you’ve invented some kind of anti-aging thing that I don’t know about — what fascinated me was the things that have changed since then. I’m going to mention three.

Number one: back when the five-day workweek was introduced by Henry Ford in his manufacturing plants and became the norm in the United States, an hour of work was very, very closely correlated with an hour of productive labor. In other words, the longer employees were on the clock, working in the factories, working on the shop floor, the more productive they were going to be. And that relationship, over the last number of decades, as we became a more knowledge-based, digitalized economy, has become more and more frayed. So today we know that there are lots of different ways you can fill an hour at work, and they’re not necessarily equal in terms of their productive output.

The second thing I would mention is that back then, work was very confined to location. These factory workers, these people working in industrial plants — they finished their work at the end of the day, they clocked out, and they left work behind. We today have embraced, for good or for bad, a very always-on type of economy that requires a degree of give and take; it requires some flexibility. Most of us work in jobs where every now and then, or even quite often, we might need to pick something up outside of work hours. And because we’ve accepted this fact that variable work time has increased, I think it’s important that we have a conversation about core working hours in the form of the workweek.

The last thing I want to mention is the composition of the workforce. Back then, we had less than 20 percent of women in the paid labor force, and so it was a mostly single-income economy. Today, we know that in order to raise a family, in order to have a reasonable life, for most people you need to have a dual income. What that’s meant is that even though the workweek has stayed the same, the average number of hours per household has increased dramatically. And that is why I think we’re seeing this incredible strain and pressure that a lot of people feel in terms of their family lives and their lives outside of work. That’s why we need to have this conversation right now.

Daniel Lamadrid [06:55] — Definitely. And I think we’ve got Henry Ford to blame — I mean, he gave us good cars, but it’s not working out the way he had planned for us. I totally agree with what you’re saying.

Let’s go back to the pilots you ran. You pioneered the world’s first coordinated private-sector four-day week pilot — it was in Ireland — and then you scaled trials to other companies in other countries. What keeps you convinced that this isn’t just a feel-good experiment, and that it’s genuinely the future?

Joe O’Connor [07:46] — Between 2020 and 2023, we saw this exponential growth in interest, demand, and adoption of shorter workweek schedules. I worked with hundreds of companies across different industries, different continents. I think a lot of that was in response to the new world of work post-COVID — employers were trying to figure it out, they were more open to trying different things, and they were also grappling with the Great Resignation.

I would say the context has shifted in recent years. We have seen a kind of retrenchment in many organizations towards more old-school, hardcore, traditional leadership styles and cultures. I’m hopeful — and I’m sure we’ll get into this — that over time, it’s almost like the last sting of the dying wasp, and I do believe that the future is going to be more flexible because of AI.

But to me, the reason why the vast, vast majority of companies I worked with in these pilots decided at the end of the six-month pilot to retain the policy and make it permanent — in the UK it was 92%, in North America it was 100%, in Ireland it was 95%, so we’re talking about very significant numbers determining that this was something that was working and sustainable — a big part of the reason is that it is incredible at achieving alignment between organizations and their people. In other words, this was not something they were doing as a perk or a concession or a giveaway. This was very much a quid pro quo, where the expectation was: you need to meet certain objectives, you need to achieve certain performance standards, and if you do that, you get this time back in return.

And I think that conversation — how do we create greater alignment between the interests of the organization and the interests of their workforce — is more relevant today than ever, because we are in an incredibly polarized scenario where most leadership teams are incredibly excited about artificial intelligence, and most middle managers and most employees have a very, very different view of the technology. So how do we create a conversation and a story around AI that doesn’t feel extractive, that doesn’t feel like a one-way street, but that feels like this is genuinely something that can be a win-win, both for companies and their people? I think a shorter workweek is a huge part of that dialogue we need to be having.

Daniel Lamadrid [10:28] — Yeah, definitely. Look, there’s a lot of research and findings — and maybe you know more about this — that actually say AI isn’t making us more productive. And then there’s other research that says it is. So I guess what I’m trying to figure out is: is AI a key component of the four-day workweek becoming more normalized? And what does your research show — is AI making us more productive to the point where a four-day workweek can be the future?

Joe O’Connor [11:00] — I feel the same way about “does AI make you more productive?” as I do about “does a four-day workweek make you more productive?” or “does hybrid work make you more productive?” The honest answer is: it depends. The devil is in the detail. It can make you more productive or it can make you less productive, depending on how you design it and how you implement it. And I think the same is so true with AI, because there’s no question — any of us who have spent a lot of time with the technology have seen the huge ways it can save time and generate ideas, but also that it can create rework, it can create slop.

Daniel Lamadrid [11:38] — It’s an AI rabbit hole. I personally use AI a ton — to the point where I reach a point where I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. I don’t know what the first task was that I started. And the other side of it is, I get so excited that it just takes me longer to complete something, because I always want to add more and more and more. But I guess your answer of “it depends” is the best answer.

Joe O’Connor [12:04] — And I think it’s why so many of these companies have been focused so much on adoption. They were measuring: how many people are using the tools? How often are they using the tools? Which was just completely the wrong frame, because adoption does not mean value added. It does not mean reimagining work. I think it’s important that we move off that and think about adaptation — think about how this is actually changing the world of work around us. What are the things that are going to become more valuable from a human contribution? And what are the things that AI brings to the table that can really help us be more productive?

To me, it comes down to this difference between efficiency and effectiveness. As I see it, productivity is a two-dimensional force that involves efficiency — which is the speed and volume of tasks, processes, outputs — and effectiveness, which is things like good decision-making and judgment, creativity, connection, relationship-building, adaptability. And I think what we can be sure of is that in the next number of years — and we’re already seeing this play out — the efficiency domain of productivity is going to be increasingly outsourced to technology. The idea that we’re going to race against the machine on efficiency is a complete dead end. It’s a complete dead end. And so the value is going to shift overwhelmingly into the effectiveness domain.

The challenge I would have for leaders is: in this world where the speed and volume of processes and tasks and output is going to be driven by AI, does it help you to have your people overworked, or sleeping at the desk? Is it important to focus on the volume of their contribution, or is it important to focus on the value of their contribution? I think that’s the critical shift in leadership that needs to happen: from volume-based to value-based.

Daniel Lamadrid [14:03] — Amazing. Perfectly said. And you mentioned something — that it depends whether you’re more productive or not, it depends how you create your four-day workweek. There’s no one way to create a four-day workweek plan for all companies. For every company it’s different, I’m assuming. It depends on their workforce size — what does it depend on? Or is there a one-stop-shop way to do it?

Joe O’Connor [14:34] — No, it depends on a whole lot of things. It depends on the industry, the nature of the work you’re doing, the nature of the customer you’re serving. It depends on your specific organizational dynamics, operations, and culture. It also depends on your baseline. I would have a different conversation with a law firm that is currently working 60 hours a week than with a not-for-profit that wants to get from 40 to 32.

So I’m not a purist about this. I’ve worked with companies to do four-and-a-half-day weeks, focus Fridays, nine-day fortnights. We’ve worked with a lot of organizations in the last couple of years to actually create dedicated time in the calendar, within the five-day week, for AI learning, adaptation, and upskilling — because people are so overwhelmed. According to LinkedIn, 51% of the workforce feels like keeping up with the pace of change when it comes to AI is like taking on a second job. We’ve introduced this technology, which requires so much rethinking, so much learning, so much experimentation, at a time when people were already cognitively overwhelmed. So this idea of “can we first actually create some space within the existing workweek for people to actually engage with this, and not do it off the side of an overflowing desk?” — I think it’s a really good place to start this conversation.

And yes, one of the most common misconceptions about a four-day workweek is that it means the company is working four days. In the majority of cases, the company is still open five days, or maybe even six days, or even seven days — and people are scheduling it in a different way.

Daniel Lamadrid [16:13] — For sure, right. Because I’m assuming the obvious pushback from management and leadership is: won’t output drop, or won’t our customers suffer? I’m assuming those are the main ones. What are the key pushbacks that you keep hearing and hearing? What does the research actually show about productivity and service quality? We’ve been getting into it, but what do you have to say on that?

Joe O’Connor [16:46] — One of the chapters in the book is actually called “But What About My Clients?” — because you’re right, it is just one of the most common things that you hear: “This is a nice idea. I can see the benefits of it. But it just won’t work in my world and in my context.” And in my experience, it’s a much more common refrain from organizations before they implement it, or before they pilot it, than it is afterwards. I think often the scale of the challenge looms larger in the mind than it does in reality.

One of the reasons for that: think about it — let’s say we have an emergency in your work, or an emergency in my work. We have an important customer who needs to reach us in the evening, or needs to reach us on the weekend. Are we picking up that call? I think we live in a world of work today where absolutely, you’re picking up that call. There are certain things where you need to have processes in place, and you need to have flexibility to be able to deal with those things. And the same is true with this. When people ask, “If Friday is my scheduled day off, what happens if an urgent request comes up on a Friday?” — well, you do the same thing you would usually do if it came up in the evening or on the weekend. You deal with it. And otherwise, you get to it on your next workday, right?

Daniel Lamadrid [18:04] — Yeah. Or you use AI. So many companies are now creating AI agents to take calls at weird hours of the night. It’s like a chatbot, if you will, but over the phone. I know this one virtual phone company that’s starting to create these agents that will take calls. There’s always a way to fix things now with AI — at least that’s my opinion.

As we talk about the four-day workweek — you mentioned that it shouldn’t be framed as a perk, and I want to talk about the framing of the four-day workweek a little bit. You’re very deliberate in Do More in 4 that the framing should be an incentive, and not a perk. Why does that matter so much? What is, to you, the difference between an incentive and a perk? And what goes wrong when companies don’t understand that?

Joe O’Connor [19:05] — Well, I think it comes down to a couple of things. I believe that we will have a world in the future where the four-day workweek is the new normal. It’s not going to be the only work model — much like the five-day isn’t the only work model today — but I do believe we are heading for that future. And there are people like Bill Gates and others who actually think that maybe I’m a little bit of a conservative, and that we could be heading for three days.

We are not in that world today. For most organizations that implement this, they are doing it against a backdrop where they’re an early adopter. Most of their competitors, most of their clients, most of their other key stakeholders are operating on a five-day work model. As a result, this requires a serious partnership approach from everyone across the organization. This is not a light lift. This requires a big commitment. This requires a lot of accountability.

It’s one of the reasons why — I’ve heard people say the four-day workweek is just some kind of woke Gen Z fad for people who don’t want to work, right? But in reality, if you’re somebody who shows up to work and you’re inclined to coast through the workweek, to kind of hide a little bit, you hate this. Because the trade-off with the shorter workweek is that there’s this expectation: you’re getting this extra benefit, you’re getting this extra autonomy, but in return there’s greater accountability — not just to your leadership, but to your peers, to your colleagues. It’s this scenario where everyone is pushing really hard to achieve this thing that is so life-changing in so many different ways. There’s this expectation that everyone is pulling together to make sure you do this in a way that’s sustainable for the company. And I think it’s that kind of positive tension that sits at the heart of this.

That’s why one of the other big fears people raise with me is: “I can see how, at the start, people are super motivated. They really want to achieve this. Their productivity goes up. But what happens after it becomes normalized? What happens after people become used to it?” And I think that is something you need to be actively guarding against. To me, this needs to be about a culture of continuously earning this benefit, rather than something that’s set-and-forget — “we’ve achieved the four-day workweek, we don’t need to think about this anymore,” right?

Daniel Lamadrid [21:34] — Yeah, definitely. And you know, I want to ask you something. There’s this theory that we’re all already working four days a week — it’s just a matter of making it official. Here’s the theory behind it: people who go into the office — and there’s research that backs this up — out of the eight hours they’re in the office, they’re only working five or six. The rest, they’re doom-scrolling on their phones, they’re in the food coma, they’re not doing anything. And if you take all those hours every day, they’re actually only working four days a week. And remote workers — who knows what they’re doing? Well, management should know. But there’s this theory that we’re already working four days a week. Would you say that’s sort of right? What do you think about that?

Joe O’Connor [22:27] — I would not universalize it for everybody and every firm, but there is no question that for a lot of people, the four-day workweek is kind of buried under the rubble of unnecessary meetings, ineffective collaboration, and digital distraction — and that once you start to address some of these fundamental issues, you find that delivering the same in less time is perfectly achievable.

I think the other thing that’s really important when we think about this is the psychological side — the incentive, the alignment, some of these concepts we’ve talked about. One of the things we cover in the book is this idea of performance punishment, which is the fact that in many organizations, the person who is first in the queue to adopt new tools like AI, the person who is always trying to find new and better ways to do their job, to become more efficient — usually that same person is the most likely person to have more tasks and more work loaded onto their plate. Which is clearly a broken incentive structure. A lot of what we’re talking about with the shorter workweek is about flipping that on its head and saying: actually, if you engage in ways to adopt new technologies and find ways to make yourself and the organization more productive, you share in that benefit through this really powerful reward.

And I think this is so critical today in a world where — here in the United States and Canada, and I think it’s probably a pretty similar story in Europe — for every one employee who is more excited than concerned about AI, there are five who are more concerned than excited. A lot of this traces back to just over a year ago, when we had the horsemen of the jobpocalypse, as I call them — Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, these guys — saying AI is effectively going to wipe out most white-collar jobs. So is it surprising, then, that we’ve created this world where most people are so fearful of this? As a result, they’re much less likely to engage. They’re much more likely to resist, or at a minimum to be apathetic about this. We need to flip the script — we really need, at a company level and at a country level, to flip the script.

That’s why, when we work with organizations on how you integrate AI into your operations, how you redesign your work around what AI makes possible — but how you do it in a way that brings your people with you and preserves your culture and your values — it comes down to three things for me. It comes down to the purpose, the boundary, and the deal. The purpose being: be really clear about what AI is for. Why are we using this? And that can’t be “because everyone else is doing it.” It has to be a really clear articulation of what this is about for us, in our company. The boundary being: what is it not for? What are the things where we’re really, really crystal clear that these are still human contributions — the things where we see AI not as displacing them, but in many ways actually elevating them and making more space for them? And the third is the deal: what is in it for me? If we are not able to tell a story about the most powerful technology of our lifetimes that is about elevating people’s quality of life and quality of work experience — not intensifying work, not laying people off — we need to really create a new narrative around AI. Work time is only one part of that conversation, but I think it’s definitely one component that needs to be part of it.

Daniel Lamadrid [26:08] — Very nicely put. And as we talk about AI — your research shows that organizations running four-day workweeks are more likely to be using AI. Is there a correlation between AI and a four-day workweek? Meaning, does the time pressure of working fewer days actually force smarter tool adoption? Is there a correlation, or is it a coincidence? Can the four-day workweek therefore be used as a business strategy for smarter AI adoption?

Joe O’Connor [26:48] — I absolutely think it’s a forcing function. One of the things that happens in these organizations is it creates a conversation about what are the things that are really delivering value, and what are the things we’re doing that are less valuable, or not valuable at all.

Some people think: if this productivity benefit is possible, why doesn’t a manager just walk into the office and say to their people, “I want you to become 20% more productive — but I still want you to work five days”? Why would you not just get the productivity benefit but keep the five-day week? And it overlooks the psychological dimension of this, which is that people start to think differently about this challenge if there’s something incredibly powerful at the end of it for them. It leads to people thinking differently about their own personal focus at work. People think differently about their habits when it comes to how they use digital tools.

And AI is definitely — I think one of the reasons we see a higher percentage of adoption with firms who’ve done the four-day week is partly cultural: these are organizations that tend to be quite forward-thinking, quite innovative. You’re probably not looking at a four-day workweek unless you’re willing to try new things. So culturally, they might be more likely to be early adopters of technology. But absolutely, you’re right — the other part of it is that it moves people from seeing AI as “am I training my robot replacement?” to seeing AI as “this is something that can radically make my life better.”

Daniel Lamadrid [28:27] — Yeah, definitely. And look, something just came to mind. When we first started discovering AI, and it was just out there and everyone was like, “What is this? What do we use it for?” — there were very smart companies that started adopting it very early. And those companies are the ones that now have this competitive advantage over others. In your theory that the four-day workweek will be the future, would that not be sort of the same? If companies right now begin to understand and leverage the four-day workweek before other companies, then they will have a competitive advantage in the future. Would you say those are similar theories?

And I want to add something else real quick. Right now we’re living in a world where most managers are millennials, and what’s bound to happen in a couple of years? Gen Z will become the new leaders. And they have this forward-thinking mindset, and they’re bound to want to apply the four-day workweek. So is the four-day workweek bound to happen, and should we get on the horse as soon as possible? I don’t know if I just rambled, but that’s my way of thinking about it.

Joe O’Connor [29:43] — I couldn’t agree with you more. The reality is, in the last few years, as I said at the top, we’ve seen this retrenchment, where I feel a lot of leaders — particularly old-school, traditionally minded leaders — are seeing it as: “Okay, we gave up some ground during COVID, and we’re using the tighter labor market, the uncertainty around the economy, the uncertainty around AI, to start to regain that ground.” I think it’s a very short-sighted way to look at this.

One thing that has not changed: you can try to talk about work-life balance as if it’s a dirty word, you can talk about flexibility as if it’s a bad thing — but the reality is that the workforce thinks differently. This year, for the first time in the 25 years they have been surveying the global workforce, Randstad found that work-life balance was actually ranked ahead of pay in terms of the global workforce’s preferences and priorities. And to your point, that’s even more the case with Gen Z and younger generations, who are going to form a much bigger part of the future workforce. So I do think that, yes, this is coming down the tracks.

I think the organizations that do this sooner are, A, going to have the opportunity to use this to accelerate how they embrace AI and reinvent their organizations around AI. But secondly, they’re going to be able to retain and attract the best talent. I think this is particularly the case with smaller companies. A lot of the companies we worked with in the pilots were things like tech companies who were competing with maybe Google, Amazon, Meta for product developers and engineers. They cannot compete on compensation. They cannot compete on salary. So this was a way for them to rewrite the rules of the game and compete on a different playing field that they knew those big giants would not go to.

For me, the things that matter to people are pay, flexible location, and flexible hours and work time. If you’re a company out there that maybe can’t pay top-dollar or top-euro salaries, and maybe because of the nature of the work you do it’s not possible to give people very flexible remote work arrangements — you need to start thinking: okay, maybe I don’t need to do all of these things, but if I want to be competitive for talent, I probably need to be doing one of these things quite well. And I think looking at work time is certainly one lever that people can pull.

Daniel Lamadrid [32:20] — Definitely. So look, I’m a strong believer that we fear what we don’t understand. And I believe a lot of people don’t understand the four-day workweek — therefore they fear it, right? If someone listening to this episode is a team leader — not a CEO, maybe, but just a leader within their team — and wants to start moving toward this in their organization, what’s the very first thing they should do? What do they say, and to whom? How does someone take the first step towards proposing, researching, looking into the four-day workweek?

Joe O’Connor [32:59] — We do have a full chapter in the book that’s dedicated to making the case — advocating for and persuading people internally of this. I think having conversations with your peers in other functions and other departments, to start to sketch out what would need to be done operationally and logistically to make this feasible — that’s always a good starting point.

Then, making the business case for this. What are the things? Is it recruitment and retention — is your organization struggling to hire and keep the right talent? Is it AI adoption — is your organization struggling to move the needle on AI? Are you one of those firms where your leaders have set out these very ambitious strategies and invested a lot of money in the tools, but work hasn’t really changed underneath it very much? Connect this to something your organization is trying to achieve.

And I think, embracing the conditionality of this. Not going in and saying, “We want you to give this to us.” But going in and saying: “I think this could help us achieve the following things. And if you’re open to testing it — maybe in a small area, not the whole organization; maybe you start small, maybe it’s a half-day Friday to start, or a nine-day fortnight — and if we can do this and continue to hit these targets…” Embracing that kind of conversation, that this needs to be a win-win for both sides — you’re much more likely to get a receptive audience than if you go in banging the table, right?

Daniel Lamadrid [34:36] — Yeah, definitely. And I don’t know if you agree with this, but — what’s the worst that can happen if a company tries a four-day workweek and it doesn’t work? They tried it; maybe it didn’t work. Based on your research and your pilots, it’s very unlikely that it won’t work. But what’s the worst that can happen, and what’s the best that can happen?

Joe O’Connor [34:58] — Part of the adaptability muscle that we need to be building in organizations is being open to trying new things, experimenting, being radical about rethinking the future. I’ve had many CEOs say to me, “We like the idea, but we’re nervous about pushing the green button, because it feels like a one-way door.” And I would say: in modern work, there is no such thing as a one-way door. So many of these companies that thought “we can’t give people very flexible remote work arrangements because it’s a one-way door” have brought people back three days in the office. Nothing is a one-way door. You need to be open to trying new things — and maybe this is one of them.

Daniel Lamadrid [35:37] — Amazing, amazing. I’m really thankful for your time — I’ve really enjoyed our conversation. I want to ask you one last thing. I won’t generalize, but the general workforce right now is feeling pretty burnt out, pretty hopeless about where work is headed, about AI. There’s a lot of uncertainty in the air. So for our listeners out there who are burnt out, overworked, and convinced that nothing will change — what’s your message to them?

Joe O’Connor [36:09] — I think it is easy to be despondent. It feels like we made one step forward when it came to the conversation about employee wellbeing and burnout, and we’ve taken two steps back. It continuously frustrates me that leaders who really believe in the science of sustainable performance when they watch sports don’t apply those same principles to running a business — recognizing that, particularly when it comes to knowledge work, cognitive labor is something that really does require us to take a much more sustainable approach to high performance.

But I am an optimist when it comes to the future. Sometimes I feel pessimistic about AI, because maybe the political leadership is not responding as quickly to how this is changing the world around us as I might like. But when I think about this at an enterprise level, and when I think about this at an individual level: A, there’s so much opportunity. And B, I think over time — the point I made earlier — leaders are going to have to recognize that speed and volume matter less from our people in a world where the one thing we can be assured of with AI is that it does speed and volume exceptionally well. The things that are really going to matter from people, from humans, in the future are not things you can maximize or optimize by cracking the whip — by trying to drain more out of people, extract more out of people. And so I hope that is going to lead us to a different type of conversation about the future of work that we’re building.

Daniel Lamadrid [37:57] — Amazing. I got goosebumps with what you just said — very, very nicely said. Joe, thank you so much for being with us today. I’m certain that in the near future we can have a round two and see where the future of work has headed. How can people reach out to you if they want to learn more? Where is your book available? We’re going to be linking it in our episode within the transcript, but how can someone reach out to you or your team to learn more?

Joe O’Connor [38:27] — Sure. So Work Time Revolution is on LinkedIn. We also have a website, worktimerevolution.com — you can sign up for our monthly newsletter, The Revolutionary Times. I’m also on LinkedIn and would be delighted to connect with people and continue the conversation. And if you want to buy the book, you can go to domorein4.com. The links are there. That’s really it.

Daniel Lamadrid [38:48] — Awesome. Thank you so much, Joe. This was a very insightful episode, and I totally agree with what you said — these are the types of conversations we need to be having, because I’m also a believer that the four-day workweek will be an inevitable part of the future of work. So thank you for being with us, and thank you so much for the research and the work that you do.

Joe O’Connor [39:12] — Thanks, Daniel. Pleasure.

Daniel Lamadrid [39:13] — Have a good day. Ciao.