The Indian Case For A 4-Day Week

Two hours. That’s the amount of time Vel Dhinagaravel believes those employed in the knowledge economy devote to deep and productive work every day. “If you can enable them to go from 2 to 3 hours each day, you’ll have more output,” he says.

It was ideas such as the above that made the founder and CEO of software firm Beroe, whose 1,000 employees are free to work remotely, propose a 4-day week as far back as 2017. The firm’s eight-member leadership team was sharply divided, but they agreed to a three-month pilot. “We decided we would measure productivity and if it stayed at the same level or went up, we would make it permanent,” he says. “We found we were actually doing 129% output.”

The seed was planted years before, when Dhinagaravel attended a two-hour meeting in Finland. “I was struck by the amount of focus they had in that meeting, there were no distractions no cellphones,” he says. That’s the first time he realised that Europe’s laid-back work life stereotype masked its focus on ‘outcomes’.

The most common reaction Dhinagaravel got from his peers after his company adopted the new policy could be classified under the ‘poor thing’ category: “Your business is struggling and hence you’re cutting back on the number of hours you work.” He confidently challenges those who promote the 70-hour work week, speaks eloquently about the “fetishisation of overwork” and why Indian companies are reluctant to jump on a trend that’s sweeping the world. 

The world’s largest 4-day work week concluded in the UK a year ago, and for most of 100 companies that participated, there has been no turning back. So what if the patriarch of his family extols the virtues of a 70-hour work week, some 67% of UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Tory party supporters would happily switch to 32 hours if it came with no loss of pay. In March, US senator Bernie Sanders announced legislation for 32-hour work week with no pay loss. Germany is in the midst of a six-month trial. I won’t be surprised if number of countries that support the four-day week soon overtake the number of countries that have legalised marriage equality. In both cases, India lags.

Results of most 4-day week studies invariably have the same results: higher employee retention, better well being and mental health, reduced fatigue. The impact on productivity is always positive.

Dhinagaravel recalls the story of a friend who worked in a US consulting company. He would set a daily alarm for 2am, respond to a few emails and go right back to sleep. It was his way to make his boss think he was working long hours. “We have not adapted our people management model to the knowledge economy,” Dhinagaravel says.

He blames that perennial villain: middle management. “They focus on busyness rather than productivity and outcomes, theirs is a command-and-control model,” he says, adding that it is this group that is driving all the post-Covid return-to-office memos, worried they are becoming increasingly irrelevant in the WFH world.

Neuropsychologist India Ashok, who began closely tracking countries’ experiments with the 4-day work week in 2020, agrees. “We have normalised and glorified the hustle and struggle of work. It’s not sustainable and results in so much cognitive dissonance,” she says, adding that when you pause the hustle, it results in a “very strong identity break” as your sense of self worth has become deeply connected with what you do.

Ashok is the head of communications for AIOU, a small startup led by psychologists that helps companies optimise their operations and work culture to enable sustainable growth. AIOU decided to lead by example and launched its pilot 4.5 day work week in March. The extra half day off can be claimed on any day, in the first or second half. Ashok and her founder Saswati Barat prefer to use the term ‘life work harmony’ over ‘work life balance’.

There are so few Indian practitioners of the four-day week that when Ashok and Dhinagaravel heard of the other’s existence, they were eager to connect. “We should start a support group,” Ashok jokes.

Ashok says the resistance to and arguments against the 4-day week don’t hold up to reality or data. “Leadership has to buy in,” she says. “There’s resistance from those in charge and this is one reason for the rise of the gig economy.”

It’s only a matter of time before Gen Z, expected to overtake Boomers in the workforce, pushes companies to change the rules, she believes. Several studies have shown that the generation born between 1996 and 2010 is one that values collaboration, equity, mental health and meaningful work. They are unlikely to grin and bear working environments that don’t take into account their needs.

Ideas such as rotational shifts and leveraging automation can help make a company’s transition easier, Ashok says. Dhinagaravel says he changed the business model to focus on output rather than input. “We started billing based on outcomes, not number of hours and then we focused on smart ways to increase our productivity,” he says. The company also stopped asking supervisors for qualitative assessments of their teams. “We built a quantitative and consistent way of measuring people,” he adds.

But what’s the main reason these two practitioners believe in the four-day work week? “At the end of the day people who are working on creating inclusive and diverse environments do it not just because it’s better for business or your brand or something that will be made mandatory soon,” says Ashok. “You do it because it’s the right thing to do. That is how you enhance your organisation culture.”

Priya Ramani is a Bengaluru-based journalist and is on the editorial board of Article-14.com.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of NDTV Profit or its editorial team.