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  • Too much communicating, not enough focus

    Joe O’Connor

    People spend 57% of their daily work time just communicating in meetings, email, and chat. 😮

    That’s according to this new study from Microsoft on AI and the workplace. 🔎

    And that’s not all.

    🔴 68% of people surveyed say they don’t have enough uninterrupted focus time.

    🔴 64% say they struggle to have the time and energy to do the job.

    This phenomenon is an epidemic in modern organizations. 🤒

    #WorkTimeReduction can be a CATALYST to make your organization more efficient by creating a forced constraint around time.

    It can also be a powerful INCENTIVE which motivates and engages people in the process of finding efficiencies.

    Counter intuitively, while people have less time to get their work done, they have more space and energy to focus on what really matters.

    #ItsAboutTime we rewarded people for finding better ways to get their work done, not for the performance of ‘hard work’ and long hours.

  • 3 companies, 3 paths

    Joe O’Connor

    Which one will you take? 🛣

    Company A 💡

    • Embraces the potential for AI to radically improve their processes, streamline their operations and automate administrative tasks
    • Wants to be an early adapter of new technologies, but sees the opportunity to share the benefit of this with employees through reduced working time
    • Implements a shorter working week, boosting engagement to drive the integration of new tools to their day-to-day processes and leading to a more efficient organization
    • Steals a march on their competitors when it comes to attracting talent and retaining their best people, due to the attractiveness of their new #WorkTimeReduction offering

    Company B 🤑

    • Sees similar opportunity in AI and wants to get out of the blocks quickly
    • Struggles to get employees to engage with the process of integrating new AI tools in their daily work
    • Makes some progress and delivers some efficiencies, but not to the same extent as Company A due to lower engagement levels
    • Utilizes all of these efficiencies to realize cost savings and lay off some of their staff, further damaging morale
    • This causes some key people to leave, and any cost savings are swallowed up by the cost of replacing and retraining

    Company C 📝

    • Passively follows new developments in AI, but ‘too busy’ to change systems and processes at this time
    • Falls behind their competitors, who are delivering leaner, more efficient services with happier, healthier employees
    • Struggles to catch up due to internal resistance to change, and talent flight to cutting-edge market leaders like Company A

    Which path will your organization take? 🤔

    If you want to be like Company A, combining operational excellence with the most attractive and effective employee proposition out there, get in touch with us at Work Time Reduction to start the conversation and your journey to a shorter working week. ✅️

  • AI and the four-day week

    Joe O’Connor

    Someone asked me a great question yesterday.

    If the pandemic was the catalyst for the #4DayWeek to go mainstream, what might the catalyst be for it to become the norm? 🤔

    The impact of Covid and the “Great Resignation” led to exponential growth for the shorter working week movement. 📈

    We are now in an incremental growth phase, as company leaders are gradually persuaded of the benefits and convinced by the research, and adoption by industry competitors creates ripple effects to encourage others to follow. 🌱

    Numerous sentiment surveys in the UK, the US and Canada suggest that the majority of executives and decision-makers believe the four-day week to be possible, desirable and even inevitable in the near future – but most are still watching and waiting.

    But could another external force fast-track this process? 🚀

    For me, the obvious answer lies in the impact of #ArtificialIntelligence, for 3 key reasons. 🤖

    1️⃣ EFFICIENCY – Many organizations that I have worked with and supported to move to shorter working weeks have automated certain tasks and used technology to improve administrative processes. This was before #ChatGPT #AutoGPT and other tools opened up a world of possibility for how we get our work done. The scope to enhance productivity is now much greater. 💥

    2️⃣ PROTECTING EMPLOYMENT – I think that it is inevitable that we reach a point in the cycle where governments and the public sector look to shorter working weeks to help preserve jobs in industries and professions significantly disrupted by #AI. We can use technology to maintain employment and productivity levels while reducing hours. 🌟

    3️⃣ FAIRNESS – The inequitable distribution of the spoils of #globalization and #digitalization has led to political polarization and popular backlash against democracies the world over, most notably characterized in the west by the election of #Trump and the #Brexit referendum campaign. We have to ensure that history doesn’t repeat itself, and the benefits of AI, #automation and robotics are shared fairly with workers across the economy. One good place to start is through reduced working time. 👍

    The pandemic didn’t lead to an immediate surge in demand for the four-day week. If anything, the initial fallout from March 2020 onwards slowed down the pace of change, as leaders grappled with sudden transitions to remote working, supply chain disruption, economic uncertainty and a myriad of other issues. 🌪

    It was only a year later, when the transformative change we had collectively experienced started to bed in, that leaders, managers and employees started to truly open up to the potential for shorter working weeks to be possible. 💡

    Has the recent explosion in excitement and fear about AI tools and technologies mirrored the early stages of the pandemic? Will this be a precursor for another radical shift in how we structure the workweek?