Joe O\u2019Connor wants to persuade your boss\u2014and everyone\u2019s boss\u2014to reduce the workweek to 32 hours.<\/p>\n
As chief executive officer of the nonprofit 4 Day Week Global, O\u2019Connor oversees six-month boot camps now helping 170 companies with 10,000 participating employees around the world to adopt more flexible work schedules.<\/p>\n
The New Zealand-based nonprofit has signed up employers in the US, Ireland, Australia and Canada, as well as its home country. This month, 70 companies in the UK with over 3,300 employees will embark on a pilot program that includes training, mentorship, data collection and networking, O\u2019Connor said.<\/p>\n
He is capitalizing on a watershed moment in the workplace, where the future of when and how work happens is up for grabs. Workers and managers alike know from the past two years of working from home that many jobs don\u2019t really require 40 weekly hours to complete.<\/p>\n
But the relationship of workers and employers remains in play, with some high profile CEOs, such as Elon Musk, demanding workers return to the office, and others, like Thomas Gottstein, CEO of Credit Suisse Group AG, acknowledging that his company will never return to full-time in-office staffing.<\/p>\n
O\u2019Connor is seizing this moment of ambiguity to provide organizations with a palatable path forward.<\/p>\n
But not for himself. If O\u2019Connor touts the virtues of working reduced hours, his own schedule is hardly abbreviated. A recent work day began with a 6:15 a.m. media interview.<\/p>\n
Other days end with 9 p.m. online information sessions with executives considering an Australia and New Zealand pilot program, which 4 Day Week Global plans to launch in August.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe laugh about being acolytes of reduced work time who do conferences in weird time zones in the middle of the night,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Changing Norms<\/strong><\/p>\n O\u2019Connor\u2019s sudden rise is unlikely. He isn\u2019t an experienced consultant who hobnobs with CEOs, or a billionaire who had an epiphany.<\/p>\n The 33-year-old Irishman can most often be found at his desk in the living room corner of a one-bedroom apartment in Astoria, Queens, that he shares with his partner, Grace, and their two cocker spaniels, Ned and Lady.<\/p>\n A former director of campaigning at Ireland\u2019s largest public-sector trade union, O\u2019Connor came to the US nine months ago, obtaining his visa through the Worker Institute at Cornell University, where he is also a visiting scholar researching work-time reduction. But he had much larger intentions while stateside.<\/p>\n \u201cIt wasn\u2019t until well into his stay here that I realized that he had come here to organize a US pilot and expected me to run the research for it,\u201d said Boston College economist and sociologist Juliet Schor, who is indeed spearheading 4 Day\u2019s global research efforts and delivered a spring TED Talk on the larger case for a four-day work week.<\/p>\n Aside from the challenge of reversing an ingrained societal norm, O\u2019Connor faces a branding problem: \u201cFour-day week\u201d is a misnomer. He and others define it as a metaphor for suitably reduced hours \u2014 typically 32 per week \u2014 and flexibility.<\/p>\n For example, some parents who participate in 4 Day\u2019s programs opt for five six-hour days a week, while some coders prefer three eleven-hour days. Many companies don\u2019t drop a full day from the schedule right away.<\/p>\n \u201cWe work with lots of companies that do a gradual reduction,\u201d O\u2019Connor said. \u201cSome shave off an hour a year.\u201d<\/p>\n Most organizations that embrace shorter schedules enjoy lower turnover, cheaper health care, fewer mistakes and higher-quality applicants, according to Schor. Stress tends to ebb, while job satisfaction rises, she says, and productivity stays stable.<\/p>\n Accidental Evangelist<\/strong><\/p>\n O\u2019Connor became an evangelist for shorter workweeks inadvertently. While he was working with the union in Ireland, the government instituted a policy to avoid pay cuts by increasing many workers\u2019 weekly hours from 35 to 37.<\/p>\n This didn\u2019t sit well with O\u2019Connor. He sent a survey to union members, and the answers changed the course of his life: Hundreds of workers, mostly mothers, filled in a comment box, explaining what had happened when they\u2019d followed the common Irish parent path of voluntarily reducing their hours and salaries for family reasons, such as working 70% time for 70% pay.<\/p>\n \u201cWe had hundreds of people saying, \u2018our expectations are the same, our responsibilities are the same, our output is the same, yet our salaries are less.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n The survey clued him into two facts that have become his guiding truths: Workers typically deliver outputs in the time allotted, and work hours shield a largescale gender-inequity problem. A man with a mission emerged.<\/p>\n In 2018, O\u2019Connor spearheaded a conference in Ireland called the Future of Working Time. \u201cThere was a lot of pushback, externally and internally,\u201d O\u2019Connor said, with concern \u201cthat this was going to be perceived as lazy public servants looking for more time off.\u201d<\/p>\n The next year, he launched 4-Day Week Ireland (its tagline: better 4 everyone), pulling together academics, businesses and the National Women\u2019s Council of Ireland as members.<\/p>\n He positioned shorter weeks as a centrist proposal that would meet the needs of workers, businesses and society, and a standard 35-hour workweek was finally reinstated in April.<\/p>\n He also joined forces with then-fledgling 4 Day Week Global, which was founded by a semiretired couple named Andrew Barnes and Charlotte Lockhart. They self-funded the group after Barnes\u2019 trust company, New Zealand-based Perpetual Guardian, thrived under an abbreviated schedule.<\/p>\n Soon, the Covid-19 pandemic uprooted a century of workplace norms. Barnes and Lockhart hired O\u2019Connor as their CEO, and in September 2021, he moved to America to run the sleepy non-profit. Arriving in the US, the former union official realized he would need to go to companies directly to create momentum.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s inevitable that for this to succeed, it would have to be driven by the corporate world and private business and private industry,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Talking the Talk<\/strong><\/p>\n O\u2019Connor has quickly adapted to the language of CEOs, smoothly talking shop about recruitment, retention and competitive edge.<\/p>\n \u201cHe just tells you how it is,\u201d said Adam Husney, CEO of Healthwise, a consumer-health information company with 250 employees that moved to a four-day week this year. \u201cHe\u2019s not trying to convince you; he\u2019s just sharing the data.\u201d<\/p>\n Healthwise has seen lower burnout and increased satisfaction with no decline in productivity, Husney said, and a crippling attrition problem has disappeared altogether. \u201cWe have lot of work to do, and we worry we\u2019ll slide backwards, but for now it\u2019s working really well.\u201d<\/p>\n 4 Day Week Global now offers a dizzying array of pilot programs globally. Seventeen companies in Ireland with 600 participating employees will complete 4 Day Week Global\u2019s first pilot in July, O\u2019Connor said.<\/p>\n A US pilot of 40 companies with 3,200 employees is just past midway; a pilot in Australia and New Zealand begins in August, and a new US and Canada pilot launches in October, followed by a European pilot in February. Starting next year, new cohorts will launch quarterly, each with a 2-3 month phase beforehand for planning, pilot design and research baseline assessment.<\/p>\n Companies don\u2019t pay to participate in the programs but are asked to donate between $2,000 and $20,000, depending on their size.<\/p>\n O\u2019Connor, meanwhile, is learning the art of fraternizing with a more disparate crowd, with his old alliance-building skills coming in handy. He also hopes to work less before too long. For now, though, he would prefer not to discuss his hours.<\/p>\n Does he work five days a week?<\/p>\n \u201cYou know, we\u2019re trying to change the world here,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Six days?<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re a small, growing organization with exponential increases in demand,\u201d O\u2019Connor said. \u201cLike many CEOs \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
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