Joe O’Connor wants to persuade your boss—and everyone’s boss—to reduce the workweek to 32 hours.
As chief executive officer of the nonprofit 4 Day Week Global, O’Connor oversees six-month boot camps now helping 170 companies with 10,000 participating employees around the world to adopt more flexible work schedules.
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. “It wasn’t 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,” said Boston College economist and sociologist Juliet Schor, who is indeed spearheading 4 Day’s global research efforts and delivered a spring TED Talk on the larger case for a four-day work week.
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.O’Connor 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’ weekly hours from 35 to 37.
In 2018, O’Connor spearheaded a conference in Ireland called the Future of Working Time. “There was a lot of pushback, externally and internally,” O’Connor said, with concern “that this was going to be perceived as lazy public servants looking for more time off.” Soon, the Covid-19 pandemic uprooted a century of workplace norms. Barnes and Lockhart hired O’Connor 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.