For about a year, nurses at the Svartedalens retirement home have worked six-hour days on an eight-hour salary. They’re part of an experiment funded by the Swedish government to see whether a shorter workday can increase productivity.
The conclusion? It does.
As with any cultural shift in the workplace, the six-hour day has to prove itself more than just humane. For any employer, in Sweden or elsewhere (and perhaps especially in the U.S.), an abridged workweek can’t damage productivity if it’s going to have a chance.
A year’s worth of data from the project, which compares staff at Svartedalens with a control group at a similar facility, showed that 68 nurses who worked six-hour days took half as much sick time as those in the control group. And they were 2.8 times less likely to take any time off in a two-week period, said Bengt Lorentzon, a researcher on the project.
“If the nurses are at work more and are more healthy, this means that the continuity at the residence has increased,” Lorentzon said. “That means higher quality (care).”
Less surprising was that the nurses were 20 percent happier and had more energy at work and in their spare time. This allowed them to do 64 percent more activities with elderly residents, one of the metrics researchers used to measure productivity.
Svartedalens is part of a small but growing movement in Europe. Sweden has dabbled with shorter workdays before: From 1989 to 2005, home-care-services workers in one Swedish municipality had a six-hour workday, but it was abolished due to a lack of data proving its worth.
The key result of the Swedish study — that productivity can increase with fewer hours worked — eliminates a major stumbling block to globalizing the shorter workday.
“The six-hour workweek has not been well-accepted in many countries because organizations are worried their productivity might fall,” said Pramila Rao, an associate professor of human resource management at Marymount University.
Even with encouraging results, it’s unlikely that the United States will soon shift to shorter days.
Americans work about 38.6 hours per week, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. They get, on average, fewer than eight paid vacation days a year; only about three-quarters of workers get any paid time off at all, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics.
“The Swedish model will not be easily accepted in the U.S. because we are a nation of workaholics,” Rao said.
