Burnout at work has become a national issue in the United States, to the point that the media is calling it “The Great Exhaustion.” There’s been concern and debate regarding productivity at work and whether the U.S. should adopt a four-day workweek versus the traditional 9-to-5 for five days out of the week. In contrast, the debate is over in the Netherlands, where a four-day workweek is commonplace and welcomed, especially for women in the workforce.
The average worker in the Netherlands works around 32.1 hours a week, the shortest workweek in the European union. While the majority of folks work part-time, most full-time workers compress their hours into four-day workweeks rather than spreading them over five. In spite of shorter work hours, the Netherlands retains a high GDP and a productive economy. This is due to the fact that while the Dutch work shorter hours each week, they work longer tenures before retiring which allows industrious work to be spread across a larger population of people in the work force.
This has been especially beneficial to women in the Netherlands. Since most households feature both partners working part-time and their parents still doing some work into their golden years, this allows women to pursue higher status positions in various fields while their traditionally male partners can share household, childcare, and elder care duties in equal measure—a common struggle and stress that many working women in the United States have if they want to thrive in both their career and family.
Of course, the Netherlands is able to have families live comfortably under two part-time incomes in a household, whereas a single person in the U.S. needs an average of over $80K in salary to live comfortably. It should also be noted that most people earn less money in the Netherlands, but still benefit from the work-life balance that allows them to spend time raising children or care for their elderly relatives. Most American families working full time need to pay for child and adult care services since they don’t have the time to do it themselves. There’s also the fact that the U.S. has no laws requiring companies to provide a minimum amount of paid vacation time to employees as is common in the Netherlands.
With that being said, and given that the Netherlands is able to accomplish this without harming its economy, there is credence for a four-day workweek to become a new standard in America to address its worker burnout problem. Studies from the National Institute of Health, Stanford University, and others repeatedly show no correlation between higher productivity and working more or longer hours. Pilot programs from companies experimenting with four-day work weeks without impacting salaries throughout Europe and Japan are reporting higher satisfaction ratings among their employees, lower burnout, and overall better health for them, too. This is all with little to no impact on the employee’s productivity on the jobs. Some states, such as New York, are conducting their own experiments on how four-day workweeks impact their bottom line.
It’ll be interesting to see if the four-day workweek becomes more and more commonplace throughout the world as experimentation and studies continue.
