Radical Idea at the Office: Companies Try 40 Hour Work Week

Before you know it, they'll be trying other revolutionary performance drivers like benefits. JL

Rachel Feintzeig reports in the Wall Street Journal:

Employees with strict workday expected to focus on work in the office, unplug fully at home.
At exactly 6 p.m. on any given weekday, the exodus begins at United Shore Financial Services LLC.
By 6:05, “the parking lot is pretty much empty,” says Ahmed Haidar, who works in client relations at the Troy, Mich.-based wholesale mortgage lender.
United Shore is among a group of small firms trying a radical management idea notable for just how un-radical it is: a 40-hour workweek.
Leaders say the “firm 40” makes employees more efficient by forcing them to focus on work while they are in the office—and unplug fully when they leave. Strict work limits have helped some companies attract higher-caliber recruits, some of whom are willing to take a pay cut in exchange for limited hours, hiring managers say.
United Shore Chief Executive Mat Ishbia demands his 1,350 employees work hard—he likes to remind staffers that 5:55 p.m. on a Friday is no different from 10:55 a.m. on a Tuesday—taking no breaks for Facebook or online shopping. But once the day is done, employees are off duty until the next morning.
“You give us 40,” says Laura Lawson, the company’s chief people officer. “Everything else is yours.”A finite workday feels increasingly rare for many U.S. workers, for whom the lines between work and home have blurred in recent years. The “work-life integration” policies touted by some companies enable people to head out early for a child’s soccer game or doctor visit, so long as they monitor emails on their smartphones late into the night.
United Shore colleagues police one another, speaking up if they spot someone slacking off or overdoing it. They are encouraged to take an hour for lunch, and teams do “power blocks”—30-minute periods during which salespeople abstain from email and might stand while doing calls—to sustain focus. Asking employees to work longer hours wouldn’t necessarily mean they would get more done, Mr. Ishbia reasons, a hunch backed by recent research.
“Workers need time to recover from work,” says John Pencavel, who teaches labor economics at Stanford University. His research has found that employees who put in too many hours in a week or work too many days in a row become less productive over time, with output per hour falling as workers put in more than 48 hours during a given week.
Allentown, Pa.-based myHR Partner Inc. says some employees are willing to take a pay cut for a 40-hour week. Job postings for the human-resources outsourcing firm boast “an actual 40-hour workweek” and beckon hires to “say goodbye to long work hours.”
Three open positions at the company have garnered 663 applicants, says Tina Hamilton, the company’s president. She adds that some hires have taken pay cuts from six-figure jobs to come work for myHR Partner, where compensation ranges from $40,000 to $90,000 a year.

Hours Worked

Average weekly hours worked in 2014 for persons 16-years-old and over (who usually work full time) for these occupations, according to the Labor Dept.:

• Management, professional and related occupations: 43.3
• Service occupations: 41.3
• Sales and office occupations: 41.6

Adjusting to an eight-hour workday can be tough for employees accustomed to tapping out emails at 9 p.m. and taking client calls on Sundays.
Mr. Haidar, a United Shore employee for about two years, says he initially doubted the “firm 40” was real. He now leaves at 6 p.m. nightly and says he hardly ever sends emails or contacts colleagues after hours.
“There’s nobody to call,” says Mr. Haidar, who goes by Eddie. “Everyone’s at home.”
At Never Settle LLC, a business-software developer based in Denver, co-founder Kenn Kelly initially wanted employees to work as much as they wanted and take vacation when they pleased.
Given the freedom to choose, though, workers overdid it—putting in 52-hour weeks on average, according to Mr. Kelly. He began penalizing those who worked too much or too little, so that anyone who doesn’t average a total 80 hours over two workweeks loses vacation time. (Most of the company’s workers are now paid on an hourly basis, so controlling hours can rein in costs too, but Mr. Kelly says the policy was developed to preserve work-life balance.)
Bosses at BambooHR LLC, a Lindon, Utah, human-resources software company with a firm 40-style policy, confront employees who don’t limit their hours, and even fired one for overworking. Others think limited hours means that showing up late for meetings is OK, says Ryan Sanders, BambooHR’s chief operating officer. He tells them, “It feels like you’re not putting in the full 40.”
People say they are working longer these days, but the truth is murky. A recent survey by tax and consulting firm EY found that about half of managers said they work more than 40 hours a week, and 39% reported that their hours have increased in the past five years. Data from the Current Population Survey show that hours for managers and professionals who usually work full-time have stayed relatively steady over the past few years at around 43.3 hours a week.
Professionals tend to remember their most hectic weeks as typical, says Laura Vanderkam, an author who studies time use. She recently studied a group of professional women earning $100,000 or more; according to time diaries, the women worked 44-hour weeks on average.“We all think we’re working around the clock,” she says. “We assume we must be working harder than anyone ever was, but probably that’s not the case.”