Fancy a six hour working day? It’s possible in Sweden

The project was previously tested in a Svartedalens retirement home in Gothenburg, which had the six-hour work day implemented as a test. During the course of the program, the staff of the home’s morale became significantly higher, fostering better care for its patients, according to Fast Company.

The theory is they will be more focused and productive during the time they are at their jobs. In order to cope, we mix in things and pauses to make the work day more endurable.

“I can say unequivocally that there’s an overall more optimistic upbeat mood in the company culture and a strong desire to want to work for a company where there are more employee perks, where employees are treated as fellow humans and not just sources of output”.

The logic goes that if the working day is shorter, staff will be more motivated and have more energy to complete the same volume of work in less time.

In April of a year ago the government of Gothenburg announced that public sector employees would work fewer hours in an experiment to improve work-life balance, boost productivity, and ultimately cut costs.

The director of Melbourne University’s centre of workplace leadership, professor Peter Gahan, said Australia should consider investing in similar experiments.

Mr Gahan said the extra hours had “significant” consequences for workers, employers and communities.

“We want to spend more time with our families, we want to learn new things or exercise more”.

“They experience more stress, burnt out that might mean for organisations there are consequences in the form of lower levels of engagement and less productivity, and the more likelihood that people would leave”, he said.

The eight-hour workday has been standard practice in business across the world since Henry Ford first experimented with it for factory workers.

He called the review of the Fair Work Act to include examining “significantly different” working arrangements that reflected the new working economy. We’re well known in the industry (and in the rest of the country), partly due to our working hours. Despite these standard working hours we tend to think that by working longer we will see the benefits later but this rarely works in our favour. And according to a study published last month involving 600,000 people, those of us who clock up a 55-hour week will have a 33 percent greater risk of having a stroke than those who maintain a 35- to 40-hour week. To stay focused on a specific work task for 8 hours is a huge challenge.

It’s possible, but you’d have to move to Sweden.