四天工作制它香不香？Four Day Work Week：Living for the weekend…or not?

魔都英语新闻丨ShanghaiLive

Tim Pope: This is the Money Talks Podcast from SMG News, I'm Timothy Pope.

Zhang Shixuan: And I'm Zhang Shixuan. On this episode: Living for the weekend... Or not...

Tim Pope: This podcast usually drops on a Friday morning... so even if you're not listening on a Friday, just imagine it's Friday. Nice thought isn't it?

Zhang Shixuan: Now imagine that you didn't have to work today! You've worked Monday to Thursday, got everything done and now you have THREE DAYS FREE!

Tim Pope: Sounds amazing right? Well pretty much everyone in the Nordic country of Iceland gets to do just that. Long before the pandemic the country started an experiment that shifted one percent of the population to a four day working week.

Zhang Shixuan: They got the same pay -- no reductions in salary or benefits. They just got to work 30 to 35 hours a week instead of 40 hours or more.

Tim Pope: This study ran from 2015 to 2019, so it wasn't just a short term thing. And Iceland found that for these four-day-a-week workers, productivity actually went up.

Zhang Shixuan: People got MORE done just working four days than they used to get done in five.

Tim Pope: So this week we wanted to look at this -- this holy grail of work life balance -- and see if people think it would work here in China.

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Tim Pope: OK so I'm out and about in Shanghai. I'm going to wait in this nice coffee shop and ambush people while they're trying to get their caffeine fix.

Tim Pope: Would you like to do a four day working week instead of five?

Guest 1: It's awesome! I get one day of! I would prefer four working days because usually people staying in the office, they only do six hours of work and then it's done and I don't think you need to force them to be in the office to stay eight hours every day.

Tim Pope: And what do you think the bosses would think about it?

Guest 1: I'm kind of the boss so I don't mind it! [laughs]

Guest 2: I think having a four day working week works as long as it motivates employees to do their jobs. This way we would have more time to spend with our children, especially since our country now advocates policies like the three child policy.

Guest 3: But for Chinese people we work hard but we still feel very anxious. Like if I work less, if someone else is going to take my job, or if I work less I will be left behind or something like this. I think it's just very difficult for us to stop working hard. It's kind of, how can I say this? It's in the blood.

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Tim Pope: I was surprised by some of the answers I got.

Zhang Shixuan: You're obviously not Chinese... what answer did you think we were going to get?

Tim Pope: I thought it would be a universal "Hell Yes we want to work less!" ... and we did get a couple of people saying that. And I totally relate to it. But I think on some level the less lazy part of me also relates to those comments about anxiety and getting left behind. What about you?

Zhang Shixuan: So I'm a typical Chinese, I'm born in Shanghai and the competition here is getting fiercer and fiercer, so if you don't do this job there will be other people taking your job and you will be left behind, you are forced to do that.

Tim Pope: The professionals don't seem as enthusiastic as the folks we spoke to in the street - some of those who were more gung-ho about the idea of a four day working week. Lei Yang is a National General Manager with recruitment and training firm Hudson China. He's also got a background in the tech industry which is where you find some of the more outrageous working expectations here in China. He wasn't so optimistic about China moving to a four day work week.

Lei Yang - National General Manager, Hudson China

To be very honest I dont think it's going to work here right now. It might work in the future because we have different national conditions. For example the scale and speed of the business are totally different. We have a much bigger population and we have our own challenges here in China so everyone right now is really focussed on developing new businesses like digitalisation. So I don't think right now this model is working here.

Tim Pope: But at the same time we have this whole continuing national conversation about overwork, and many of the bosses and founders of China's star companies promoting this 9-9-6 work culture.

Zhang Shixuan: Yeah... 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week. It's kind of the opposite to what they tried in Iceland. Lei Yang said it's all about staying competitive, but that more and more young people don't want to do it.

Lei Yang: 9-9-6... I can understand that. Maybe it's not perfect but given the current economic conditions it's really about speed to market. For example, the internet companies and start-ups. They're really focussed on speed to market so it's about survival. So I can understand why they take this approach. But over time I also notice that a lot of the younger generations they are not willing to do this so I know some of the companies already cancelled this model. Have you ever heard of the Big and Small week? In one internet company they just cancelled that.

Tim Pope: Ok to be fair I knew about 996, but I didn't know about the big and small week. Can you explain it and tell us who dumped it and why?

Zhang Shixuan: It refers to people working for five days and week and then six days a week. They take turns. And then the big week refers to the week that they work for six days and the small week refers to what we would consider the regular term, five days a week. This is very common in internet companies like Bytedance, Kuaishou, Tencent, those kind of large companies but they suddenly dumped it. And one of the most interesting I found is that most employees weren't that optimistic about this new policy because they think in the past, workers at Bytedance could get extra payments; usually doubling their original pay for their work overtime at weekends. But now suddenly it's cut off so they got something like 15 to 25 percent less in their yearly payment according to some employees.

Tim Pope: Ok so they were actually upset that they lost this Big and Small Week thing because they were making a lot of their income from overtime!

Zhang Shixuan: Because you know it doesn't mean that they should do less. They almost the same workload. It means more working pressure during the weekdays.

Tim Pope: So this sort of raises the question about what people are being paid for. Is it the amount of work that they do? Or is it the amount of time that they spend in the office? Because this big and small week sounds like people are being paid for their time, not their work.

We're also interested to know what you think about this. Would you prefer to be paid to be present at work; or would you prefer something more flexible where you're paid for getting the job done - so leave us a comment.

I'd sort of thought that the pandemic might change people's minds about just living to work... so we spoke to another keen observer of work practices here in China. Her name is Barbara Ex and she's the founder and CEO of a company called Whitespace...

Barbara Ex - Founder and CEO, Whitespace: I find that China is going in the opposite direction. We own flexible meeting rooms, training rooms where people can come together, either within their own company to do an internal meeting or training, or for their own professional development. They come to do a GMAT preparation course or professional certification or to prepare for overseas study. And we are busier and busier during this flexible working period.

Zhang Shixuan: So I guess working flexibly and working fewer hours are two quite different things...

Barbara Ex: I think people want to work more flexibly. I think they want more opportunities to express their inherant innovation and creativity but I would not say that China wants to work less. In my experience fact that we have people voluntarily signing up for professional education on a Sunday evening indicates a hunger for advancement and I dont think that there's a lot of appetite for working less. I think there's an appetite for working more effectively and getting ahead and creating something new, but not necessarily for working less.

Tim Pope: And what do you think about the idea as an employer?

Barbara Ex: I think if I were to ask my own staff would you want to work four days a week, some of them would say yes. But when I look at what they actually do, I'm not the one keeping them in the office after six o'clock. If one of our staff said I wanna work longer but I only wanna work four days a week we could adjust around that.

Tim Pope: So, Shixuan to wrap up... I guess I just wanna as you the question - 'As probably the hardest working reporter in our office - do you think you'd like to try keeping up your current level of productivity, but doing it in four days a week instead of five?"

Zhang Shixuan: Well to be honest, I'd rather keep it at five days a week because currently working five days a week I can arrange my interviews I can spend more time editing my videos but my current working schedule cannot fit into the four-days-a-week scheme. I'd rather take more rest during weekends.

Tim Pope: Thanks for listening this week. The show was written and produced this week by me Timothy Pope, and Zhang Shixuan with help from our intern Hannah Jiang. It's edited by Leonard Pratt, Ying Junyi is the producer. Money Talks is a production of SMG News.