Hello, everyone. Welcome to the four-day work week. I want to start by just getting a sense of the room. How many of you currently work a four-day week? Didn't think so. Welcome back to Davos. How many of you aspire to work a four-day work week? Or at least fewer days or hours than you currently do? And how many of you are willing to commit to no work on Friday tomorrow? OK, we're going to try to get some of you to rethink your stances here and change some behaviors. So I'm Adam Grant. I'm an organizational psychologist at Wharton. Delighted to have a chance to discuss this pressing topic with a panel that has a lot of expertise and experience. Maybe just to kick us off, I think a lot of you have probably followed the trial that the four-day week organization has done primarily in the UK. They did an independent analysis led by Juliet Shor, a sociologist of work. They had dozens of companies do a six-month trial of a four-day week. And the results are pretty encouraging. They find that across the board burnout, stress, and anxiety are down. Pace of work actually goes up so people work faster and more efficiently. There's a term for that. It's called Parkinson's Law. It's the idea that work expands to fill the time that you have in your day. And it also can shrink to fill shorter windows of time, which is kind of exciting. Revenue is up over 8% and over 37% where it was the prior year at that time. So there are actually some productivity gains from working less, it seems. And also satisfaction is higher. Work, life balance has improved. People exercise more. They have more time for leisure and hobbies and they even sleep better when they work less. So we're done. Four-day week. Case is made, right? Every single organization here in Davos is going to implement it. Maybe not. Not so fast. I want to talk today about why we might want to consider the four-day week. What are the challenges? How might we make it happen? And what's going to happen in the future? Are you all ready? Okay, let's do it. So let me start with Kareen, Employment Minister in the Netherlands. I should say, by the way, we actually have a chance to do a deep dive. Western Europe is leading the charge on the four-day week. I think light years ahead of most of the rest of the world. There have been occasional trials in other parts of the world. But as an American, I would really like to know how we can all work less. I think those of you from Asia probably have similar questions unless you've followed the Microsoft Japan trial before day week, which was highly successful. Reduced meetings also saved on electricity. But I do think that in the Netherlands, you have a lot of experience that we don't. So Kareen, tell us, why are we having this conversation now? What's going on? Well, I think I want to put it in a little bit of a broader perspective because we are really facing enormous challenges ahead of us, an 18 population, increasing health costs, decarbonization. And the way to deal with that, actually in the Netherlands and many Western European countries is not that clear yet because at the same time, we face record low unemployment. And at the same time, we face a million in the Netherlands, a million people who are still on the side and not working. So we have really a puzzle in the labor market to lay. And if you look in the Netherlands, at least, we have a lot of people working five days a week, men, presumably, and a lot of women working two or three days a week. So for me personally, it would be great a four-day work week for everybody because that would actually mean that women would step up because more financially independent and men would take more care of smaller children, elder parents, informal care that's now majority on the shoulders of women. But when you talk a little bit broader, what you see is you see at the one hand, a big drive, especially from a younger generation, for more flexibility. And a four-day work week can be one of the answers, but a four-day work week in itself is also inflexible. Maybe flexibility is also about the hours that you can work, the starting hours.  Maybe you wanna be a screen structure in winter and I see nurse in summer. So these are the kind of questions that we need to deal with. And when you look ahead for the next 10 years, as governments and commercial organizations, we really need to think about what kind of work we can offer to people that's indeed much more flexible. If you wanna do a project from Portugal servicing and somebody in Amsterdam, how can that be done? At the same time, this is very much a discussion for the upper class. Because if you look at many of the jobs that are service jobs, they're still in-person service jobs, in healthcare, for instance, in the service industry. And there, it's much more difficult to actually go to those flexibility hours. And also, if you would go to a four-day work week, if you consider the discussions we also have on minimum wage and on living wage, then you have to be quite serious about what that means for the paper hour. And that is also a difficult discussion, of course, because that actually means you have to increase wages to make sure that people can still make their rent and pay their bills. But the drive for flexibility comes, of course, because people need to exercise, take care of their families. But also, what we see today is we're running quickly into a burnout society. That's, I think, we saw it during COVID already, but it started before. It can be through social media, through the always-on culture that we have and the lookup movement.  And that's mostly burnout. And the big question is, how can we actually make that better? And flexibility is one of the answers to it. A good working culture is another one. And also stretching out, I think, your work over more of your lifetime. That's also a question of flexibility, that maybe there are times in your life when you have small children or elderly parents you want to work a little bit less and three, four years later, you want to pick it up again. So I think that's the broader question and how it's the next question. Yeah, well, I think that's given us already a lot to think about, so problem solved. But I think the point about flexibility is really important and it relates to the work that the forum is doing more broadly on not just creating jobs, but actually creating high-quality jobs. WEF has put together a framework for thinking about what does it mean to actually have good work? And flexibility is one of the pillars of this. Sandra, we were just talking about this yesterday.  Talk to us about what the demand for the four-day week is looking like. Are there benefits for attracting and retaining and motivating people? What does the landscape look like in the Netherlands and beyond? Well, I always take the global perspective. We're a global talent company. We have 700,000 people working day in, day out at our clients. And I would say why flexibility, why four-day work week? What I say to my clients or to our clients is this is not because you want to be a charity or something like that. No, this is a business imperative. Why? Because the talent is scarce. And you almost should start to treat your talent as your customer. Your customer, you ask what you want and you try to do the best possible job for your customer. You should treat talent in an equal way. Because people have options. We have just launched our work monitor. And 50% of people say they're willing to quit the job if they're not happy at work. And flexibility, something that we all have all experienced or started to experience, some of us before that, depending on your work environment. But we have all experienced that it's great. You can decide when you work, where you work, how you do your work. You can blend in your work life much more easily with your personal life and work life balance is a critical thing that people are looking for as well. So, this is really a business imperative and business needs to step it up. I'll say just one thing about the how because that's of course, it's easy to say you gotta do it. But at Ransat we talk about flexibility with intentionality. And what do we mean by that? We mean, we're not gonna say to you you have to work two days at home or you have to work three days in the office and Monday and Tuesday, I mean it's complicated and a one size fits all doesn't work. I'm sure we'll all recognize it. So, flexibility with intentionality means let's look at the intent of what we're trying to do here in our organization. We're trying to serve our customers. We're trying to do policy making if we're in government. We're trying to serve our talents as we do in Ransat. The intent is to do the work that needs to be done to build, to grow the business. That's the number one. Within that, there are times that you need to be in the office because you're in the finance team and you're wrapping up the quarter. You're in the marketing team, you're starting a new campaign. Now, you all know those instances. There's new people joining, they need to be trained. They need to be on boarded. So, those are the days you got to be in the office and you decide that as a team because I cannot decide that for everybody all our 50,000 people in Ransat globally no, it needs to happen locally depending on what the team is trying to do. So, intentionality I think is the keyword so you make it almost tailor-made to every, not to every individual but to the team that you operate in. So, I have to ask a follow-up on this because I agree with that philosophy. I am hearing pushback from some CEOs. If we were to go, for example, to an unnamed CEO of Tesla, SpaceX or Twitter I think he would tell us that we should all work a seven-day week and also that really talented people are ambitious and they don't want to work less. They actually want to work more. So, what would you say to that hypothetical CEO? Well, let's, no, so what I would say if people wanted to work seven days per week in a very intense environment to build a great company, be my guest they should absolutely do that. I am, yeah, but I am wondering because now he bought Twitter which is a more established company with a certain culture. Can you change that culture like this to the startup culture that he sort of built the other businesses with? Well, it's an interesting experiment time we'll tell so we'll see. We certainly will. And by the way, some of you are trying to get photos. There's actually a QR code here if you want to do a deeper dive into the framework on good work and especially the flexibility component. Christie, general secretary, you and I you just spent a lot of time with unions. You have your finger on the pulse of what workers actually want. What are you hearing around the interest in the four day week? Nobody's talking about the four day week. I mean, in my- I disagree, we're talking about it right now. No, when you're asking me what I hear about that, I'm not, but there is a huge, I mean, sort of the big mega word, flexibility is what everybody wants and less time at work for some, not all. But I think just looking at the range of workers and I appreciate what Karine said is like, we represent grocery store workers, for example. They want more hours, usually, yeah, but more important, they want to know when they're working next week. They want to plan their childcare. They want to know when they could take their kids to the doctors. And algorithmic management has come into their lives so that they no longer work every Tuesday and Thursday. It depends what the algorithm predicts and they often don't know their schedule. So scheduling is really important for low wage, predominantly women workers and care and grocery stores, things like that. On the other extreme, we have people who are film producing and on the sets and they're expected to work 15 hours a day during the time of production and they're trying to get an eight hour break between, between, and that's what they almost had a strike over last year. So they want, they're happy to do 15 hour stretches but could they have at least an eight hour break or nine and then you've got, I know we've got workers producing video games. They have the crunch. They have to work maybe 24 hours a day to meet some deadlines but they want and they're like, okay, like let's fix that. We don't want to work that many hours but in, or IT workers a little bit less pressure than the ones on the crunch but they want to be able to take the next week off. So it's about flexibility but not the one size fits all of a four day week. And I think we do have Amazon workers who work four day week, four, 10 hour days. Now, would they prefer five, eight hour days? No, four days in an Amazon warehouse is you get a three day weekend but it's really hard to work 10 hours in a row. It's very difficult safety-wise and it's a physical job and so in the eight hour day it was kind of designed around physical work so it isn't really ideal but they prefer that. So yes, in that case, I really think a lot of it is like how many hours over four days is another big question. I mean, are Japanese members, for them a 40 hour work week is not even in the realm of possibility. Like they have a campaign to force each other to leave after nine hours a day but normally they're working 10 and 11 hours a day and I think that's, I mean, I would say the data that just came out was published last week from the ILO is that 33% of employees in the world not the informal economy work over 48 hours a week as right now and that number goes up when you go to the United States and the United States is the worst in the developed world in terms of U.S. and Japan or by far the worst and I know as a lawyer, when I was a practicing lawyer, I worked 50 hours a week and I was a slacker. Like what, only, you know, really, 50? I was like, I'm limiting my, you know, I was always like, I'm gonna be really disciplined about this but you know, we have, I have a relative, I won't name her but who's working, she's a, and this is considered a great job. They can, they work between nine and 10 hours a week a day for nine days and they get the 10th day off and that's great. You get every other Friday off and that would be sort of in that four day week environment but you're still working that nine, 10 hour day and I think, I just wanna close. I have a lot to say about this but I do think negotiating with workers is really important. That's the key. You know, it's not just about deciding, we believe unions have a big role in that and it has to be attached to dignity and of course, rather work four days than five, no question but for some who are already working 60 hours, do they, you know, what does that mean in terms of the number of hours? You know, it's a real whole cultural approach to how much you have to actually work and part of that I would throw in is vacation time because, you know, in the US you got, you have no right to pay vacation and it depends on the company what they allow and in Europe it's, you mostly start with four weeks even as a new employee and that is also about time off from work and I think that we, you know, when you have to consider that and some people would rather have a five day work week and have six weeks off, you know, and that's another, I mean, that's sort of like our option and where I work is you get a fair amount of time off but it's not, it's not organized as a four day work week so I think there's so many variations to this theme and yes, of course, I love to work a four day week, I'd love to work a five day week, you know, and in my, you know, I think that it's real, what's the starting point and there's so much difference, there's such a big range and we have to think about those 22% of the world's workers who aren't working a full time job and that, again, that does not include the, that does not include the informal economy where those workers are just, they don't know from one week to the next what they're gonna work so it's just such a huge amount of range and we just need to have some negotiation over this and this is a big demand for our unions, big demand for workers and yeah, it's all in there. You're reminding me of the time I was advising an investment bank and I asked a basic question about work-life balance and somebody said, I have great work-life balance. What? I said, yeah, I've worked, that's my life. Yeah, I mean, yeah, you know, the U.S. is an outlier in this though and the vacation, you gotta like put that in the mix because yeah, you know, it just really isn't enough of a demand in the United States to have leisure time, to have time off and it's sort of considered barbaric in other countries that you get two weeks off a year when you're... Well, maybe a little bright, or sorry, Karina, a little bright spot on the U.S. we have asked in our work monitor how's your work-life balance? In the U.S., about 80% of the people say it's okay. That's just because we have very low expectations. Yes, because you have low expectations. That's probably the story in Japan at 60, in Europe it's sort of in between. So apparently it's expectations but apparently it's not perceived to be a problem. You know, when I moved to the U.S., people said on Wednesday, we're going on vacation. I said, okay, that sounds great, when will you be back? Yeah, next Monday. Yes, I know. I'll see you in six weeks. Also the three-week vacation is almost unheard of in the United States. I've been told, well, maybe once every couple of years you can do that, but not really in U.S. and Europe. Four weeks. That's the model. Yeah, it's a big, you know. May I add a dimension to the discussion because the one size fits all, that's one discussion. But there's also discussion that we had about productivity per hour. And I strongly believe that when you have more time off, you will be more productive in the hours that you work. I think that's what we all believe in, but there's more to it. There's technological investments that you need to do, process, reorganization, but there's also something about work culture. I was a CEO before and I learned really that when you have teams that lead themselves, they become more productive and that has to do with culture as well. If you have a better work culture, if you invest more in people, rescaling, if you really give people enough time to invest in themselves, the hours that they put in the projects and in the work will become more productive. But that's also a discussion that we need to have because if we look at the amount of work that's ahead of us, whether it's climate transition, health care, we cannot afford for everybody to go to a lower number of hours with the same productivity. So we need to find ways to increase that productivity to make it work with a four-day work week or any other arrangement of flexibility. I think you're raising an important point here and I'm reminded of a couple of data points to speak to this. One is Kamal Burdy and colleagues did a massive quarter-century study of what practices that you implemented in an organization actually improve productivity in the long run. And they found that none of the manufacturing and operations practices that we all talk about in buzzwords like Six Sigma or Lean had consistent benefits. The only practice that had consistent gains in productivity was empowerment and that was especially around empowering teams. There's also some work by Cummings and Blumberg which showed pretty clearly that self-managed teams are especially effective when you're in a high uncertainty and high interdependence world. It's dynamic, unpredictable and you need to collaborate to achieve a common goal which is kind of describing the world right now. So I think that this really speaks to you the desire for flexibility and for people to have control over when they work and how much they work. I think though there also is violent agreement on this panel that people want to work less and that we should look for ways to reduce the working week. So I wanna talk about the how. As far as I can see, the easiest intervention point is meetings. Most managers spend more than half their week in meetings. Many of them find them unproductive. There's some evidence that you can shorten your meetings by standing up literally instead of sitting down. They're on average something like 34% shorter with no cost to quality of discussion because when people are standing up they get tired and all of a sudden like I'm just gonna make my important point instead of blathering on and they learn how to be concise. It's like having to talk in tweets. You put the constraint on and it happens. We have seen that when we do four day work week trials that meetings become shorter and more efficient. And I think there's a great question to be raised here about why are we meeting? When I think about meetings, I can think of four reasons that we meet. We're here to decide, we're here to do, we're here to learn or we're here to create. If it doesn't fall in one of those buckets, cancel the meeting. So love to hear your reactions. Do we need to get rid of meetings and what other practical steps can we take to move toward a four or three or six day work week for those of you who work. But not me. Because the question is flexibility. The question is not necessarily less hours. The question is also flexibility. Less meetings, I think we all dream about that. At least I do. What helps as well is to actually say you will only have so many people in the room and only the ones who have to decide on this topic. Standing up helps. And just basically saying, I don't want any more meetings. When I was CEO, that was during Corona. What we did, we implemented a lunch break. It sounds, when you're physically, no, we do a lunch break. But from 12 to one, no meetings planned. Well, that gave a breeze through the organization. The other thing is just say 30 minutes is 25 minutes. 60 minutes is 50 minutes. So you leave a little bit of time to prepare for the next meeting, check your messages. That also means you don't have to check your messages during your meeting. But you can do it in between. So there are quite a number of tricks, but you have to implement them and be strict about it. Yeah, schedule 30-minute meetings as opposed to 60-minute meetings. My minutes are now 15, but that's my job. So what else can we do? Fewer meetings, shorter meetings, that seems like low-hanging fruit. What are other steps that we can take to move toward this flexibility? I mean, I think it is, you mentioned empowerment, but empowerment has to be preceded by trust. If I trust you to do the right thing, that means I don't have to check you anymore. We talk about what you're doing and what your results are, what your progress is, whatever. But I think that's a critical, but that's almost a mindset. And this is back also to the flexibility. I was also talking to one of our clients. He said, yeah, that's working from home, but not on Monday and Friday. In other words, because then people are making a long weekend. So I think trust the workplace and trusting the people in the organization to do what's right for their clients or for the other stakeholders that they operate with. I think that is critical. Anyone else? Other interventions, practical steps? Yeah, I mean, just thinking about so many of the interventions so many of the industries we represent where they're understaffed and that presents a real, like in care, for example, they're not about meetings. It's really, they just don't have enough staff. And so that has to be addressed because you can't work fewer hours as a nurse unless you've got more nurses on the job. I mean, there are some jobs like that where, so just thinking about white collar jobs. We just say, no, no, no, stand the nurses for a second because isn't that a chicken and the egg problem? We have a huge burnout problem in healthcare. Exactly. And so if we offered more four-day workweek jobs, for example, right, is it possible then that we attract more nurses? No, absolutely. I think you would attract more nurses and it would be great for the profession, but in order to do that, you have to have more nurses. I mean, it's chicken and the egg, but that's sort of that cycle, the downward cycle in some of these frontline jobs is that you get more hours because you don't have enough people and there's turnover and that the staff shortage in some industries in particular in care and not only in nursing, but in nursing home care and so on has become a real dimension. It has really caused turnover and then more staff shortage. So it's a circular thing, but absolutely. In white collar jobs, I'm not as clear. I mean, obviously, meetings, cutting them to 25 minutes, 30 minutes, 25 minutes, and having that automatic scheduling feature on your outlook to actually schedule 30-minute meetings, I think is a big, important thing. It's also about better meetings, which is a whole discussion stuff, but I want to come back to the nurses because I believe that if you think you need more nurses and for all the work that there is, then let's step out of it and say that can we reorganize the work in such a way that you can do it differently and you need less nurses? I mean, you have the motica if you talk about at home care. If you organize the processes differently, if you have less of an administrative burden, if you have more empowerment, so just thinking you need per working hour the same amount, the same number of nurses, let's think out of the box and see if we can reorganize the way we work. And there's a lot of discussion about administrative burden for healthcare workers in general and how to reduce that. And the trends don't go in the other direction. The trends kind of go in the other direction as more admin burden is what we're seeing. But yes, absolutely, you could cut that. I have one more for office workers, if you will. Focus and clarity. Be clear in your organization what is important, what your strategy is, what you want to focus on. I think that is really important because there are so many times, and I see it in our organization, saying people say, oh, wouldn't it be great if? And then leadership doesn't really want to say, that's a great idea, but not for us now. Yeah, and then they start a working group and then it's sort of, you know, there's a lot of dust and then they start working and then sort of six months later, it sizzles out. And in fact, then it has been a useless exercise because of leadership not saying, listen, great idea, but not for us now. I think it has worked for me really well, just as a bit of free advice for the room. Yeah, no, I think anytime somebody says, what if we, or why don't we try? That's an invitation, it's an opportunity to experiment. And I think that's really what the four-day-week conversation is about, is we have had a static, in many countries, five-day-week and some longer, for about a century. And it's time to start testing other models. I think organizations are ready for it. Our technology has enabled it. The pandemic has, I think, really created some urgency around it. And so I don't think we have an answer to what everybody's schedule should look like, but I do think we need leaders who are willing to run more AB tests. And say, let's try a no meeting morning or a no meeting day every week. Let's try canceling one day, maybe once a month. We give the last Friday off every month. And let's see how that goes. Let's see if we can maintain our productivity, if we can increase it, and if we can improve quality of life. And the goal is not, then, to make a permanent commitment to a policy. It's to learn from the experiment and then say, we're gonna evolve as a result of that learning. With that, we have lots of time. We probably have some audience questions. We'd love to take some, which is gonna remind everyone a few rules of questions. Number one, questions are not speeches. Number two, questions end in question marks. Over here. So my name's Jeremy Garoccox, I'm from the UK. I've actually run a four-day week. My question is, do you want me to share quickly that experience? Would love it, Jeremy, tell us about your experiment. So I was running a software development team at the time, and we found that very hard to motivate them to react to any of the things that motivated us, like equity. So they wanted to turn up at nine, leave at five, not cover support tickets when it was out of hours, we were operating a global service. And they had no motivation with equity. So we brought in, during summertime only, the four-day week, we were running an agile program so we could measure their productivity. We knew exactly what it was. It was conditional upon their performance. So they needed to be at least performing at the same level, if not more. And it worked through the summer where we get, in Scotland, we get very long daylight hours in the summer. And what we did was we changed the team's approach to when they turned up at work, because they turned up for longer hours during the four days that they were there. And it suddenly meant that they weren't just always thinking, oh, I turn up at work at nine, and I go at five. And it really did change the dynamic, but it was in that discrete team. And it was done because we made them the offer and they accepted it, and it really worked. So that was my experiment. Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to introduce you to our fourth panelist, Jeremy Garrett Cox. It's a great example. And I do think there's a big opportunity here to say the four-day week does not have to be treated like a perk if you're gonna try it. It's an incentive. Perpetual Guardian did this in New Zealand. They said, we're gonna hire people. We're gonna start them on a five-day week. And then we'll trial the four-day week for them. And if they can prove they're just as productive or more so, then we'll let them keep it. Seems like a smart experiment to me. Others? Other questions in the audience? Right over here, we have a mic coming. Hello, Julia Hobsbawm from the Nowhere Office book and project and Bloomberg's Working Assumptions column. I've got a question for Secretary Hoffman, actually, which is, are you noticing, and if you are, are you encouraged by the almost merging of dissatisfactions amongst both white collar workers and blue collar workers at the same time? Which, it's my belief, has not also happened for a century. Are you seeing those trends and what do you make of those? We are seeing the trends. A huge amount of dissatisfaction across all sections of the workforce, and one of the biggest things that we're getting from white collar workers is not necessarily the hours of work, but the squeeze and the monitoring and the surveillance that they're experiencing when they work remotely through all the various software tools that are now available to make sure that your productivity is at the same or greater than it was pre-remote work. And the productivity squeeze is something that, I know there's a big article about it in The New York Times, but it's really, it's not limited to the US or it's really pervasive everywhere. And we represent banking workers who work for retail banks. And I went to Australia just two weeks ago to visit our, they're just like, they can't take the pressure. There's just so much pressure right now to, and monitoring and surveillance and cameras and keystrokes and all of that has really contributed to a lot of dissatisfaction among white collar workers in my experience. So I think you're right. It's really quite a coming together on that point. And again, they weren't asking for more time off, although the other thing that we get a lot, and I think this really came out in the pandemic more so than ever, is this like never off kind of like right to disconnect is really important that we respect that, yeah, you don't get emails after seven o'clock at night unless it's an emergency. But this tendency of alongside flexibility and some people are working in different hours than others, but this constant stream of emails which is really stressful and it's measurable stressful and you get a work email at nine o'clock at night when you're putting your kids to bed and it really throws off, it can really be bad for your mental health and having time off, really legitimately time off. So I think those are two big things is like the never off kind of phenomenon and we're making some really big progress and some countries have legislated the right to disconnect and you cannot send an email after a certain time and I know you probably have a lot to say on that too, but I think those are two issues that we hear about a lot. And I think this right to disconnect is very important. The always on culture, it's not just in work, it's also in social life, it's also in school. We all are attached to our screens, we want to answer to all our social media immediately. I see it with my own teenage daughters and that adds to a burnout society. But there is a question of flexibility because the right to disconnect, if you implement it too strictly, then you actually take away flexibility because there are people who want to leave the office at five to take care of their small children and restart at eight till 10. There are people who want to work till seven, then go home, have nothing left more. So implementing the right to disconnect is much more difficult if you don't want to take away the flexibility than it looks like, but the philosophy, we need to strive for. But those people who work eight to 10 can't wait and send their emails to the morning and that's what we, you know, you could just schedule your emails. I mean, because otherwise, you know, let's say I'm working from eight to 10, it's not fair for me to send emails out to staff at 10 o'clock at night, you know? I mean, it may not be fair. Well, I would say the right to switch off is my right to switch off. So I think we should talk to Microsoft and say, give us a feature where we can say, these are my working hours and then I want to receive my work mail and these are the hours that I switched off and I don't want to get them. I think that's Satya Nadella is here, so. Satya will be listening. Well, I mean, our outlook, it says, you may want to refrain from sending this email because it's not it. No, no, no, you have to look at the receiver. Because that receiver might be somebody who wants to start at six o'clock in the morning and then go running and then take the kids to school. And, but then you say, no, no, I don't send it until eight because that's when the work day starts. So it's about the receiving end. That's what you need to schedule. All right, two quick things before we go to the more audience questions. One is there's research on the email urgency bias, which shows that we actually overestimate how quickly people expect a response. And so this is an organizational norm conversation that has to happen, right? What are reasonable response times? And ideally that's flagged in every email, right? I do not need to hear back from you for at least 48 hours. And hopefully then it makes it a little bit easier for people to not get sucked into that cycle. Secondly, monitoring and surveillance problem that we see, can we just put on the record that if you have to monitor your employees, you have failed as a manager? Like full stop. You've either failed at hiring, you've failed at training, you've failed at motivating. That's on you. Who else has a question? Microphone's coming. Hi, I'm Sylvia. First of all, thank you for a brilliant discussion. So far, I would love to hear a bit more about leadership skills that you think we need today in this environment that you've just described. Who wants it? You, yeah. You're the CEO. Well, I mean, I go back to, I think trust is a very important leadership skill. Trust means because not everybody works in the same way as you do. And I had to learn that when I was a young manager, I was in a consulting company. I had to learn that as we say in Dutch, there are multiple ways leading to Rome.  So trust, I think trusting your team, trusting your coworkers to do what they need to do. Also give feedback if they don't, because that's part of the story. But trust, I think, is very important. I think adding on trust is a shared vision. And how do you get to a shared vision is to have a collective thinking about it, and then also be decides about what that shared vision is, communicate it very well, and then trust people to act upon that vision. Because they also need clarity where they need to go. Another thing that I learned over the years is the power of diversity. If you have more diverse teams, and diversity is not only gender diversity, it's by culture, it's old and young, different work experience, blue color, white color. But if you have a really diverse discussion, you get to better decisions. And better decisions inspire people. People can smell when a decision is bad. People can smell when your narrative is not logical, when you haven't told it through. So working for a company that has a vision, that has good decision making, and has women on the board, has a good sustainability profile, everything that's also inspiring. But at the work floor, you have to be able to feel that the story is real. Maybe one addition. I think that employee engagement might be the wrong concept for the world we've been describing. It is possible to have people who are engaged at work and suffering in the rest of their lives, or on the road to burnout. And I think we need leaders now to start thinking much more broadly about employee well-being and quality of life, not just engagement in the job. Just a hand right over here, and then we'll go behind. Fantastic. My point is a little bit on the topics before. You were just saying... I was thinking about desynchronization, as you were saying. So one of the reasons why people work five days a week is because it's efficient when they think on an aggregate basis. Individually, it makes a lot of sense to work flexibility less hours. But think on global perspective, on other countries, on adjusting time zones, if each person decides it's on ours. So do you think it could be a barrier? How can we overcome this barrier? Thank you. I mean, I think for every... There's so many just different kinds of work, right? And some kinds of work, you need to have people working at the same time.  And some people work in more isolation. And it's not reasonable that everybody gets to work whenever they want. I mean, and let's just be, I would say, honest about that, knowing all different kinds of work. There has to be schedules. You have to know when is your day to show up at the grocery store, whatever.  So there have to be schedules. And I think that it just really depends on, you know, what are the times when you need to be available and then can you be more flexible in that context? But, you know, we do a lot of negotiations with employers about remote work because that is one kind, one aspect of flexibility. And in many, many jobs, you can't be remote all the time. And hardly anybody wants full-time remote workers. Let's say some do call centers, but then it's not like you don't get to choose your hours. You work from home, but here's what your assignment is. And there's still many jobs where there's shift work, like at Amazon warehouse. You don't get to decide this week I'm gonna work these four days and not those four days. So I think that, you know, it really depends. But in remote work, you know, you've got to have a discussion about when does it, intentionality is really important. Like not just everybody has to be working Monday, Wednesday, Friday, but why, what are those days and what are the reasons why these teams need to be together and when and so on. So I think there's a lot of work that goes into making remote work. And nobody's really hit that sweet spot yet because, you know, I think, I mean, I could say, you know, in all the employers that we deal with, you know, there's just like this discomfort with having people never in the office for all the reasons we know loyalty and all the other questions, but then also at the same time, we don't want over monitoring either and that goes back to trust. And so I don't think we've really figured that out. And that also ties in with flexibility, I would say. Yeah, to your point, Paul, we've talked about this, but you can categorize jobs and projects by levels of interdependence, right? So we call them pooled, sequential and reciprocal. I prefer to think of them as individual sport, relay sport and team sport. And where we really need the synchrony is basketball or what most of the world calls football, where we're passing back and forth. If you're doing a relay race, you need a little bit less of that for handoffs. If everybody's a gymnast, you can let people go off and be completely asynchronous because you don't need to do your floor routines together, right? And I don't think we're having enough of that discussion about what are the work we're doing right now? What is the level of interdependence and then how much do we need to coordinate accordingly? We had a hand in the back right there, yes. So my question is we used to talk about a work family and when I started to work, these people became a part of my family and I was happy to see them and I was happy to spend time with them. But now when we shorten the time of work and if we get more flexible, also for the company, how can they build a company culture if people aren't around? How can young people learn to work and become a part of the work family? That's just what I am asking. Sandra, you want to enlighten us? That's the intentionality. How the work gets done, how do we train young people, how do we keep our culture? And that's an ongoing discussion. I like to see this as a global experiment at a scale that we haven't seen before. So, Adam, you must have a great time. So we're working through that. We are working as a brand start. We're working through that as a company. We're working through that with our clients, with our industrial clients. We're looking at self-scheduling, things like that. So we're sort of, we're all coming to grips with that. My experience with young people is, if they have an office environment and they have the opportunity to be flexible, they really would prefer to be around each other, around their colleagues for one or two days a week and work four days a week instead of five. And they like to have that in engagement because they know they're not getting that mentorship and there's a lot of things they're not getting by full-time remote. Nobody really loves that, at least some do. But I think they like that engagement, but they'd rather work less. Yeah, this is exactly what Nick Bloom's data show. If you go to WFHresearch.com, monthly surveys, huge cross-section of people across industries, young people want to show up part of the time to build community and also to learn and get mentored. It's often the next stage of the career where you have young kids or you're busier where you want the extra flexibility. I think we need to accommodate that. Hi, I'm employed by a company with about 7,000 people and we're going through all of these same questions. And I'm curious for you, so the culture point is really important, right? Because the young people do want the culture, but it is the more senior people who don't feel like they need it, who need to provide the culture and the education, the inculcation, the training for the younger people. So it is a bit of a challenge to work through that. And we're experimenting and floundering a little bit like everyone. I'm curious if there is ever, if there's any research to date that talks about the effectiveness of virtual versus in-person versus hybrid meetings, because one of the challenges that we have had is everybody individual, it's a collective action problem. Everybody individually would prefer additional flexibility, but the end outcome that you get is a little dysfunctional because people are all over the place. So what we've done is gone to anchor days. You have, we have two days a week where everyone's expected to be in so your meetings are predominantly in-person. Otherwise there might be predominantly virtual and anecdotally personally, I think we have found that the hybrid is the most difficult. Yeah, it's the most effective and satisfying, but also the most difficult. We're about to run out of time so just very quickly, I think Nick Bloom's research supports the anchor days idea and suggests that hybrid is probably the best of both worlds if you agree on when you're gonna do that. It doesn't have to be days though. I think Leslie Perlow's research would tell us you need to agree on what are focus time windows, what are downtime windows and what are collaboration time windows and try to align people on that and it seems like the afternoon is the best time for collaboration if you can sync up time zones. With that, I think we are out of time. I wanna thank our panelists for challenging us to think a little bit differently. I wanna thank all of you for joining us and invite everyone to not work tomorrow. Thank you. Thank you.


The president of the Igbo Social Cultural Group is in Igbo in Iquiti state. Ndubi Sikalo has appealed to the federal government to unconditionally release the leader of the independent people of Biafra, Namdikano, and put a stop to the citadel home order declared in the five states of the southeast. Ndubi Sikalo stated that the federal government should work as seriously towards finding a lasting solution to the crisis. At a gathering of Southeast leaders resident in Iquiti the stakeholders called for a dialogue and unconditional release of Ndubi Sikalo. The arrest and unconditional release which we requested that is perpetuated on Ndubi Sikalo, what they refuse to do is the main problem that is even drain our economy at the southeast there. So I want to use the medium to appeal to the present federal government and the leader, the president, to kindly release Ndubi Sikalo. This president should call everybody without discriminating any tribe because there's a lot of discrimination in what I am seeing from the inception, from the inauguration of the new president. I'm not seeing Igbo people being carried along and that is not the best.  He can achieve this through invitation of so many tribes. Let them come together. Everybody have one thing or the other to say. So my advice to the Southeast leaders, the governors, the traditional rulers, the PG's of each local government and each state to come together and meet with the new government on board, which is the government of president to Nubu, to come to our aid in southeast to see what they can do to ensure that now the canon is released. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.