Resilience and the Four-Day Work Week with Professor Sir Cary Cooper

In the second half of a special two-part episode featuring Professor Sir Cary Cooper, CBE, Bill Banham and Professor Sir Cary discuss the four-day working week and how organizations are coping with the challenges of low growth, energy insecurity, and higher levels of long-term sickness due to stress.

Professor Sir Cary is the 50th Anniversary Prof of Organizational Psychology & Health at Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, author and editor of 100s of books and is one of Britain's most quoted business experts.

He is also the founding President of the British Academy of Management, a Companion of the Chartered Management Institute, one of only a few UK Fellows of the (American) Academy of Management, and a past President of the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy and President of RELATE.

Professor Sir Cary was awarded the CBE by the Queen in 2001 for his contributions to organizational health and safety, and in 2014 he was awarded a Knighthood for his contribution to the social sciences.

Questions for Professor Sir Cary include:

• What do you think of attempts to move towards a 4-day work week? 
• Is the 4-day work week a way to ensure a better work-life balance or does it offer stresses e.g. employees, in reality, working longer hours and scambling to get tasks done? 
• One of your latest books, Resilience in Modern-Day Organizations, focuses on how organizations are coping with the challenges of low growth, energy insecurity, and higher levels of long-term sickness due to stress. Tell us more
• What are the big world of work trends to watch out for in 2024? 

We do our best to ensure editorial objectivity. The views and ideas shared by our guests and sponsors are entirely independent of The HR Gazette, HRchat Podcast and Iceni Media Inc.

Chapters

• 0:03 4-Day Work Week and Flex Work
• 11:19 Achieving Organizational Resilience and Well-Being Metrics
• 17:45 Prioritizing Organizational Structure and Accountability

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Welcome to the HR Chat Show, one of the world's most downloaded and shared podcasts designed for HR pros, talent execs, tech enthusiasts and business leaders. For hundreds more episodes and what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit hrgazettecom.

Speaker 2: 0:26

Welcome to another episode of the HR Chat Show. Hello, I'm your host today, Bill Bannum, and in this episode we're going to focus on a bunch of things, including presenteeism, optimizing productivity and fostering a culture of employee health and well-being. My somewhat illustrious returning guest today is Professor Sakari Cooper CBE, the 50th anniversary prof of organizational psychology and health at Manchester Business School, University of Manchester. Sakari, welcome back to the show. It's a pleasure to have you back on today.

Speaker 3: 0:58

Yeah, it's great, Bill, to see you again. Let's have a nice chat.

Speaker 2: 1:02

So, for those who didn't catch our last conversation on the HR Chat pods, can you take a minute or two and reintroduce yourself to our listeners?

Speaker 3: 1:11

Oh, yeah, sure, my name is Kari Cooper. I'm a professor of organizational psychology and health at Manchester Business School University of Manchester. I'm a chair of the National Forum for Health and Well-Being at Work, which is mainly over 50 employers, very senior people in it, directors of health and well-being, hr directors, chief medical officers of global companies based in London yeah, and, we look at health and well-being. We actually do things rather than just sit and talk about them, and I think well-being is a big. It's now a strategic issue for many organizations, not just the global ones. It's becoming quite big in the SME sector, but particularly the EMS, and gradually we're filtering down even to the smaller organizations.

Speaker 2: 1:59

I want to talk to you briefly, just briefly, about the 4D work week now, if that's okay. So this is something which is it's been a pretty sexy topic in the last year or so. We've had a few guys on the show who've spoken about the 4D work week. In your opinion because you're the expert you know Is the 4D work week, is that a way to ensure better work-life balance or does it actually offer its own stresses? So, for example, employees working longer hours during those four days, scrambling to get tasks done so that they can have that fifth day off?

Speaker 3: 2:37

There's a lot of research on the 4D working. There's a big study in the UK, as you know. There's 60 companies involved. They tend to be fairly niche companies, by the way, they tend to be like PR firms and advertising firms and professional services, right, they're not like heavy. A lot of them aren't heavy manufacturing.

Speaker 3: 2:59

So, okay, and the studies that have been done in Iceland, and so many studies already been done. The first one was done in Gothenburg in Sweden, where that was public sector workers. Half of them were put on a 30-hour weekend, half of them on a 40-hour, paid the same amount of money, and that went for two years. That was a big one, right, and the ones who were working 30 were much more productive, more job-satisfied, etc. Okay, but again, it was local authority workers, all right, working for local government, okay. So there are studies and the studies tend to be reasonably positive, but they're not a representative sample of all the sectors that we have. Okay. So my take on this is the following we are, by the way, in the US and Canada. They've always had the short working week option in many companies, that is to say, you could work for 10 hour days I'm sorry for 12 hour days or whatever. You could do something like that, the shortened working week, rather than a 30 or 35 hour week where you get paid the same as you paid for a 40 hour week. That's what the 4D working week as a concept is. More it's more. On that, you know we're gonna pay it the same as you work 40, but you only have to work 30.

Speaker 3: 4:23

My own view is, if you're a really advanced organization, you talk to your employees and see what they want to do and not why is there one size fits all. Can you imagine telling everybody you will now be working a 4-day working week because the evidence is that, on balance, that's a more productive thing, gives you better work-life balance? What about talking to your employees and saying what would you like to do, given our sector, given what we do, what works for you, and then let's see if it works for our clients, our customers, and works for us as an employer, and come up with some kind of model. And even within a company it might be. Some should be working, would like to work a 4-day working week, and it's possible given their function, their functional role, and some might want to continue to work with 5 days a week. Some might want to do a short, compressed working week, you know, for 12-hour, 4-10-hour days, I mean it. There's no one size fits all and every sector is going to be kind of different. But isn't it about communication between management and and their staff? That's what it should be about, and then you could work something out.

Speaker 3: 5:43

I think, if you impose the 4-day working week, saying the evidence is first of all, the evidence doesn't hit every sector at all and it's very limited that we have the sectors that are the companies that are participating in the studies that you're seeing. So I would say this is HR. Again, hr should, rather than pick up what let's do the trendy thing because it'll get people more flexible, it'll get people better work-life balance. But once you find out from your employees what they would like, they may come up with something extremely novel, and it may be. Some workers should be 4-day working. See, I have problems with the people who are in jobs where they can work hybridly. Right, because they get better balance. No, not hybridly. Forget the word hybrid, let's use the word flexible. Hybrid tends to mean in our vernacular, since post COVID, tends to mean 2 plus 3. You go in two days a week or you go in three days a week, right, and that's nonsense. It should be flexible. It should be. This is what I would like as an employee. You're the employer, what do you like? We reach a psychological contract of what suits us both the days I you want would like me in, the days I would like to not come in, or come in and you develop it. And that's what HR should be, in my view, should be about. So the flexible people who can do that, who are in personal services and service-based thingies. They can work that way.

Speaker 3: 7:24

What about the people who have to be at the cold face five days a week Nurses, doctors, bus drivers, pilots what about them? What about all those people who have to be at the cold face? And for people like that, probably a four day, particularly people who are on stressful jobs like working in a hospital, for example. Maybe those people should be on a four-day working week Again. Talk to them about it, because they're under intense pressure and that's emotional labor. That's scary. You're working in a job which has to do with people's lives day in and day out. Even a porter in a hospital sees people dying, sees very ill people. That's emotional labor. Should those people be? What kind of arrangement would you like with them? What would help them with their work-life balance, with have healthy living where they don't burn out? And in that context, maybe a four-day working week for those kinds of jobs very stressful, driving buses in London, driving buses in LA, in New York, cab drivers, I mean who knows.

Speaker 3: 8:41

But the point I think I'm trying to make is there's a difference between people, because at the moment I think the flexible working arrangements probably don't necessarily require a four-day working week because people are working partly from home, partly from a central office.

Speaker 3: 8:59

They balance their work-life balance quite nicely and maybe don't even have to work, maybe aren't actually working five days a week because they made it up in the loss of commute time big time. You drive into a city like New York, in and out of it from Connecticut or wherever you're going, or LA or whatever. You're taking up two or three hours commuting. Right, you're working from home. You don't have to work a 40-hour week in a way, if you're going to be working from home, not fully but flexibly. So it's not either, or Either there's a four-day working week or a five-day working week. Talk to your employees, figure out what suits them and within an organization, there's going to be big differences. The more you engage them, the more you involve them in decision-making, the more they're going to commit to you because they think you trust and value them and you're going to listen to them.

Speaker 1: 10:05

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Speaker 2: 10:44

I have a bunch more questions I want to ask you around that, but we're running out of time, so I'm going to start with you and instead I'm going to hound you for another interview very soon. One other thing I do want to talk to you about is one of your latest books Resilience in Modern Day Organizations. It focuses on how orgs are coping with the challenges of low growth, energy insecurity, higher levels of longer term sickness due to stress, etc. Can you tell us a bit about the book?

Speaker 3: 11:10

Yeah, I mean it's basically saying you know, let's talk about individual resilience. That's a lot. A lot of people are doing resilience training, you know. And what is organizational resilience it's about? It's just like individual resilience. It's like do I have a sense of purpose, can I work flexibly, do I feel valued? How do we create, how do we create cultures in organizations like that? How do we give our people a sense of purpose? How do we make them feel valued? Not just the American bullshit, have a nice day type stuff. But you mean it. When you develop people, you encourage them, you recognize them when they do a good job. You don't. It's not a command and control culture and it's about that. It's about giving people a sense of purpose, allowing the kind of flexibility, making him feel part of it.

Speaker 3: 12:15

And I think we ought to be considering more often now Employee involvement in the business itself. I mean the organizations in the UK and other European countries, for example, that have some share ownership and you get that. In smaller Organizations they get much more. The SMEs tend to do that and I think that's really useful way of Retaining really talented people, making them feel part of the business. I don't think that's going to happen very much in North America, well, at least in the United States, maybe in Canada more, but I'd like to see more of that. I think we I think that would be a nice thing to do small organizations understand that's a one way you retain really top talent and you create a much more resilient organization.

Speaker 2: 13:02

And, by the way, that's book number one. You're around about 250 now. So, kerry, is that right? Something like that.

Speaker 3: 13:08

Yeah, well, I mean, I've written. Probably I can't I don't even know how many. I've written probably 125 books and probably edited more than that, but I enjoy. I mean, I enjoy writing and I enjoy editing, because what you do when you edit a book is Is you're getting academics from different parts of the world, like I did a book called flexible work and I did that prior to the pandemic. It came out in March 2020. I was very lucky man, oh, in May 2020, but we had done it prior to that and I went to academics and that's when flexible working People wanted it but weren't taking it because it were frightened that their employer would feel they were less committed.

Speaker 3: 13:49

So we went, I went to Australians and Americans and review the evidence. Academics and said review the evidence on this. Tell me, in your part of the world, is Flexible working contributing to the bottom line? And the answer overwhelming. Who was yes. Then the pandemic hit and Then we were working a hundred percent remotely and then we realized we could do it and then it became okay to do it. So we they wanted to do it 10, 15 years before that, given that? No, about 10 years, given the technology was around to enable us to do it. It was only from the pandemic that we learned we could work flexibly because we had the technology to back us up. And so I like editing books, because you're getting a perspective from different people. They could be practitioners, doesn't have to be just academics. What do practitioners, what do HR directors think? And some of my books have HR directors in them Telling us what they think we should be doing in the space of well-being or in flexible work or whatever, and you learn a lot from listening to people.

Speaker 2: 15:00

I Learn a lot for listening to you. Um, those are all my questions. I guess my only question for you is is what else? What else would you like to highlight today? What? What are the books we were coming out? What are the trends you focused on? What do you work?

Speaker 3: 15:14

I mean, I think that I think. Okay. But the big thing that I'm really excited about and my kind of national form for health and well-being are excited about to be senior people and that is about getting all the metrics right of how we measure whether an organization is really achieving a Well-being culture. You know what are the metrics and there are objective and subjective. So the objectives were what's the sickness absence rates? What's the present he is some rates? What's the labor turnover rates? What's the talent retention rates, etc.

Speaker 3: 15:46

Then there's subjective how you perceive how you're managed, how you perceive whether you can have flexible working with you wanted or not, how trusted you feel, how job satisfied you are. The metrics are right. Then we need to change the organization. We do need at the at the board of all companies and all public sector bodies Like, by the way, in the National Health Service we have in the UK. Every hospital has a non executive director on the board of that hospital.

Speaker 3: 16:18

Who's responsible for employee health and well-being, because somebody has to look at those metrics. Those metrics, by the way, should also be in the company accounts so that not only are they looking at the bottom line indicators profits, turnover profits etc but they're looking over what is labor turnover here? Are we losing good people? What's our stress-related ill health record for absenteeism, etc, etc. If we had those indicators and somebody at the top table who's responsible, some non-executive director on the board of a company, on the board of a public sector body, who could say who's responsible? Hey, I just discovered our labor turnover in that important part of our business is horrific. We're losing good people, full turnover, we call it People. You can't afford to lose that.

Speaker 3: 17:23

Somebody should say, okay, now, director of health and well-being or HR. What are you doing about it? Let's get this sorted. Why are we losing those people? Why do we have mental health? Why is depression and anxiety so high in our sickness-absence figures? What the hell is going on here? What are we doing wrong? We're not doing something's wrong here. I think if you talk strategic, it's no longer about mindfulness at lunch, sushi at your desk, mental health, first aid. What we need to do is not the low-hanging fruit in the well-being arena. We need to have the right organizational structure and accountability at the top table.

Speaker 2: 18:08

That just leaves me to say for today, Professor Sikeri Cooper, I'm always in awe of you when I get a chance to sit down with you. You're such an impressive guy. Thank you very much for your time today. I appreciate it.

Speaker 3: 18:20

Thanks, bill, it's great seeing you again. Look after yourself.

Speaker 2: 18:23

And listen as always. Until next time, happy working.

Speaker 1: 18:29

Thanks for listening to the HR Chat Show. If you enjoyed this episode, why not subscribe and listen to some of the hundreds of episodes published by HR Gazette and remember for what's new in the world of work? Subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit HR Gazettecom.