Would a 4 day work week make your office more green?

Kira Vermond weighs in on the 4 day work week and it's environmental impact.


Weighing the merits of the four-day week

KIRA VERMOND
Globe and Mail Update
September 20, 2008 at 6:00 AM EDT

Thursday is the new Friday. At least it is if you work for one of the growing number of employers offering workers a four-day workweek to help offset long commute times, congestion, pollution and skyrocketing energy costs.
While the majority of trendsetters come from the public sector – Alabama, Utah and Nova Scotia have either implemented programs or are thinking about it – some private companies – have jumped on board the 10-hour day, Monday-to-Thursday bandwagon.
Sure, three-day weekends are nice, but do longer workdays suit older employees or those who have to pick their kids up from daycare by 5:30 p.m. on the button? And while the energy spike's silver lining might be more flexibility on the job, exactly how green is a condensed week anyway?
They want it

At VirTex Assembly Services in Austin, Tex., which made the switch to four days on Sept. 8, 2008, it was actually employees who went to management and proposed the plan, says Brad Heath, the company's president and chief executive officer.
“The increase in gas prices was really putting the pinch on their wallets,” he says before mentioning that the company made sure it asked all employees for their opinion before shutting down the machinery each Friday. “It was only going to work if it worked for everybody. We didn't want somebody to have to leave here because we went to a four-day workweek.”
Employees who need more wiggle room to pick up or drop off young children at school or daycare get 30 minutes of flex time he says. So far that's been enough time.
VirTex employees are hardly alone in wanting a shorter week. It's often listed as the most popular option in surveys. According to a recent Monster.com survey, for instance, 34 per cent of workers favoured a condensed workweek over other gasoline-saving options. By contrast, 19 per cent of workers considered employer reimbursement for gasoline costs the most appealing alternative, and only 7 per cent of workers preferred employer-subsidized public transportation.
How about clients?
While four-day workweeks make sense for the manufacturing sector, it's much more challenging for service-based companies that have to be available for clients' questions. Even on Fridays.
It's for precisely this reason that Babcock & Wilcox Canada in Cambridge, Ont., now runs a condensed week on the manufacturing side, but requires management and other support employees to work at least every other Friday, says Terry Danielczak, the company's manager of staff relations and employment. Beyond customer service, there's another upside too.
“The Fridays that you do work, they're the most productive days because half the population is off that day. It's just amazing how much you get done,” she says. No interruptions from the plant floor either.
LSM Insurance in Markham, Ont., also offers condensed workweeks to its four staff and 25 brokers. It staggers days off so all bases are covered says Lorne Marr, president.
“If a few people are taking advantage of the four-day week, we won't have everyone take off Friday,” he says. “Some have to take the Monday.”
Friday temptation
Having a wide-open Friday is a godsend for some, but for others it offers too much temptation to duck down to the basement home office to check in with work or finish that report. Ms. Danielczak admits it happens to her.
“To be honest, there are many Fridays when you're working at least half days and working from home. You're never totally away from it,” she says.
For others, working the Friday means putting in overtime, without feeling like it's eating into the weekend. And sometimes they end up making more money too.
“Yeah, the brokers are on commission so if they're able to work more hours and be more productive, they're going to do it and bring in more money as well,” Mr. Marr says.
Not so green
No doubt about it, touting the four-day workweek has a certain green appeal, which is not a bad thing from the PR point of view. But does shutting down for one day each week make sense from an environmental standpoint?
Not necessarily, maintains John Putzier, author of Get Weird: 101 Innovative Ways to Make Your Company a Great Place to Work. In fact, he's pretty sick of hearing about the green benefits of compressed weeks.
“I just find it annoying because when you cut to the chase, it's not about going green. It's about working less hard and having a three-day weekend. Let's at least be honest about it,” he says.
But is a flexible week such a bad thing? Aren't commuters happy about driving one less day?
“Absolutely. Then they can drive two hours to the shore on Friday.”
And that's the issue, Mr. Putzier says. Just because employees aren't driving into work on Friday doesn't mean they're going car-free all day.
“Listen, unless they're going to be shackled to the kitchen table, they don't run the lawn mower or do anything else that day, it's a wash,” he says.

Linear to Concurrent Decision Making

With the evolution of technology, the decision making process for businesses has moved from a linear decision making process to a concurrent decision making process.

If you think back to the late 90's, email was just coming mainstream. We still used a word processor to write letters to mail or fax. Many people did not have or want voicemail and receptionists and secretaries (now that is an antiquated word!) were the conduit of phone calls and most communication. We travelled to almost every meeting and almost every meeting was face to face.

10 years later, technology has changed the way we communicate as well as on how decisions are made. Linear decisions where information passed back and forth or up and down a chain of command has now been replaced with real time concurrent decision making. Decision makers and influencers can work together to achieve more by talking through their choices and coming to one or more conclusions and essentially moving the peanut forward, FASTER!

As I think back to some of the larger organizations I worked for, email can drive us back to linear decision making as we wait for others to read, digest and act on our correspondence. This can be good and bad. With Blackberries, I could often get a quick ruling back but when the answer or solution was more complicated, a conversation was the better way of coming to a conclusion.

Leveraging technology can accelerate decision making depending on the scenario: Internal vs. Customer Facing, single decision makers vs. a committee etc. All important considerations when choosing a medium to achieve a decision.