Sweden is moving towards a six hour working day as Australia's hours increase

Chloe Booker
October 1, 2015
As work-life balance worsens in Australia, Sweden continues with its renowned family friendly policies by shifting to a six hour working day.
Businesses across the Scandinavian country are implementing the change so workers can spend more time at home or doing the activities they enjoy.
The theory is they will be more focused and productive during the time they are at their jobs.
Stockholm-based app developer Filimundus CEO Linus Feldt told Fast Company they switched to a 6-hour day last year and hadn’t looked back.
“We want to spend more time with our families, we want to learn new things or exercise more. I wanted to see if there could be a way to mix these things,” he said.
Feldt reported that productivity had stayed the same, while there were less conflicts because workers were happier and more rested.
Meanwhile, Gothenburg retirement home Svartedalens is conducting a year-long experiment to evaluate if the cost of hiring 14 new workers to cover the lost hours is worth the improvements to patient care and employee morale.
Australians working longer, not smarter
The director of Melbourne University’s centre of workplace leadership, professor Peter Gahan, said Australia should consider investing in similar experiments.
“When it is planned for well, you should be able to get the same levels of productivity out of people working shorter hours with more technology, and so on, than you used to get out of eight,” he said.
While Sweden was shifting towards shorter work days, Mr Gahan said Australia had been moving in the opposite direction to many other industrialised economies with average working hours for full-time employees increasing.
“We’ve been working more overtime, unpaid overtime, and us and the United States are about the only countries where that’s been taking place,” he said.
‘Significantly different’ working arrangements needed
Mr Gahan said the extra hours had “significant” consequences for workers, employers and communities.
“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.
In order for a reduction in hours to work in Australia, Mr Gahan said the business community would need to be brought along.
He called the review of the Fair Work Act to include examining “significantly different” working arrangements that reflected the new working economy.
“We’re at a significant juncture in terms of how to reconfigure the way that we work and the sort of working hours and working arrangements that we enter into,” he said.
Shorter work day, longer lives
Mr Gahan said benefits included an extension of our working lives and better health and connection to communities.
“Health and medical research shows that people who work much longer hours tend to fall off the perch in the end, and are more likely to suffer more serious health consequences later in their life,” he said.
A study published in The Lancet in September that analysed data from 25 studies monitoring the health of more than 600,000 people in Australia, the US and Europe for up to 8.5 years found people who worked 55 hours a week had a 33 percent greater risk of having a stroke than people who worked a 35 to 40 hour week.
It also discovered a 13 per cent increased risk of developing coronary heart disease.
Back in Sweden, Mr Feldt told Fast Company the eight hour work day was not effective, with workers needing to pause in order to cope.
What was preferable, he said, was less hours with fewer meetings and workers asked to stay off social media and away from other distractions.
“My impression now is that it is easier to focus more intensely on the work that needs to be done and you have the stamina to do it and still have energy left when leaving the office,” he said.
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