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Miriam Marra, University of Reading
The idea of a four-day working week is gaining momentum. The Labour Party has included it in its 2019 electoral manifesto, and Microsoft Japan announced positive results from a trial run earlier in 2019. Some fear it will “wreck” the economy.
But, colleagues and I have found in our research that the benefits of a four-day working week, without loss of pay, can outweigh the cons for both businesses and staff. We surveyed a number of businesses that have already adopted the four-day working week and found that they were making savings of almost £92 billion (around 2% of total turnover) each year.
Just over half (51%) of the respondents thought that the four-day working week enabled them to save costs. Of those, 62% say their staff take fewer days off sick, 63% say they produce better quality work, and 64% are more productive. Our research also outlines that the businesses who haven’t yet implemented a four-day week could save around £12 billion by moving to one. If we add this to the savings made by businesses that already implement a four-day week, we’d get a total combined saving of roughly £104 billion a year.
It is interesting to note that our positive results square with the evidence provided by Microsoft Japan. In its trial in August 2019, 2,300 employees were given a paid Friday off each week. The company reported an impressive 40% increase in the productivity of employees in the month (measured against August 2018). But other measures were also adopted to improve productivity, for example a significant reduction in the time and number of meetings and encouragement to use online platforms for collaboration.
On their day off, workers were encouraged to volunteer, learn and train. Or simply rest to improve their productivity and creativity. After five consecutive Fridays off the company reported a sales rise by nearly 40%, the company’s electricity consumption dropped by 23% and there was a 59% reduction in the printing of paper pages. This experiment suggests the arrangement might be applicable to larger corporations and in one of the countries most affected by a workaholic culture.
Other companies have implemented the four-day working week and also reported an increment in staff productivity. One example is Perpetual Guardian, a New Zealand estate management firm that adopted the policy in November 2018. The company ran a pre and post-trial survey across employees and found that productivity was unharmed by the shortened work week, while staff work-life balance had improved by 24%, sense of empowerment by 20%, leadership and commitment levels respectively by 22% and 20%, and stimulation by 22%.
In our research we have also highlighted that the benefits of this arrangement aren’t just for businesses and the world of work. An extra day off could have a knock-on effect for the wider society. We found 54% of employees said they would spend their day shopping, meaning a potential boost for the high street, 43% would go to the cinema or theatre and 39% would eat out at restaurants.
We also see potential environmental benefits to a shorter working week. In addition to the reduction of energy and paper use experienced by Microsoft Japan, we think that fewer journeys to and from work provides a potentially large green dividend with less fuel consumption and a reduction in pollution.
The hottest question now is: can this work arrangement be easily translated into a change in legislation such as the one proposed by the Labour Party? In its annual conference the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, said that if the party wins the election, it will reduce the average working week to 32 hours within ten years.
One of the main challenges outlined by our research is that the four-day working week can be difficult to implement in service industries where customer demands need to be met, and particularly for smaller businesses. It would also imply a significant change in public services like teaching and nursing. But Labour did recognise that different sectors will need to respond in different ways.
Meanwhile, research by the Centre for Policy Studies, a centre-right think tank, also found that reducing the hours of public sector employees would mean at best a £17 billion cost for the Treasury and at worst a possible £45 billion cost, assuming no increase in productivity and a need to expand the workforce in public services.
But the main point is that any legislation change should not just focus on reducing time but also to find ways for employees to enhance their productivity when they are working. Time reduction should be seen as both the conduit and the outcome of increased productivity.
Miriam Marra, Lecturer in Finance, University of Reading
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Simon Horobin, University of Oxford
Many people think they know their main language intimately. But there are many words and phrases in English that people often use wrongly. Whether these erroneous uses truly count as “wrong” is up for debate – after all, a mistake that has become widely adopted should really be considered acceptable. But whichever side of this argument you err towards, here are five examples of ones that we are all making.
Someone who has no clothes on is widely described as being stark naked. Originally, however, the phrase began as start naked – from the Old English steort, meaning “tail”. The phrase literally meant “naked to the tail”, probably referring to the buttocks.
Although the word steort is not recorded in this sense, tail has often been used in this way – as it still is in the American phrase work your tail off. The word steort fell out of general use around 1300, surviving only in the names of birds like redstart and wagstart (better known today as the wagtail).
The switch from start to stark naked was triggered by start becoming obsolete, combined with an association with stark, meaning “completely”, in phrases such as stark dead, stark blind and stark naught – first recorded in the early 16th century in the savage put-down: “Ye count your selfe wele lettred [educated], your lernyng is starke nought.”
The verb to sneeze is imitative in origin – the sound of the word mimics the sound of the thing it names, as with words like drip, fizz, beep and the noise created by a sneeze: atishoo.
But the original form of the word was fnese, along with fneosung (“sneezing”), and fnora (“a sneeze”). The change from fnese to sneeze arose through confusion caused by the way the word appeared in medieval manuscripts.
Medieval handwriting employed several different forms of the letter “s”, including an 8-shaped form, another resembling a kidney bean, the Greek letter sigma and a long form – still found in printed books of the 18th century. This last letter closely resembled the letter “f” and it was confusion between the long “s” and “f” that resulted in fnese being adapted into modern English sneeze.
Read more: Lost in translation: five common English phrases you may be using incorrectly
While gravy may seem a quintessentially English sauce, the word is actually French in origin. Gravy was originally grané, meaning “spiced”, from Latin granum “grain”.
The letters “u” and “n” were often indistinguishable in medieval handwriting – both were formed using two single vertical strokes called minims – so that it would be easy for a scribe to misread the word as graue.
While the letters “u” and “v” are distinguished by the sounds they represent today, in medieval English they varied according to position: “v” appeared at the beginnings of words (vntil, “until”) and “u” in the middle (loue, “love”), irrespective of the sound. As a result, the word grané came to be misread as gravy, and this form has been used ever since.
Adder (the snake) goes back to the Old English word nædre; it is one of a small number of English words where the initial “n” has been lost due to confusion over where the boundary falls when following the indefinite article a/an.
As a result of this process, known as metanalysis, a nædre became an adder. The same misapprehension lies behind words like apron (from napron, related to nappe, “tablecloth”) and umpire (originally nonpeer, “no equal”).
The word orange was also formed this way, although in this case – since it is a borrowing into English from French – the mistake had occurred before it was adopted into English. The French orange is itself a borrowing of the Arabic word naranj (the initial “n” is still found in modern Spanish naranja); it was confusion following the indefinite article un that produced the modern form.
The word cherry originates in the northern French dialect word cherise (a variant of the standard modern French cerise), which was adopted into English after the Norman Conquest of 1066.
Because it ended in an “s”, English speakers mistakenly understood it to be a plural form and so the false singular cherry was born. The same process lies behind the word pea, erroneously derived from the singular form pease (ultimately from Greek pison) – preserved in the nursery rhyme “pease pudding hot, pease pudding cold”.
Although these changes took place hundreds of years ago, the process can be observed today in the emergence of bicep: a singular form of biceps. This may seem logical, but biceps is an adoption of a singular Latin noun, from bi- “two” and -ceps “headed”, referring to a muscle with two points of attachment.
The tendency for speakers to associate the “s” ending with plurals has also given rise to erroneous plural forms. Despite phenomena being the plural of Greek phenomenon, the false plural phenomenas is sometimes used. But the error of this type that is most likely to make pedants reach for their red pens is paninis – the supposed plural of Italian panini (singular panino) – a reminder that what is acceptable for some remains anathema for others.
Simon Horobin, Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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