The very notion of work-life balance, a common HR talking point these days, was once considered revolutionary in the truest sense of the word. During the 19th century, the average full-time factory worker engaged in 100 hours per week of hard labor, and it took nearly a century to standardize the 40-hour workweek and make it part of everyday life. It was a hard-fought battle, but it fundamentally changed our relationship to labor: Employees are now well-accustomed to having evenings and weekends (or an equivalent amount of time) away from the office.
Today, so many employees work a five-day, 40-hour week that it's hard to imagine anything shorter than that. But we may be on the brink of another paradigm shift — our workweeks are growing smaller yet. One New Zealand company shortened its workweek from five to four days with no salary cut for workers, improving its employees' sense of work-life balance. And according to a McKinsey report based on a review of 2000 different tasks across more than 800 jobs, existing technology could reduce our workload by an average of 30 percent. That’s a lot of hours shaved off of your timecard — enough to give your team a workweek that’s only three days long.
The driver behind this change? None other than automation and artificial intelligence (AI). AI in the workplace has been a hot-button issue for the past five to 10 years, often centered around whether the concept has the potential to eliminate human workers from the office. But in light of the McKinsey report’s findings, it’s not so much that automation could replace workers; it would replace a portion of the work those workers are tasked with, giving society the gift of four-day weekends.
What’s It Going to Take?
Today’s AI and automation tools put this well within reach. Just last year, a programmer developed scripts to automate a good portion of his work, letting him kick back and take care of his son at home. The ethics of it are more than enough to make an HR professional grimace, but the automation worked — the programmer's peers and supervisor didn’t notice. Another programmer did something similar a few years back, going further than automating his own tasks and creating scripts that could even hack into the coffee machine and brew a drink for him.
Although our current technology makes a three-day workweek possible, a change like this won’t happen overnight. Before companies allow AI to take over our menial tasks, society — employers, employees, and HR teams — needs to address key concerns that have become common in AI discussions: the debate on whether machine learning poses an existential threat to humanity and the rare (yet sometimes serious) flaws in current instances of AI.
But there are more specific questions that affect HR and staff as a whole when we think of how AI will affect not just our tasks at work, but our time, too. Even upon first hearing the term “three-day workweek,” employees will automatically wonder about compensation. If you’re working fewer hours, how does that affect your pay and benefits, especially for workers on an hourly pay rate? Similarly, a three-day workweek amounts to about an average workweek for current part-timers. Does part-time work dissolve as a result, or will this shift simply redefine it? These are crucial questions HR teams will need to address.
In theory, this reworking of work shouldn’t affect what employees take home at the end of the week. Although workers will spend less time at the office, employers will see a boost in productivity, as relative productivity tends to increase when companies demand fewer hours of work. Automation only adds to this; the above-mentioned McKinsey article notes that “automation could raise productivity growth globally by 0.8 to 1.4 percent annually.”
It makes sense: When employees aren’t spending time on tedious or repetitive tasks (i.e., tasks bots could take over), they have more time to focus on bigger-picture, strategic work, getting more important tasks done in less time. In short, with the help of AI, per capita production can grow while employees reduce the time they spend at work, so wages shouldn’t be slashed.
Theory differs from reality, however, and a shift like this one will make it inevitable to reconsider labor laws to adapt to a new economy. It’s not unreasonable to assume that some companies would lower employees’ salaries when presented with the chance to do so, but that could have serious consequences on workers’ quality of life and the economy overall. This is, of course, a subject outside of HR's hands; creating legislation that ensures workers’ salaries remain on par with our current norm for a week of work should be the highest priority for governments at both the federal and state level.
The subject becomes even less straightforward when hourly and part-time workers come into play. When a full-timer’s workweek suddenly mirrors that of a part-timer’s, how does HR define the type of work approximately 26 million Americans perform? If their time at work is reduced without re-examining their compensation, that’s an immediate (and significant) cut to hourly workers' paychecks.
Part-time requirements to fulfill peaks or to address skill gaps for enterprises will operate at enhanced rates similar to full-time employees. In other words, part-time workers' productivity and payout will slide upward on the same scale (while time spent at work decreases at the same rate) as full-time salaried employees. People working part-time for personal reasons — needing to spend time at home, having their own side business, etc. — may find switching to full-time more appropriate, as the new structure would still let them meet their personal goals. We could even see some workers work part-time and full-time simply because of additional time available.
But while laws and corporate cultures still have some work to do before being fully prepared for a three-day workweek, many technologies that could make it happen today (or at least push us in the right direction) already exist — meaning this change, sweeping as it is, is closer than you might think. And when we do begin to watch our time sheets reflect smaller numbers, it will be the start of an era where we feel both more productive at work and more engaged for a longer period of time at home.
Overall, AI presents a positive change that will benefit humankind. The single biggest effect will be the elimination of non-value-added work where human intelligence isn't required because it’s not about having less people — it’s about having less work. There will be growing pains, but if employers, HR teams, and governments approach it correctly, AI can spark a shorter workweek, adding more weight to the “life” portion of work-life balance. And that’s something we can all enjoy.
K.R. Sanjiv is the Chief Technology Officer for Wipro Limited, a global information technology, consulting, and business process services company, where he's overseen the development of Wipro HOLMESTM, the company's proprietary AI system. Sanjiv has more than 25 years of enterprise IT experience, including consulting, application development, and technology development spanning multiple industry segments and diverse technology areas. He tweets regularly about advancements in tech at @KRSanjivCTO. The views expressed in this article are his own and his employer does not subscribe to the substance or veracity of these views.
