Joe O’Connor wants to persuade your boss—and everyone’s boss—to reduce the workweek to 32 hours.
As chief executive officer of the nonprofit 4 Day Week Global, O’Connor oversees six-month boot camps now helping 170 companies with 10,000 participating employees around the world to adopt more flexible work schedules. The New Zealand-based nonprofit has signed up employers in the U.S., Ireland, Australia and Canada, as well as its home country. This month, 70 companies in the UK with over 3,300 employees will embark on a pilot program that includes training, mentorship, data collection and networking, O’Connor said.
He is capitalizing on a watershed moment in the workplace, where the future of when and how work happens is up for grabs. Workers and managers alike know from the past two years of working from home that many jobs don’t really require 40 weekly hours to complete. But the relationship of workers and employers remains in play, with some high profile CEOs, such as Elon Musk, demanding workers return to the office, and others, like Thomas Gottstein, CEO of Credit Suisse Group AG, acknowledging that his company will never return to full-time in-office staffing. O’Connor is seizing this moment of ambiguity to provide organizations with a palatable path forward.
