Daily Talker: Six-Hour Workday Experiment

How many hours do you put in at work every day? A normal day is 8 hours. But a lot of people go far beyond that every day. One country is experimenting with a six-hour workday on an eight-hour salary. Nurses at a retirement home in Sweden are part of the experiment funded by the Swedish government. They want to see if a shorter workday can increase productivity and they say it does. A group of 68 nurses working a six-hour workday were compared to a control group at a similar facility. They found the nurses working the shorter workdays took half as much sick time, were 2.8 times less likely to take any time off in a two-week period, had more energy at work and in their spare time and were 20 percent happier. A marketing agency in the U.K. adopted a staggered schedule to allow reduced hours while making sure productivity did not fall. A survey last month found six out of 10 bosses in that country agreed cutting hours would improve productivity. What do you think of the six-hour work day? Would this work in the United States?

Leave your comments below, or on Facebook or Twitter using #WBZTalker.