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According to The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, job stress is classified as the perception of having little control but lots of demands. It tends to be associated with increased rates of heart attack, hypertension and other disorders.

The institute reported that “The relationship between job stress and heart attacks is so well- acknowledged, that any police officer who suffers a coronary event on or off the job is assumed to have a work-related injury and is compensated accordingly.”

According to Jeffrey Pfeffer, a Stanford professor and author of “Dying for a Paycheck,” workplace stress — conditions such as long hours, lack of health insurance and little job autonomy — is killing us.

Pfeffer and two colleagues did a meta-analysis and found that there are roughly 120,000 excess deaths per year attributed to 10 workplace conditions costing approximately $190 billion in incremental healthcare costs. If completely accurate, that would mean going to work is the fifth leading cause of death in the U.S. — higher than Alzheimer’s and kidney disease.

In Japan, death from overwork is so common it has a name. It is referred to as ‘karoshi.’

Matsuri Takahashi made it to her dream job at Japan’s top ad agency, Dentsu, a corporation notorious for disobeying labor laws and sometimes requiring up to 50 hours of overtime per month. After only six months on the job, she committed suicide. Her overtime passed 100 hours that month.

The rise in work-related deaths begs the question, why do we work so much? Better yet, why do we get paid based on the amount of hours we spend inside of the office, rather than the amount of work we actually accomplish? It’s quite peculiar because in reality, a seven-day week is arbitrary in itself.

“The year marks one revolution of the Earth around the sun,” Philip Sopher said in an article for The Atlantic, a Boston-based magazine. “Months, supposedly mark the time between full moons. The seven-day week, however, is completely man-made.”

In fact, there is reason to believe that a seven-day workweek with a two-day weekend is inefficient. A corporate case study suggested that a transition into a shorter workweek would lead to increased productivity, improved health and higher employee retention rates.

According to a study in the Journal of Epidemiology, those who work 55 hours per week performed worse on some mental tasks than those who work 40 hours per week.

Tony Schwartz, the author of “Be Excellent at Anything,” said that people work best in intense 90-minute bursts followed by periods of recovery, meaning proper scheduling of bursts and rests would result in the same amount of work being done in significantly less time.

In order to combat the amount of workplace stress, a New Zealand-based firm, Perpetual Guardian, has axed Friday from the workweek.

Perpetual Guardian is a firm, 240 employees strong, that manages trusts, wills and estates. In the spring of 2018, the company began a landmark trial of a four-day workweek. The firm reduced the required amount of hours for full-time employees from 40 hours to 32 hours. Employees still received the same amount of pay. Two researchers were brought on to study the effects on the staff.

The results were staggering.

Perpetual Guardian founder Andrew Barnes came up with an idea in an attempt to give his employees a better work-life balance, help them focus on the business while in the office on company time and manage life and home commitments with their extra day off.

Jarrod Haar, researcher and human resource professor at Auckland University of Technology, said in November 2017, 54 percent of the staff felt they could effectively balance their work and home commitments. After the trial, this number jumped to 78 percent.

“Supervisors said staff were more creative, their attendance was better, they were on time and they didn’t leave early or take long breaks,” Haar said. “Their actual job performance didn’t suffer when doing it over four days instead of five.”

Other firms have been praised for allowing four-day workweeks by compressing the standard 40 hours into fewer days, or allowing people to work less for reduced pay. This concept is different.

Barnes said the results of Perpetual Guardian’s trial showed that when hiring staff, supervisors should negotiate tasks to be performed, rather than basing contracts on hours spent in the office.

“Otherwise you’re saying, ‘I’m too lazy to figure out what I want from you, so I’m just going to pay you for showing up,’” Barnes said. “A contract should be about an agreed level of productivity. If you deliver that in less time, why should I cut your pay?”

Tammy Barker, a mother of two and a senior client manager with the firm, agreed with Barnes’s plan to axe Friday out of the workweek. She said she spent her day off each week running personal errands, attending appointments and shopping for groceries, which allowed her to spend more time with her family on the weekends.

The benefits of a four-day workweek extend much farther than increasing employee satisfaction. With 20 percent less time spent in the office, the firm saved money on electricity bills. Additionally, Barnes said there are implications for urban design, such as smaller offices and less rush hour traffic, making it inconsequential for employees to live in the city.

Scott Bull, assistant professor in the Grand View business administration department, is fascinated by the idea of a four-day workweek, more importantly, a work-life balance. Coincidentally, a problematic work-life balance was why he left the sports industry and came to work as a professor instead. 

“In my previous career, work-life balance was a problem,” Bull said. “It is exactly why I am in this position today. So it doesn’t surprise me that people are happier, more productive and more ready to engage in work activities when they are working shorter weeks.”

While the four-day model seems to work favorably in certain business scenarios, there is a lot of uncertainty of the practice moving into the educational realm.

Kathryn Duffy, head of the music department at GV, said the four-day model is not something that works with higher education.

“You would have to change everything,” Duffy said. “We’re already cramming for time between class, rehearsals and athletics.”

Ryan Anderson, a GV associate professor of business administration said it would be easier on the educational front to shift class schedules to Monday through Thursday than it would be for most business settings. However, he is still skeptical of the trend in general.

“There’s a big disconnect,” Anderson said. “That’s the challenge with early adopters. If one sector does something but 90 percent of the other sectors don’t, does that sector stay in a silo, or does it eventually become a trend? And we don’t know yet.”

According to a report from the National Conference of State Legislatures, shortening the school week to four days has become an increasingly common trend over the last decade. The practice is most common among K-12 schools in rural areas. 

Unlike Perpetual Guardian, schools aren’t reducing the week to increase productivity; they’re doing it because they can’t afford the standard five-day schedule.

“Reasons for implementing a shorter week vary, but most schools implement a shorter week seeking to cut costs due to budget constraints,” the report said.

The idea is to save local authorities money. For example, saving on reduced heating bills or transportation costs, as well as saving on the wages of clerical staff and janitors. Another motivating factor is the need to recruit and retain teachers, many of whom find the idea of preparing for fewer lessons appealing since it likely stretches into the weekend.

While it might save the district money, there are obvious disadvantages, including the impact on families with two working parents who are then left to arrange and pay for an extra day’s childcare every week. Likewise, the four-day method has not been proven to help or hinder a child’s education, so it’s a bit of a risk.

Per the National Conference of State Legislators, an estimated 560 districts in 25 states have allowed at least a portion of their public schools to adopt a four-day week. However, this trend has not quite moved into higher education at the rate it has in K-12.

In fact, an extensive search didn’t find a single state-run university that has even experimented with the four-day week. However, some community colleges have mimicked corporate methods of the four-day schedule to minimize their expenses in the face of an economic recession.

Durham Technical Community College, located in North Carolina, implemented the four-day schedule at the beginning of this year. Employees are now working 10-hour days, and students see the same amount of class time. On Fridays, the campus completely closes. They adopted the four-day week to offset around $140,000 in revenue cuts from both the state and the county.

In Alabama at a 57-year old private university, the University of Mobile, a new initiative called “Focus Friday” has been put into action. Over the past year, the University has given faculty and staff members the equivalent of Fridays off, with a 35-hour work week that moves classes to a Monday through Thursday schedule.

Students and staff are encouraged to spend Friday volunteering, working at internships, mentoring or performing community service.

Per Inside HigherEd, a university news database, the University of Mobile provost, Chris McCaghren, who initially proposed “Focus Friday,” said that these are not simply days off. The library and dining hall remain open, and most students’ cars remain in the lot on Friday, suggesting they aren’t taking three-day weekend getaways.

It’s clear that there is some merit to the idea of a four-day workweek, whether in business or in academia. However, there is a considerable amount of justifiable uncertainty lying within the four-day schedule. Our capitalism-driven, materialistic, society requires a non-stop supply of products and services making it near impossible for a four-day week to become the norm in the business sector. For education, the four-day week is more likely to become commonplace when the money runs out than to preserve the sanity of our nation’s students. But for now, Dr. Anderson said it best:

“We really don’t know.”