Tim: Joe, please introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about who you are.

Joe: Sure. Pleasure to join you, Tim. Looking forward to the conversation. I run a consulting organization called Work Time Reduction. We specialize in shorter workweek models and also in helping organizations and teams to alleviate overwork. So, really, a lot of what we do is trying to find ways to work less and achieve more. I started doing this really off the back of leading a lot of the global pilots and trials of a four-day working week between 2020 and 2022. So yeah, excited for the conversation.

Tim: Your organization and FlexOS have partnered together on creating a report specifically around work time reduction and that push to work fewer hours, that concept of work-life balance. I still don't know what that means or how this had existed, but I am just taking a data-driven look at this idea of work time reduction.

Before we even get into the report, let's talk about this idea, this concept of worktime reduction. And I think many of our listeners would be familiar with the idea of a four-day workweek.

Before we hit record, we talked about the hype of the four-day workweek, specifically around COVID or even just before COVID.

There's a lot of buzz around work time reduction. What does it mean, and how does it differ from a four-day workweek?

Joe: A four-day work week is one component within what we see as a broader spectrum of work time reduction until, I would say, the four-day, 32-hour work week is very much the gold standard that we have worked with many organizations to adopt, which I think if you're looking for something that can give your talent proposition a real significant differentiator in the market, that can give you a really significant competitive edge when it comes to attracting and retaining the best people.

That's something that a four-day workweek can deliver, and I think that there are many more organizations across many more industries than maybe people would initially believe can do that, and we're really seeing that in the market.

But the reality is that isn't going to work for every organization right away. We're not going to go into a law firm where people are working 55, 60 hours a week, very much experiencing a lot of burnout, unsustainable workloads, and unhealthy lifestyles as a result of their work habits, and say, Hey, you need to do a four-day work week.

We see work term reduction as being something that can help organizations to combat over work to maybe turn a 10- or 11-hour day into a more standard 8- or 9-hourday to get home in time to have dinner with your kids.

Then there are lots of variations in between. We've seen organizations do things like 9-dayfortnights, where you've got a four-day work week every second week, half-day Fridays, and maybe slightly shorter workdays.

So, this is something that we very much believe is not one size fits all. But the core principles of the fact that we have the technology and we have the productive capacity to spend less time at work while still delivering the same or even more, we believe that applies across the board.

Tim: I like the idea of spending less time at work, not just from the perspective of, Hey, I want to spend time with my wife and my kids. I think that's an added bonus, but also from that idea of being able to set those clear boundaries. And I think that's something. I know for me and many of my friends, we struggle with setting those boundaries.

And so this idea of work time reduction—we're jumping ahead here, but I'm really curious about that. What have you seen even from that four-day workweek model about setting those clear boundaries? I think we're jumping to conclusions, and don't worry, we're going to get to the data piece, but that's something that's just always been top of mind for me.

Joe: I think the first thing that it's really important for people to understand is that work time reduction is very much something that we see as a productivity initiative, and that might seem really counterintuitive for people. We're saying to people that you can spend less time at work in a given week, and that's going to help us solve our productivity problem.

But the reality is that most productivity initiatives in organizations today fail because they lack one critical ingredient for success, which is enthusiastic employees. Buy an engagement motivation, and you know we know, in fact, that in many organizations we actually actively disincentivize people from finding ways todo their jobs more efficiently.

Because often the only reward that they get for finding new and novel ways to get more done in less time is for more things to be loaded onto their plate, more work, and more tasks, and that's a broken incentive structure.

So work time reduction is really about flipping that on its head and saying that in exchange for realizing productivity gains, we're going to share the benefit of that with the workforce in a really tangible, really life-changing way through work time reduction.

And that's how we're seeing these organizations deliver these very powerful outcomes because people are aligned, their interests are aligned, and, you know, they have as take in the productivity initiative.

Tim: You definitely hit on something that's top of mind for me, and I'm looking at my notes here, which is that enthusiastic buying and engagement—because I've worked in organizations, and one example from almost 20-plus years ago was I found a more efficient way of doing something. And I was told by my peers to not do it that way because they didn't want to take on more extra work. And it was a foreign concept to me. I thought, if I can do it, this job in half the amount of time, why wouldn't I?

It's still a bit of a strange concept to someone. I don't want to be more efficient because then I'll have to take on more. So if I'm having a bad day, but now I'm “more efficient,” I'm now going to have more work or I'm going to be overloaded or overburdened. And I think even in the report, the work time reduction, the study in this area, there's a couple of factors that have come up.

And that is, those working overtime, those last-minute requests, the unclear goals, the demands from clients, and the list does go on, and I think there's some hesitation to even think about this of like, Oh, we want to become more efficient, but what if or what happens when?

Let's talk about these barriers because I know you've seen it, especially from working on that four-day workweek model for a number of years. Let's talk about some of those barriers that you have seen and heard of.

Joe: The data is really clear that reducing work time and four-day workweeks. Are positive for employee well-being. I don't think that will surprise too many people that this is something that is delivering across all of the pilots the research that the major studies that we've seen in recent years we're seeing statistically significant improvements in employee well-being across a number of different indicators.

I think part of the reason for that is obviously the additional rest, the additional recovery time, and the additional kind of psychological detachment from work.

But that's onlypart of the story.

The other big component of that success is down to the work redesign that becomes necessary in order to adopt a work time reduction strategy or to implement a shorter workweek.

So, if you take Oxford University, it did a study last year where it looked at 90 different corporate well-being initiatives, things like yoga, meditation, and sleep apps, and it found that only one out of the 90 had any demonstrably positive effect on employee well-being, and that was allowing people to volunteer for charity during the work week.

And that's not to say that all of these things are not useful on an individual level. But the problem is they're not addressing root causes. You cannot beat burnout off the side of an overflowing desk as well.

What overtime reduction does is it forces you to address those root causes, things like unclear expectations in your role, unclear boundaries between work and life, unsustainable workloads, and poor resource management. It forces organizations to deal with these issues head-on, but to do so in a way where employees know that if they're successful,.

And actually finding the efficiencies, but that's something that's going to directly benefit them, rather than just being subsumed and absorbed by the organization.

Tim: What you're saying coincides exactly with the study as well as the key hurdles for implementing or just that, right? It's that demanding workload that demands of your clients, but also work culture. We're seeing a lot of mandates to go back to the office right now.

However, I think that the key here is when we just think about the hurdles and that's all we're focusing on, and not, I think the key word here is the root cause, what's causing that.

And so I wonder if there's maybe an HR professional, maybe somebody who's listening to this and going, Oh, I don't know how to get to the root cause.

And I found this; my background is operations, and even just a rudimentary study of root cause analysis, getting to that, asking the five, wise, figuring out that fish pond, whatever it is, we jumped to solving symptoms rather than the actual root cause. What are your thoughts on that?

Joe: I totally agree. And I think the critical thing with this approach is that you're giving employees permission to engage with what the frustrations are and what the issues are.

But to do so in a way where my job is so much easier than someone who's going into a team to implement a new piece of software, a piece of technology, because the incentive and the motivator are so great with a work time reduction conversation, that the types of ideas that you get from the bottom up in terms of how to find those efficiencies are really quite incredible.

A CEO that I worked with running a software company here in Toronto who moved to a four-day work week a couple of years ago described how the four-day workweek didn't solve all of their problems. Actually, what it did was it surfaced all of their problems; it found all of the challenges within their systems, their processes, and the bottlenecks. It brought those in the force so that they could bead dressed, and it provided this really incredible catalyst-enforcing function for employees to engage with.

With actually stopping and fixing those problems, I think that's really what differentiates work time reduction from the flavor of the month, operational excellence strategies like Lean or like Kaizen, which often fall short because they don't answer the What's in it for me? question in a way that really feels tangible for employees.

Tim: The what's in it for me, and maybe a CEO, maybe something on an exec team, or even an HR leader listening to this, and you're thinking, Wow, our employees shouldn't have that mindset of what's in it for me. Well, the reality is employees do have that mindset of, okay, what's in it for me, though.

We're asking to do this. We're reducing or we want to condense our work into four days or into six hours or whatever it is, maybe a half day Friday. There's some skepticism of, okay, if we find these efficiencies, does that mean that we're just going to have to do more work? And so that's, I think, where the exact buy-in has to come into play.

Joe: Right. When we look at organizations that have successfully made this transition, we know that we have a very significant problem in modern corporate culture with meeting blokes.

We know that we have a major problem with digital distraction interruptions. Context switching and task switching are really impacting people's productivity. We know that we have process issues that need to be addressed. So, this is really about creating a framework and creating an incentive structure in order for these types of issues to be addressed.

Things like decision-making within organizations. One of the most common problems that we see in organizations that, when solved, really helps with the transition to a reduced work time model is this idea that every decision gets defaulted up the line, gets escalated onto the desks of busy managers, and onto the agendas of busy meetings, and actually once you get really clear about what decisions each individual employee and each team is empowered to make, you create that kind of clarity that allows for much greater efficiency within the organization.

So, a lot of this really is not rocket science. These are problems that we know exist. This is unlocked capacity that we know is there to be grabbed at, and all that we're doing in the course of these projects is we're providing something that really brings employees to the table in a way that.

From a psychological perspective, there are three things here. There's the collective incentive. That's what will really get people to engage with the organization’s transformation goals, whatever that might be. There's the intrinsic individual motivation.

Then there's the fact that, as knowledge workers, I would argue that even in manufacturing today, much more of the role of a modern factory floor employee is about problem-solving, decision-making, and coming up with new and creative ideas to actually improve the process. Then, it was the case on the assembly line of a hundred years ago.

So, we've gotten to an age now, and it's only going to increase with AI, where everyone is reliant on knowledge, brainpower, and technology. And we know that a well-rested, well-recovered employee is going to be a more productive employee.

And so this idea that we're not going to recognize the human constraints and limitations that lead to a diminishing rate of return on productivity, more mistakes, lower quality, and a higher risk of burnouts and turnover. This is the reality that every leader needs to grapple with and deal with.

Tim: I've got so many different ideas or scenarios from past work experiences that relate to that, especially with a well-rested employee who will perform better. We all have things that happen outside of work, and being able to provide that flexibility in order to maybe attend an appointment or go to your kid’s school play or maybe care for a love done. It all feeds into that overall, I think, commitment and engagement to that employer.

But then there's also this question that we asked in the study, which is the top reason employees work beyond their schedule. So, we alluded to it already, and often it's depending on your jurisdiction where you live; it's not paid. It's just extra. So you get a salary.

This concept of overtime almost just seems to not exist unless you're in a specific industry. That last-minute request that comes in: Oh, I see you're putting your code on, but I really need that report by the end of today, or, Hey, I know we don't have the resources, so I can't approve your vacation because there's nobody to backfill you.

There are so many of these reasons we feel that lead to the burnout. And if I'm just putting on that pessimistic point of view, oh, and now we want to look at reducing time, this puts a lot of onus on leaders and HR people, HR professionals, and people culture teams to just sit back and go, We need to restructure how we're doing this, because the data is also clear that if I think of reduced hours or a condensed work week, I have more time for things like myself and my health.

I can go to the gym, and I'm not getting up at 4 a. m. or 5 a. m. Whatever that looks like, spending time with family, your hobbies. And I think the big question is where do we start? The data is clear. People are feeling those demands, the pressure already right now.

Maybe there's some pessimistic view of, Oh, now I have to do more with less, but then where do we start? How do we just surface those areas that we can improve?

Joe: I think it starts with having that conversation, quite honestly. I think if you take the example that you described of people who are in that situation where they're regularly overworking for those reasons, they're not gonna thank you if leadership walks into a room and says, You know, we're gonna do an experiment with a four-daywork week, because they have a pain point in a problem that needs to be resolved and addressed first, and so even just calling out.

The overwork problem recognizing that this is something that not only is it not healthy and sustainable at an employee level but recognizing the burnout if you take most studies globally on burnout today would suggest somewhere between a third and two-fifths of the workforce are experiencing burnout in any given work year.

That is an incredible crisis of epidemic proportions, but it's not just an individual wellness crisis; it's a corporate productivity crisis. If you look at the definition of burnout according to the WHO, it is somebody feeling cynical towards their work, it is someone feeling low confidence in their performance, and it's somebody who feels detachment from their work. All three of those symptoms combining at once.

Nobody who's in that situation is going to be able to show up and perform at their best, and so recognizing that if we can solve that, there's probably nothing more powerful we could do to make our organization more productive. And I think too many leaders still don't think about burnout in those terms. They still see that as this kind of wellness issue that sits somewhere else off to the side of our core focus and our core mission when really it's quite fundamental.

Tim: I think one of the surprising pieces of data is that of hundreds of participants in this study, there's a significant amount of people that if their organization embraced. work time reduction, remove the unnecessary, remove that noise, and create clear goals. That's a whole other conversation. We will dive into that here in a sec, but people are willing to give up or forego at least one year of salary increase just to have a shorter work week.

When I read that, I actually had to read it a couple of times because, to me, that is significant. Just came across something on LinkedIn the day we were recording this. And I don't believe everything I read on LinkedIn. So I always read it with the greatest hope. But this person said that they wouldn't accept a significant pay increase because they were afraid of the demands it would then put on and strain on their family.

And so I think leaders and HR people, like, we got to sit with that for a moment. We got to sit with that. And, talk to me about that.

Have you seen that even in the four-day workweek conversation of, Hey, I want to get the same salary, but in four days, or We're going to take a reduction of salary, or are people like, What's the sentiment that you've been hearing out there? 

Joe: That question that we asked in this report is mostly being answered by people who don't currently have that benefit, who aren't currently working shorter or reduced work weeks.

We have data from people who actually participated in our pilot programs. We asked them at the end of the six-month trial. What's that worth to you in the form of a pay increase? And the results were astounding. People saying it would take for me a50% pay increase, a 30% pay increase. I think about 15% of people were sayingit would, that no amount of money would persuade them to go back to working five days, having experienced the benefits of working a four-day workweek.

So I think the value of this is something that is clearly very powerful to employees. I think we know that something changed in society during and post-COVID where a lot of people have really re-evaluated their priorities, the things that matter most to them. I think that's even more the case with Gen Z and with younger generations of employees for whom I think that the trade-off between time and money, the pendulum for the first time in decades, has started to swing more towards time, balance, freedom, and experiences than salary increases and consumption.

And that's not to say that doesn't matter, but the key point here is that lots of organizations that we worked with to implement shorter work weeks, they haven't done so, where we're saying we're going to cut your salary and reduce your hours. Because to me, if you do, that's the trade-off.

Now it's not a productivity initiative. The work that we do is about its time for productivity, efficiency, and innovation. But the reality is that we have heard from those organizations that over time, they can probably be competitive when they're, let's say, the standard market salary increase in their industry is 4or 5% this year. It can probably still be competitive offering people 1, 2, or 3% if they're also offering something like reduced work time.

And it is a question of trade-offs. If you're a not-for-profit, I'm trying to compete with the private sector. If you're a small tech company trying to compete with Meta or Google, you're not going to be able to pay top dollar.

So, this is a creative alternative way to really set yourself apart from the competition when we're still at the early adopter stage of this. We see in the reports that this is relevant to the conversation about remote work, too. We asked people a very binary choice. If you could choose between four days in the office fully or five days working remotely fully, which would you choose? 59% of people. So 3and 5 chose four days in the office.

I've seen aversion of that statistic multiple times, and every time I see it, really, even I can't believe it because we've had so much conversation about how much employees are prepared to fight for remote work.

I think that sends a very clear message to those leaders who are either in an industry of which there are many where it isn't possible to offer very favorable work-from-home or remote work policies, or for whatever reason, they don't want to offer those.

And we can get into whether we agree with them or not. You don't need to offer fully remote working and a four-day workweek and be the market leader in salary in your industry, but you probably need to be doing at least one of those things really well or two of them pretty well if you want to be competitive.

Tim: It's a competitive labor market, and it's only going to get more and more competitive. My unresearched opinion on that is 2025. I think we're going to see a significant shift in the market where AI is; we started talking about it in larger conversations in mid-year of2024, and look where we are now in terms of leveraging the use of AI technology and where it's going to go.

And which I think will make some jobs even more and more competitive. And so if you're a small- to medium-sized business that, like you said, Joe, can't compete with salary on the big companies and can't compete with all those “perks and benefits,” what's a differentiator? My philosophy whenever I've led a team is we're going to set goals that tie to the corporate goals.

So, the CEO or whoever I report to needs to buy into the goals for my teams for the year. And for the quarter we operated often on a quarterly basis. and I bring that to my team, and I said, If you get these goals done in a shorter period of time. That's awesome. I'll see you on Monday.

But it doesn't mean we're going to keep adding more and more, which is a different mindset. It's if you get your goal done halfway through the quarter, not saying go on vacation for half a quarter, but it doesn't mean I'm now going to pile on extra and extra. What that might highlight is that we've got a broken system.

Joe: And it is about that shift towards really focusing on outcomes and results over inputs and activities, and I think that's core to a lot of the conversations we're having about work right now.

Being honest. I'm sick of talking about the office for going on five years now, and I think it is such a distraction from the important conversations we need to be having about not just how long we should be working for in an age where AI is accelerating down the tracks at a rate of knots. And also, how do we need to be working differently in a post-COVID, post-generative AI age? I just think the office, in many ways, is just such a huge distraction from those critical debates that need to be happening.

I think there's a huge crossover between the AI conversation and the conversation we're having about work time reduction in multiple ways. One, every organization I've worked with over the last six years has, in some way, used technology to augment their shorter work week. They've used it to streamline administrative processes and automate certain tasks. Obviously, the scope and the potential for that have exponentially increased just in the last 12 months. And that trend is only going to continue into the future.

Secondly, similar to what we were talking about earlier, we know that leaders are struggling to get enthusiastic engagement from their employees in integrating and adopting these new tools and technologies, and a lot of that is based on fear and doom and gloom and skepticism and negativity and this sense of, Is this going to make my job redundant?

So much of the console, there's a real opportunity to flip this on its head, make it a win-win. If AI can deliver us eight hours worth of efficiency gains, can were invest four hours of that into new projects and initiatives and give back four hours to our workforce?

These are the conversations. That we absolutely need to be happening because, big picture here, look at what we're seeing all over the world: MAGA, Brexit, and far-right movements in Europe. A lot of this is down to people feeling left behind by the last major advancement in technology: digitalization and globalization.

If we aren't having a serious conversation about how we're going to share the benefits of the predicted productivity gains of artificial intelligence with the workforce, we are walking ourselves into a major crisis in my opinion. I think work time reduction is a really important part of that conversation.

Tim: So, the big question is how? How do we bring this conversation? I'm all in, Joe; you've convinced me I'm in. Somebody's listening to this going, Yes, I'm in.

First off, how do I bring this conversation to the leadership team if I'm not on that leadership team? And two is maybe they're bought in and going, now what? Aside from bringing you in and saying, Hey, we're going to bring in Work Time Reduction and bring in your research and consultancy into the organization, what are a couple of practical things that an organization can do? Where can we start?

Joe: So, let's start at that individual employee level. And this is actually very fresh in my mind. And this is a quasi plug here, but I'm writing a book, Do More In Four, which has been published by Harvard Business Review, coming out just under a year, and we have a full chapter on individual employees or groups of employees.

How can you start this conversation with your boss, your manager, or your leadership team? I think a lot of this is about coming to the table with number one comfort with this being conditional. And what I mean by that is recognizing that for any leadership group to embrace piloting a shorter work week. In a world where we know that isn't the norm, where most of their clients, most of their competitors, and most of their stakeholders are going to be working five days, a regular work week, then that requires being prepared for the fact that this is going to need to be measured and this is going to need to be demonstrated to be successful and sustainable from the business perspective.

So coming to the conversation from that perspective, coming with ideas and coming with solutions for opportunities that you believe could be exploited in order to find the capacity to make this work. I think all of those things are really critical if you want to be looking at this as a business case. This is not a concession that you're seeking the organization to give. This is an incentive that you're saying that, as a group of employees, you believe that you want the opportunity to at least try and that you believe fundamentally that you can achieve.

Tim: Yeah, I think it's about that business case, but also just trying, looking even at your own job and thinking about, okay, what could you potentially outsource to AI? Maybe your company doesn't have an AI policy; use caution on that, but what are elements of the organization that could be outsourced to an AI agent to free up that creative time?

And I have found even for myself, if I'm just heads down, I just got to do work. It's draining, but when I have the freedom to be creative, whether it's even creative writing a policy, in the HR work I'm doing, researching what other companies do and how, what we could adapt to the organizations that I'm supporting. Giving that creative freedom, and it also brings about that, as you said at the beginning, that enthusiastic buy-in and engagement.

And it's not like, Oh, you saved 10% of your time by outsourcing or by streamlining a system. It doesn't mean, Oh, I now need to take on something else. Hey, may be I can take off a half day on Fridays.

I think there's still that mindset shift that has to happen, and from that place of a pessimistic view, that pessimism of, Oh, this is going to just pour on more onto my plate, to, like, Hey, if we can reduce our work time. What does it look like? Because, for me, flexibility is incredibly important, having that flexibility to have breakfast with my kids or pick them up from school from time to time or taking off early to go camping or hiking on the weekends and things like that.

So from an HR perspective, there's a lot that often will fall on an HR person. The CEO might be listening to this, or they look at your work and they go, Hey, HR, go and figure this out. What can we do?

For an HR person, what advice would you have for them specifically?

Joe: I think that the key thing initially is committing to the exploration, the feasibility study, and putting in place the framework, but this is not something that can be solved around the executive table.

You need to come up with all of the ideas and all of the solutions before you engage your team and before you start. Because honestly, even if you come up with are organization of new policies and new processes, if we do X, Y, and Z, this is what's going to create the efficiency that we need to make this work.

It isn't going to stick. It might work in the first instance, but it isn't going to stick. And the reason it won't stick is because your people don't own it. This has to be a bottom-up process. We are talking about forming new work habits. And then sustaining them, and if people aren't left with the tools and empowered to actually say, at an individual level and at a team level, what are the things that you need to change in order to make this a success?

It isn't something you're going to be. That's one of the biggest fears that CEOs have: I can see how we might achieve the initial productivity uplift, but how do we stop that from waning over time?

The way that you stop that from waning over time is that you embed this as a continuous improvement initiative that is owned by employees. This is something where most organizations we work with, they're not executing this necessarily as a kind of a permanent contractual change. They're implementing this as a policy, which is continuously reviewed, and where people feel like we need to earn this incredible benefit, and it creates this remarkable positive tension within teams where, you know, just as you described.

The benefit of this is so personal. That's what makes it work. You run a yoga class at lunchtime; everyone's going to have a different experience with that. You give people back their Friday afternoons. To me, it might mean spending more time with my elderly relative. To you, it might mean spending more time on a hobby that you love. To someone else, it might be learning a new language that you've been putting off for years.

So the benefit is so personal. If you've got people who are slacking off and who are coasting within teams, you create this incredible team-based collective accountability where there is an expectation that you're managing sideways, where, hey, hang on a minute, we all need to be pulling together if we want to be able to continue to make this work. That's what this is really about.

Tim: Yeah, it's getting that rate of free from the ground level all the way up if you're looking at a hierarchical structure is getting that enthusiasm. You've said it right at the beginning, that buying and that enthusiasm and saying, Hey, like we're going to work hard. We're going to find those efficiencies. We need to reduce that noise. What can we automate? What systems can we implement in order to reduce these manual tasks?

In order to create that, whatever it is, a shorter workday, shorter workweek, I love that four days in the office and one extended weekend, or whatever that looks like to your organization.

The data is clear based on the data that's already there plus the great data that's in this new report, which shows people want it, whether your organization is going to embrace it or not.

So, if you're listening to this, just think about this: you're employing maybe one person, a hundred people, a thousand people. The data shows that they want this; they want it; they will forgo salary just to take this. So somebody on your team's a high performer, and they get a job offer, and that job offer is like, you know what? Yeah, we work on goals. We don't work on time, and we're going to pay you X salary. That's a real threat to your organization.

Joe: I would say to any leader that's listening to this, Tim, don't just take our word for it for this. Christopher A. Pissarides, who's a Nobel Prize-winning economist from the UK. He made headlines last year for predicting that a four-day workweek is coming in the very near future as a result of AI, similar to people like Bill Gates and Jamie Dim on and others, but that's not why I'm bringing him up.

The reason I'm bringing him up is that he won his Nobel Prize for demonstrating that search theory, which is this idea that businesses will create new products and create new services based on what consumers are demanding in the market. But that also applies to the employment market.

In other words, over time, in a free market economy, businesses will end up developing perks, benefits, and offerings for employees in response to what they're demanding. I think the data is so clear on this that, over and above pretty much anything else—and we could cite so many other studies beyond just this one—consistently, four-day work weeks, flexible working, and work-life balance are the things that are coming in ahead of salary and ahead of remote work.

KPMG did a study on this, Deloitte, and Bank of America. These are consistently top one, top two, top three. So if Christopher Pissarides is right, who are we to argue with a Nobel Prize-winning economist?

This is coming down the tracks, and really the choice that people face is, do we want to be planning for this? Do we want to be thinking about this? Do we want to be activating this now? Or do we want to be following one of our big competitors who got out ahead of us and do the first because I think the biggest benefits of this are going to flow to the organizations that are the early movers?

Tim: So good. I'm so eager to see where this idea, this not-even-idea-anymore, this movement of measuring just productivity rather than time in a seat, could show up and sit in an office for us for eight hours, and I can look busy. Doesn't mean I'm busy and leave versus here's your clear goal. Here's how we're going to hold you accountable. Here are the measures we're going to put in place. Do you agree to those? Yes. Let's go and get to work. And, and that's where the market is going and needs to go.

Joe, I'm excited for this report to come out for those who are listening. You need to make sure that you are subscribed at flexos.org/subscribe to make sure when this episode or other episodes are coming out, but also subscribe to the newsletters, because that's where you're going to get the reports.

Joe, if people are interested, I'm sure you've piqued the interest of some people who are listening to this. Where can they find you? Where can they reach you?

Joe: Our website is worktimereduction.com. I'm on LinkedIn. The organization is on LinkedIn. Those are good places to find us. I used to be a frequent Twitter/X user, but not so much recently. I've joined Blue Sky, but I haven't really gotten going with it yet. So, I would say a website and LinkedIn are probably your best places.

Tim: Sounds good. And we'll make sure all those links are in the show notes as well.

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