German company trying out a five-hour work day

To fit a 40 hour work week into 25 hours, a 16-person tech consulting firm in Germany is doing this to still get paid and earn benefits like a normal eight-hour shift. Those things include discouraging small talk, banning social media, keeping cell phones in backpacks, only checking work e-mail twice a day and meetings run about 15 minutes.

Culture Association CEO and founder, best-selling author and speaker Dr. Daren Martin said the Global Employee Engagement rate is only 15 percent of employees are fully engaged. During the work day, American employees waste so much time and then hit that slump.

"The average worker is actually working about 15 percent of their day. If you crunch that down and you really incentivize people to get their work done in a faster manner, I think we might actually get more output from people," said Martin.

He said it's smart to compress employee's work time and get the best out of people and let them go home. This isn't last century where people go to a factory and punch a clock. The way we're working isn't really working.

"This is just a Draconian view of what work is supposed to be because we've got these hard and fast rules that apply in a factory environment," said Martin. "It's really about our biases and our perspective. We've got that 'old-manism’. We've got that archaic mindset that says this is what work is supposed to be."

He said there's many way to structure the workday in 2019 to make it more functional. He added an aggressive or innovate company in the US might try something like this, but probably won't be successful.

Martin said according to Tim Ferriss' best-seller "The Four Hour Work Week", it's not about how many hours you work, but how much work you get done.


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