In Praise of Slow

by Carl Honore

  The shift is particularly striking in Japan, which once terrorized the world with its fearsome work ethic. A decade of economic stagnation has brought job insecurity, and with it a new way of thinking about work and time. More and more young Japanese people are eschewing long hours on the job for longer spells of leisure. “For years, parents in Japan screamed at their children to go faster, work harder, do more, but now people are saying enough is enough,” says Keibo Oiwa, the author of Slow is Beautiful. “The new generation is realizing that you do not have to work incredibly long hours, that it is not so bad to be slow.” Instead of becoming a cog in the corporate wheel—a “salaryman”—many young Japanese people now prefer to drift from one temporary job to the next. Pundits talk of Generation Fureeta, a coinage based on the English word free and the German word arbeiter (worker).

  Consider Nobuhito Abe, a twenty-four-year-old university graduate in Tokyo. While his father toils more than seventy hours a week for a bank, he works part-time at a convenience store, spending the rest of the day playing baseball and video games, or hanging out downtown. Abe, smiling under a mop of hennaed hair, says that a life ruled by work is not for him or his friends. “My generation is finally realizing what people in Europe realized long ago—that it is crazy to let a job take over your life,” he says. “We want to be in control of our own time. We want the freedom to be slow.” The Fureeta are hardly a role model for the future—most fund their relaxed lifestyle by sponging off hard-working parents. But their refusal to embrace the furious madness for work points to a cultural shift. Even Japanese officialdom is changing tack. In 2002, the government called for shorter working hours. New legislation has already made it easier to job-share. Japan still has a long way to go, but the trend towards working less has begun.

  Continental Europe has moved farthest down the road to cutting work hours. The average German, for instance, now spends 15% less time on the job than in 1980. Many economists reject the claim that working less creates more jobs by spreading the work around. But everyone agrees that trimming work hours generates more time for leisure, traditionally a higher priority among continental Europeans. In 1993, the EU laid down a maximum workweek of forty-eight hours with workers given the right to work longer if they wish. At the end of the decade, France took the boldest step so far to put work in its place by cutting the workweek to thirty-five hours.

  In practice, France stipulated that no one should work more than 1,600 hours per year. Since the implementation of les 35 heures was negotiated at the company level, the impact on workers varies. Many French people now work shorter days throughout the year, while others work the same or even longer weekly hours but get extra days off. A mid-ranking French executive can aspire to nine weeks or more of annual vacation. Though some professions—among them senior business executives, doctors, journalists and soldiers—are exempted from the thirty-five-hour rule, the net effect is a leisure revolution.

  For many French people, the weekend now starts on Thursday, or ends on Tuesday. Legions of office staff desert their desks at 3 P.M. While some use the extra leisure time to veg out—sleeping or watching TV—many more have broadened their horizons. Enrolment in art, music and language classes has risen sharply. Tour operators report a boom in short trips to London, Barcelona and other European hot spots. Bars and bistros, cinemas and sports clubs are packed with people. The surge in leisure spending gave the economy a much-needed shot in the arm. But beyond the economic numbers, the shorter workweek has revolutionized people’s lives. Parents spend longer playing with their children, friends see each other more often, couples have more time for romance. Even that favourite French pastime, adultery, has benefited. Paul, a married accountant in southern France, tells me that the thirty-five-hour workweek allows him to indulge in an extra tryst each month with his mistress. “If cutting the workload gives more time for love, then it has to be a good thing, n’est-ce pas?” he says, with a wolfish grin.

  Fans of the new regime are certainly easy to find. Take Emilie Guimard. The Paris-based economist now enjoys a couple of three-day weekends a month, on top of her six weeks of annual paid vacation. She has taken up tennis, and started reading the Sunday edition of Le Monde from cover to cover. Many of her long weekends are spent touring museums across Europe. “I now have time for things that make my life richer, and that is good for me and for my employers,” she says. “When you are relaxed and happy in your personal life, you work better. Most of us in the office feel we are more efficient on the job than we used to be.”

  Many bigger companies have grown to love the thirty-five-hour week. On top of the tax breaks they received for hiring more workers, the new regime allowed them to negotiate more flexible ways of working. Staff at large manufacturers, such as Renault and Peugeot, have agreed to work longer hours when production peaks and shorter hours when it slumps.

  So the Cassandras who warned that the thirty-five-hour week would send the French economy into instant meltdown have been proved wrong. The gross domestic product has grown, and unemployment, though still above the EU average, has fallen. Productivity also remains high. Indeed, some evidence suggests that many French workers are more productive now. With less time on the job, and more leisure to look forward to, they make greater efforts to finish their work before clocking off.

  There are, however, some pretty large flies in the ointment. Small businesses find the thirty-five-hour week a real burden, and many have put off implementing it until the deadline in 2005. Funding the tax breaks that underpin the system has blown a hole in state finances. Meanwhile, business leaders moan that the leisure revolution has made France uncompetitive. There is some truth in this. The flow of foreign investment into France has slowed in recent years, as companies opt to put their money into nations with cheaper labour. The thirty-five-hour week must take some of the blame. Indeed, the French experience points up the dangers of taking a unilateral stand against the culture of long working hours in a globalized economy.

  Nor has the thirty-five-hour regime been a blessing for all workers. Many have found their wages held down to offset the higher costs of doing business. In both the private and public sectors, employers have often failed to hire enough new staff, leaving existing employees to cram the same tasks as before into less time. Blue-collar workers get an especially raw deal. Restrictions on overtime have cut their income, and many have lost control over when they can take their vacations. To workers who actually want to put in longer hours, the system is anathema.

  With so much invested in the idea of les 35 heures, the French attitude to time itself has taken on a more obsessive edge. The state enforces the thirty-five-hour week with nitpicking inspectors, who count cars in company parking lots and look for lights on in offices after 6 P.M. Employers are more likely to frown on coffee and toilet breaks. Some French shops now have to shut early so that staff can leave bang on the official closing time.

  The system is flawed, and everybody knows it. In 2002, the new right-wing government took the first step towards rolling back the thirty-five-hour regime by easing restrictions on overtime. In a landmark poll in September 2003, a slight majority of French citizens said the country should return to a thirty-nine-hour week. Thirty-six percent wanted the switch to be permanent, 18% thought it should be temporary. But though critics claim a counter-reformation is underway, a full-scale repeal will not come easily. Having spent years and large sums of money implementing the thirty-five-hour week, companies in France are loath to reopen the complex and divisive negotiations that brought it about. What’s more, support for the philosophy that underlies the system—less work, more leisure—remains strong.

  The lesson for other countries, especially those with a less dirigiste culture, is that a one-size-fits-all approach to cutting the workweek has serious drawbacks, which is why the battle to work less takes a different form elsewhere.

  Other European countries have used collective bargaining to push down working hours in individual sectors of the economy.
The Netherlands is often held up as a paragon of this piecemeal approach. Today, the Dutch work fewer hours than almost any industrial nation. Their standard workweek has fallen to thirty-eight hours, with half the labour force working thirty-six hours in 2002. A third of Dutch workers are now part-time. Crucial to the change was legislation passed in the 1990s that gave the Dutch the right to force their employers to let them work fewer hours in return for less pay. Such meddling in the labour market makes orthodox economists shudder. But it has worked. The Netherlands combines prosperity with an enviable quality of life. Compared to Americans, the Dutch spend less time commuting, shopping and watching television and more time socializing, studying, looking after their children, and pursuing sports and hobbies. Other countries, notably Japan, have started studying the “Dutch model.”

  Even where lawmakers are loath to intervene in the labour market, people are taking a personal stand against the round-the-clock work ethic. In 2002, Suma Chakrabarti, one of the most gifted senior civil servants in Britain, accepted his latest post as permanent secretary at the Department of International Development on the understanding that he would work forty hours a week and not a second more. Why? So he could have breakfast with his six-year-old daughter every morning and read her a bedtime story in the evening. Across the Atlantic, President George W. Bush makes no apologies for his short workday and laidback weekends. And for every headline-grabbing high flyer that has started cutting back on work, millions of ordinary people are doing the same. Though working less often means earning less money, more and more of us think that is a price worth paying. A recent survey in Britain found that twice as many people would prefer to work fewer hours than win the lottery. A similar study in the United States revealed that, given the choice between two weeks’ vacation and two weeks’ extra pay, twice as many Americans would choose the time off. Across Europe, part-time work has shed its “McJob” stigma to become an increasingly popular lifestyle choice. A 1999 survey found that 77% of temp workers in the EU had chosen to work fewer hours in order to have more time for family, hobbies and rest.

  At the top of the corporate food chain, more and more high achievers are choosing to work freelance or as independent contractors. This allows them to work hard when they choose and still have time to recharge their batteries, enjoy hobbies and hang out with the family. Many are refugees from the dotcom boom. Dan Kemp spent three years putting in ninety-hour weeks as a project manager for a software company in Silicon Valley. The long hours put such a strain on his marriage that his wife threatened to leave him and take their twin daughters with her. When the company went belly up in 2001, and Kemp found himself back on the job market, he decided to scale back. Now, he works four days a week, helping companies manage their IT systems. He still earns a comfortable wage and now has enough time for his family and his golf. So far he has not detected any disapproval or contempt from full-time colleagues. “If anything they envy my lifestyle,” he says.

  As it turns out, people who cut their work hours often take a smaller hit financially than they expect. That is because spending less time on the job means spending less money on the things that allow us to work: transport, parking, eating out, coffee, convenience food, childcare, laundry, retail therapy. A smaller income also translates into a smaller tax bill. In one Canadian study, some workers who took a pay cut in return for shorter hours actually ended up with more money in the bank at the end of the month.

  Sensing which way the wind is blowing, companies across the industrial world have started offering their staff the chance to get off the long-hours treadmill. Even in fast-moving, cut-throat industries, employers have twigged that one way to boost productivity and profits is to offer staff a better work-life balance. At SAS, a leading software company based in Cary, North Carolina, staff put in a thirty-five-hour week when the workload permits and enjoy generous vacation benefits. The firm also offers a package of on-site amenities, including childcare, a health clinic, a cafeteria with a pianist, and a gym—and encourages employees to use them. SAS is regularly voted one of the best firms to work for in the United States.

  Farther north, the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) has also won plaudits for recognizing that its employees have lives outside the office. On any given day, up to 40% of RBC staff will be using a work-life program—job-sharing, flex-time, reduced hours. At the bank’s headquarters, a gleaming skyscraper in downtown Toronto, I meet Karen Domaratzki and Susan Lieberman, a couple of smart, energetic forty-somethings, who have moved steadily up the ranks since starting to share a job in 1997. By 2002, the pair were second in command of the division that sells banking services overseas. We meet on a Wednesday, the only day of the week when they overlap at work. Their shared office is homey. On two shelves stand a forest of family photos. Artwork by their children hangs on the walls.

  Both women followed a similar career path. After earning MBAs, they began climbing the corporate ladder, putting in sixty-hour weeks without blinking. But once children entered the picture—they have three apiece—life became an endless, unsatisfying rush. So they decided to share a job, doing three days a week each.

  The 40% pay cut turned out to be less of a blow than it sounds. It helps, of course, that Lieberman and Domaratzki both have high-earning husbands. But the extra leisure has proved to be priceless. Both women are able to spend more time with their children, making family life more relaxed and rewarding. Lieberman’s six-year-old son recently urged his father to start job-sharing. The two bankers also feel closer to their communities. They now have time to chat with neighbours and local shopkeepers, help out at their children’s schools and do volunteer work. Home cooking is back on the agenda, too. “Before the job-share, we used to have some pretty lousy meals,” says Domaratzki, wincing at the memory.

  Both women feel their whole relationship with time has taken on a healthier complexion. The itch to accelerate has gone, or at least faded. “When you have more time off to slow down and recharge, you don’t take anything quite so intensely,” explains Lieberman. “The whole emotional level changes, and you’re just calmer in general.”

  For RBC, that calmness pays off in higher productivity—and more Slow Thinking. “When I come in on Wednesday, I’m fresh. I’ve got all my home stuff under control—the house is clean, the food is bought, the laundry is done, the children are happy,” Domaratzki explains. “And during my days off I don’t just rest and rejuvenate, I mull. The work plays in the back of your mind, and often because of that you make better, more thoughtful decisions when you come into the office. You’re not just always reacting to things on the spot.” In 2000, RBC started offering flexible working arrangements to the eleven thousand new staff it acquired through expansion into the United States.

  Formally cutting work hours is not the only route to working and living better. Sometimes it is enough to purge the corporate culture of the notion that working longer always means getting more done. That is what Marriott did. In 2000, the hotel chain concluded that its managers were often staying late at the office simply because they felt it was expected of them. The result was sagging morale and burnout.

  To combat the culture of “presenteeism,” Marriott launched a pilot project in three hotels in the northeastern United States. Staff were told that it was okay to leave the office when the work was done, no matter what the clock said. Leading by example, senior managers began openly going home at 5 P.M., or earlier. After three months, it was clear that a cultural revolution was underway. Staff who left early, or who took time off in the middle of the day for personal reasons, no longer had to run the gauntlet of disapproving gestures and jokes. Instead, people began taking an interest in what their colleagues were doing with their spare time. On average, Marriott managers now work five hours less per week—and they are more productive. Not having to clock up long hours for the sake of it gives them extra motivation to be efficient and prompt. Bill Munck, the Marriott manager who oversaw the regime change, draws a conclusion that should be pinned up in b
oardrooms and factories everywhere: “One of the most important things we learned … was that people could be just as productive—and sometimes even more so—when they worked fewer hours.”

  Nevertheless, any move against the long-hours culture faces some hefty obstacles. A CEO can create the world’s most enlightened work-life scheme but if managers farther down the chain of command are unsympathetic, it fails. One American company recently introduced a raft of work-life measures with full backing from the board. After a year, though, enrolment was much lower than expected. An investigation revealed that several division leaders were putting staff off with warnings that signing up would damage their chances of promotion. “A lot of people are still very suspicious of work-life solutions,” says a manager in the company’s human resources department. “Changing the rules is just the beginning—you have to change people’s mentality, too.”

  Often the barrier to work-life balance is self-inflicted. Many men still regard it skeptically. In most companies, women with children are the main users of work-life balance schemes. John Atkins, a sales manager for a large retailer in London, recently became a father. He would love to work reduced hours, but cannot bring himself to sign up for the program. “Every time I think of it, a little voice in the back of my head says, ‘If you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen,’” he says.

  Another obstacle to establishing work-life balance is that everyone is different. A single twenty-five-year-old man will find it easier to work long hours than a thirty-six-year-old mother of four. He may even want to spend longer on the job. Companies need to find a formula for rewarding those who work more without penalizing those who work less. They also have to manage the ill will that can flare up between colleagues. Childless workers often resent work-time concessions granted to those with children. In many companies, different departments simply cannot offer the same work-life deals—and that can cause friction. At RBC, the Capital Markets division offers less flexible working arrangements simply because staff have to be on hand for the hours that the market is open.