In the comedy classic Dumb & Dumber, Harry and Lloyd complain they’ve been all over town and can’t find jobs. “Yeah, unless you wanna work 40 hours a week!” Jim Carrey‘s Lloyd scoffs.
Apparently workers nowadays are taking their gripe to heart.
While many people log more than that at the old grind, the 40-hour week has been a standard for decades. But in the last few years, Americans have been working less, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. The agency reveals that between 2019 and 2022, Americans worked on average 33 fewer hours a year.
The pandemic, and working from home for millions of people, seems to have compounded the issue, Anthony Klotz, a professor of management at London’s UCL School of Management, tells CNBC. “There’s a growing annoyance with work tasks that add no value to our lives,” he says.
The work from home period taught employees how much time was spent commuting, chatting around the watercooler or sitting in endless meetings. “We don’t want to waste our time,'” Klotz says.
As normal office routines return, the expert explains, “[P]eople are happy to come back to the office and perform their core job functions, but they don’t have a lot of tolerance for things outside of that. Like, if you’re making me come to the office or attend an on-site meeting, it better be good.”
To combat this, some companies have begun experimenting with a four-day workweek — and have found increased productivity because of it — or experimented with meeting-free days.