Kellogg’s Short Work Week

In Yesterday’s Post, 40 Hours?, I discussed the current standard 40 hour work week and made a personal observation that a lot of those 40 hours are wasted and adding more free time to our personal lives would make a positive change to not only our personal well being, but would also have a great impact on our communities.

This experiment has been done before and it had great success. Cereal tycoon A.K. Kellogg began offering his employees a short work week in December 1930. Kellogg was a hard working man who worked hard as a child and felt like he never had time to just live. He was always working. At first he offered 35 hours worth of pay for 30 hours of work. Not only did Mr. Kellogg offer a shorter work week but he also built parks, a summer camp, nature centers, garden plots, sports fields, and other recreational facilities for the community of Battle Creek Michigan where his plant was located. His plan created 400 new jobs in Battle Creek and within 2 years Kellogg began paying workers for 40 hours worth of work for just 30 hours of actual time. He made the increase in pay because productivity had increased so much.

Just as I have said before, if we could incentivize workers to get the job done and let them have the rest of the day to themseleves, they will find a way to be more productive in less time. If you have to be somewhere for 40 hours a week doing something you really don’t want to do, you will most certainly find other things to fill that time.

Shortly after A.K. Kellogg died, the Kelloggs Company changed to a 40 hour work week. Within just a few years the city of Battle Creek Michigan reported that volunteering at the schools and in the community went down and the cities crime rate went up.

The Kelloggs company successfully offered its employees a shorter work week for 55 years. The quality of life for the workers and their community increased and Kelloggs was a desirable place to work. Sadly the new management joined what everyone else was doing and that decision has lowered the quality of life for the entire community and has not increased the companies profits.

It is not a coinidence. Free time is life. Free time turns Human-Doings into Human-Beings.

Tags: Changing Workplace, free time, simplify, time

This entry was posted on Friday, March 19th, 2010 at 6:47 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.