Everyone's working for the weekend?

Don't ask me how my brain works.  While I was trying to think of how to start this blog post tonight , I kept going back to a memorable line in the opening scene of one of my all-time favorite movies, Francis Ford Coppola's 1972 classic, "The Godfather".  Apparently there is a Sicilian tradition that a Mafia boss cannot refuse a request on his daughter's wedding day.  Don Corleone ("The Godfather") tells an individual, "Some day - and that day may never come - I will call upon you to do a service for me."  He then grants the request (and much later in the movie calls for the service as payment).  Why I was thinking of that line, I don't know.  Maybe it reminded me of "Once upon a time..." (or even, "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away") - who knows.  Perhaps I thought of this line because it seems like the end of the COVID-19 pandemic will never come.  Regardless of how things seem right now, I can assure you that the pandemic will eventually end, and when it does, the world will be a much different place.

As I read through different articles on the state of the world economy, it's becoming ever more apparent that we need to prepare for a new state of normal after COVID-19.  I suspect that after nearly 2 months of remote working from home, there will be calls from both employers and employees to explore remote working as a more permanent thing.  Organizations, including those in health care, will begin to experiment with different staffing models.  I can't help but wonder whether some of these different staffing models have been tried before in the past (as they say, "Past is prologue").  

One of the strangest work experiments I've ever come across was something that the Soviet Union tried almost a century ago.  It started on a Sunday - the Sunday of September 29, 1929 to be exact.  Joseph Stalin believed that he could increase productivity by completely doing away with the weekend.  While that doesn't seem all that revolutionary - several organizations work all 7 days of the week - Stalin's concept of a continuous work week was completely bonkers.  He completely threw out the Gregorian calendar (which defines the first day of the week as Sunday and the last day of the week as Saturday) and created a new Soviet calendar that had five days per week!  He called it, nepreryvka, or “continuous working week."  Saturdays and Sundays were completely abolished.  

With the new Soviet calendar, workers were divided into five groups, and each group was assigned one day off.  Therefore, on any given day, four-fifths of the population was working.  Stalin thought that productivity would take-off like Sputnik (okay, bad analogy since Sputnik came long after Stalin, but you get my point).  The problem was that a worker's friends and family members could be assigned to a completely different day off from work, so in some cases, husbands and wives never saw each other.  Stalin's new calendar failed miserably.  Just two years later, he tried to change the calendar to six working days, but by 1940 that experiment had failed too.  

The writer, Judith Shulevitz described Stalin's failed experiment in an article in the November 2019 issue of The Atlantic.  She goes on to lament the loss of the 40 hour work week (who works forty hours anymore?).  Organizations are continually tinkering with the work schedule in order to maximize productivity and minimize expenses.  The problem is that the schedule that maximizes productivity may not always be the best schedule for the individual worker.

Undoubtedly, some of us will want to continue to work from home once the shelter-in-place orders subside.  Workers need to feel safe, and those workers who are at a higher risk of COVID-19 or (depending on whether children return to school) those workers who struggle with child care issues may choose to continue to work from home.  However, I know of others who have remained productive while working at home but feel socially isolated and would choose to return to work.  It's incumbent upon organizations to find ways to meet both their needs as well as the needs of their employees.  We would do well to remember the failed experiment known as nepreryvka.  We would do well to assess the impact of new staffing and working models on productivity, as well as things like employee satisfaction and work-life balance.