BIELEFELD, Germany— Lasse Rheingans realized taking time to check
Facebook or respond to reply-all emails distracted him from work goals and caused him to spend extra hours at the office rather than with his young daughters.
So when he acquired a small tech consulting firm here in late 2017, he introduced a radical idea: Reduce the workday to five hours, from the standard eight, while leaving worker salaries and vacation time at the same levels.
“They were not sure if I was kidding,” he says. “Some of them thought I was testing them. But yeah, I was being serious.”
At the firm he renamed Rheingans Digital Enabler, the 16 employees start work at 8 a.m. and may leave at 1 p.m. Mr. Rheingans, the firm's managing director, says employees can deliver the same output during a focused 25-hour week as in 40 hours interrupted with distractions.
“We have all experienced that: We sit in the office, out of energy, reading newspapers online or Facebook, just in need of the little pauses to recharge, but you don’t really recharge,” he says. “My idea is focusing on the first five hours and then just leave, and have a proper break.”
To accomplish that, small talk during work hours is discouraged. Social media is banned. Phones are kept in backpacks. Company email accounts are checked just twice a day. Most meetings are scheduled to last no more than 15 minutes.
As a result, the company produces the same level of output for clients despite shorter days, says Mr. Rheingans. He says the company, which develops websites, apps and e-commerce platforms, was profitable in 2018, the first full year he owned it. He says happier employees deliver better work for clients, and the shorter workday is a draw, boosting recruitment in Germany’s tight labor market.
At 7:55 a.m. on a recent Tuesday, employees gathered in a small kitchen in the sixth-floor office overlooking the city’s weather vane-topped spires. They filled coffee mugs and discussed the changing leaves. By 8, each was seated.
Project manager Jana Burdach entered the office at 8:15 with her dog Bonnie. Mr. Rheingans initially required employees to arrive at 8, but later relaxed that rule.
“It’s not really about the process of establishing a five-hour day. It’s about individual maturity,” he says. “It’s so silly to think of a 40-hour workweek when work is not a place or time.” It’s an activity, he says.
The five-hour day brings challenges, employees say, with the pressure to produce the same work in less time. They also had to adjust to not texting or talking with family during the workday.
But the shorter schedule freed marketing assistant Lucas da Costa to return to a long-shelved hobby of drawing portraits. It also allowed him to take a part-time job on weekends and play basketball more frequently with friends, who are jealous of his shorter workday.
“When you work until the evening, you just want to go lie on the couch and chill,” the 25-year-old says.
At a previous firm, Mr. Rheingans took a salary cut so he could spend two afternoons a week with his children. A few months later he asked for his salary to be reinstated because he was producing as much work as before. His partners agreed, though, he says, they were rankled by the arrangement. He started researching new work-time concepts before he purchased Digital Enabler.
One model he reviewed was San Diego’s Tower Paddle Boards, which began a five-hour workday in 2015. Chief Executive Stephan Aarstol says that as an entrepreneur, he typically worked irregular hours but felt guilty leaving the office for the beach when others were still at their desks.
Mr. Aarstol says the five-hour experiment was an initial success, allowing him to reward productive employees and weed out those marking time. Two years later, he limited five-hour days to the summer months because it sapped some employees’ enthusiasm.
“We lost the startup culture,” he says. “Everyone’s outside life got so much better, at the expense of their passion for the work.”
Brian Kropp, chief of research at Gartner Inc.’s human-resource practice, says the five-hour workday idea fits with the broader trend of companies looking to increase flexibility, which many workers value above pay. Research shows most people are only productive for four or five hours of the workday, so reducing work time doesn’t necessarily cost companies output, he says.
Still, managers need to support the change, and employees might need to stagger schedules to ensure customers’ needs are met, Mr. Kropp says.
“The most important thing, and the hardest to make happen, is being willing to change the mindset,” he says. “You can’t just say it, and then be frustrated when employees don’t respond to email until the next morning.”
At Digital Enabler, a monitor displays the hours, minutes and seconds remaining in the workday. At 1 p.m., the display changed to “#high5, #feierabend”—or closing time in German. One employee packed up and said goodbye. There wasn’t a rush to leave. Another worker fetched Chinese takeout and joined two colleagues for lunch in the conference room.
By 1:45 p.m., only two developers remained, their eyes trained to their screens. Ms. Burdach, their manager, says it is often necessary to work more than a five-hour day to meet client deadlines.
“We can’t always say to a customer ‘Hey, it’s one o’clock in the afternoon, we’ll see you tomorrow,’ ” she says. But clients are adjusting. “Our customers understand,” Ms. Burdach says. “Some asked if we have job offers for them.”
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