Dive Brief:

• Anyone up for a 6-hour workday? If so, relocating to Sweden might be the ticket. That's where some companies say they are interested in focusing and motivating employees — not pushing the same amount of work into a shorter day.
• While it's an admittedly small sample size, a group of elderly-care nurses in Sweden recently made radical changes to their daily lives in an effort to improve quality and efficiency.
• Earlier this year, the group moved from eight-hour to a six-hour working days for the same wage. This is significant says the Guardian because it comes after a "rightward political shift in Sweden a decade ago snuffed out earlier efforts to explore alternatives to the traditional working week." 

Dive Insight:

While Americans can't expect such a radical change in working conditions (though the 4-day work week does exist in some industries, healthcare for example, six-hour workdays seem to have made a qualitative difference in performance for the Swedish nurses.

"I used to be exhausted all the time, I would come home from work and pass out on the sofa," Lise-Lotte Pettersson, 41, an assistant nurse at Svartedalens care home in Gothenburg, told the Guardian. "But not now. I am much more alert: I have much more energy for my work, and also for family life."

The article goes on to detail how other industry segments, including manufacturing and even the public sector, are having some success with the shortened daily working hours.