Billionaire Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, Nvidia’s boss Jensen Huang and Elon Musk have all made the same prediction in recent years: The workweek is about to shrink. Automation will take over routine tasks, they argue, freeing workers’ time and pushing a four-day week toward becoming standard. Gates has even floated the idea of a two-day workweek.
But Mark Dixon, CEO and founder of International Workplace Group (IWG) CEO isn’t buying it. From his vantage point, running the world’s largest flexible office provider—with more than 8 million users across 122 countries and 85% of the Fortune 500 among its customers—the math doesn’t add up.
“Everyone is focused on productivity, so no time soon,” Dixon says flatly.
“It’s about the cost of labor,” Dixon explains to Fortune. The U.S. and U.K. are experiencing significant cost-of-living crises. At the same time, he says, businesses are experiencing a “cost of operating crisis.”
“Everyone’s having to control their labor costs because all costs have gone up so much, and you can’t get any more money from customers, so therefore you have to get more out of people.”
