Nicolai Tangen, CEO of the trillion-dollar fund Norges Bank Investment Management, believes that Europeans are falling behind Americans when it comes to work ethic.
The CEO revealed during a new interview with the Financial Times that American companies are surpassing their European competitors in innovation in technology, calling it “worrisome.” He also said that he believes Americans “work harder” than Europeans, and that Europeans are less ambitious.
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“There’s a mindset issue in terms of acceptance of mistakes and risks. You go bust in America, you get another chance. In Europe, you’re dead,” said Tangen while speaking to The Financial Times. “We are not very ambitious. I should be careful about talking about work-life balance, but the Americans just work harder.”
Americans tend to work an average of 36.40 hours a week, according to data from World Population Review. The data also revealed that workers in the United Kingdom work an average of 30.70 hours a week.
Europeans and Americans also appear to have differing attitudes on hard work, according to a recent survey from King’s College London’s Policy Institute. The survey found that 39% of Europeans agreed with the belief that hard work brings a better life, compared to the 55% of Americans who agreed with that statement.
Europe has recently been experimenting with a four-day workweek. In 2022, several countries in Europe participated in a study that ran a six-month trial of a four-day workweek that aimed to study the impact the shorter working hours would have on productivity and the mental health of their employees. Roughly 61 European companies and over 3,000 employees participated in the study.
Three people in an office standing above a large desk looking down at something on the computer of a fourth person sitting at the desk.
Campaign Creators via Unsplash
The study found that 96% of employees said that the shorter workweek boosted their personal life, and 86% said that their performance at work improved.
“Physical and mental health and work-life balance are significantly better than at six months,” said one of the report’s authors, Juliet Schor, a professor at Boston College. “Burnout and life satisfaction improvements held steady.”
Also, 89% of the companies in the study still used the four-day workweek a year after the trial concluded, and more than half of the companies permanently adopted the shorter workweek.
Some in America are hoping to soon follow suit and adopt a four-day workweek as well. U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders recently introduced a bill last month that would make the standard workweek in the U.S. four days, reducing workweek hours from 40 to 32 over a time period of four years. Also, workers would not face any reduction in pay due to the shorter workweek.
“Today, American workers are over 400 percent more productive than they were in the 1940s,” said Sanders in a statement announcing the bill. “And yet, millions of Americans are working longer hours for lower wages than they were decades ago. That has got to change.”
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