A group of elderly-care nurses in Sweden have commenced experimenting with a six-hour work day that many there hope could soon have widespread impact for workers across that region.

Ideally, the shorter work day will increase productivity and reduce staff turnover and since the group launched its experiment earlier this year other work forces, including Sweden's Gothenburg's Sahlgrenska University Hospital and the departments of doctors and nurses in at least two other local hospitals, have also adopted the practice.

Even more recently, the growing trend has advanced to the public sector to include various small businesses.

"I used to be exhausted all the time, I would come home from work and pass out on the sofa," Lise-Lotte Pettersson, a 41-year-old 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."

At Svartedalens, the trial is widely viewed as a success, even if the bottom line has resulted in an extra 14 staff members needing to be hired and the council having to be pay out more money in employee wages.

"Since the 1990s we have had more work and fewer people," said Svartedalen's head of elderly care Ann-Charlotte Dahlbom. "We can't do it anymore," she said, adding that staff well-being and the standard of care is now better than ever. "There is a lot of illness and depression among staff in the care sector because of exhaustion -- the lack of balance between work and life is not good for anyone."

After a century in which working hours were gradually reduced, holidays increased and retirement reached earlier, more recent times have made for an era of increased workloads and longer hours.

"For a long time politicians have been competing to say we must create more jobs with longer hours -- work has become an end in itself," said Roland Paulsen, a researcher in business administration at the University of Lund. "But productivity has doubled since the 1970s, so technically we even have the potential for a four-hour working day. It is a question of how these productivity gains are distributed."

Many point to the outgoing trend at Toyota service centres in Gothenburg as the best way forward. Some 13 years ago, the company went to a six-hour work day and since then employees and customers alike have proven to be more satisfied.

According to company managing director Martin Banck, staff now feel better and there is less turnover with greater workplace efficiency, paving the way for profits to increase by some 25 percent.

In Sweden, much of the 1990s was a time of growing experimentation with the six-hour work day, but as political power swayed from the left to right many of the reforms were reversed and things reverted back to the way they had always been.

"It was a political decision to end it, they said it was too expensive," says Prof. Birgitta Olsson of Lund University, who was involved in research to evaluate the Stockholm experiment. "But it was a good investment in improved well-being for the community. More people were in jobs, they were in better health and enjoyed better working conditions."

Despite all the positive signs born of the latest movement, the fear is that the experiment will likely end next year, as the centre-left coalition on Gothenburg council has lost its majority.

"Under the Conservative-led coalition government in Sweden from 2005 to 2014 we spoke only about working more, and more efficiently -- but now we want to discuss how to survive a long working life so we don't destroy our bodies by the time we are 60," said Daniel Bernmar, leader of the Left party on Gothenburg's city council.

"Not everything is about making things cheaper and more efficient, but about making them better," he added.