Sweden reveals results from pilot of 30-hour work week | Hacker News Reader

Sweden reveals results from pilot of 30-hour work week

bloomberg.com

231 pointsuxhacker198 comments

This pilot was actually not 6-hour workday, but 30 hour workweek. Yes, it is true that the politicians that decided it called it for 6-hour workday, but in reality is was 30 hour workweek and nothing else, because of how the facility works with scheduling and so on (regulations etc).

Nurses worked between 5 to 7 hours on day shifts resulting in a 30 hour workweek. Night shifts was 6 to 8 hours.

I think it is important to stress this fact that it was about workweek and not workday. Almost all media reporting on this (Swedish as well) misses this fact. You have to read the report to get that.

Personally I rather work more one day and less the other. It is the flexibility over a week that is more interesting than over a day.

report after 18 months 2016-10-11

https://sverigesradio.se/diverse/appdata/isidor/files/104/75...

Seeing as how even the PDF you link says in the first sentence "6-hour workday" ("6 timmars arbetsdag"), I can see why there is some confusion about the specific details.

Yes, that does not really help. That shows that it is important for journalists to read the fine print.

In Sweden, 6-hour workday is a well known political slogan, probably why that was used.

OK, we put "30 hour work week" in the title instead. Thanks!

Wait, hold the phone. That's not really accurate according to the article nor the paper he linked. The trial was 6 hour work days, as the article claims.

After downloading the aforementioned paper and uploading the to google translate, since I don't speak Swedish:

> Summary 18 months with 6 hours

> 6 hours of trial

> City of Gothenburg decided in 2014 to conduct a trial with 6-hour day with follow-up research. The trial started 2015-02-01 and 2016-12-31 terminated after 23 months. The trial will answer the question about the effects of reduced working hours have for nurses, tenants and the economy / jobs.

> The trial has been shortened working hours to 6 hours per day and 14.9 full-time employees, 17 nurses have been hired to compensate for reduced working hours. Consequential changes have made of schedule at Svartedalen center for the elderly. To provide a high comparability has no other changes made by different senior housing from others. In follow research studies 100 % Of nurses participated.

...

> There are 29 sessions on a six-week period in the new schedule. Three of the six weekends included. Employees at Svartedalen work in the trial between five and seven hours on daily schedule. In practice, between 6 hours and 6.25 hours (6 hours and 15 minutes). That it not exactly six hours per day due to scheduling must answer received business needs.

> Night schedule is at least six and no more than eight hours. Before the experiment was working nine hours on overnight.

So yeah, the resulting full-time hours were 30, but the study was specifically interested in 6-hour work days, according to the report. The only reason it wasn't exactly 6 was for business/logistical reasons.

> The only reason it wasn't exactly 6 was for business/logistical reasons.

The person you are calling inaccurate said as much in different words.

If it wasn't exactly 6 then you shouldn't call it 6.

We call a standard work day 8 even though it isn't exactly 8. If indeed the idea was to shift a standard work day from approximately 8 hours to approximately 6 hours, it seems reasonable to refer to it as the "6-hour work day". (I haven't read the report, so won't comment on whether that was indeed the focus, as opposed to a more flexible 30-hour week.)

Everywhere i've worked that has actually cared about hours meant 8 when they said 8. My current job (as stupid as I think it is) requires me to be at work and not on lunch for 8 hours a day.

EDIT: This comment is not that informative on the subject. Ignore it. Read this one instead https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13323756

It does say 5 to 7 hours and looking up other Swedish media that have reported on the length on shifts they also say 5 to 7.

http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/article22726117.ab

http://www.gp.se/nyheter/göteborg/sextimmarsdag-på-äldreboen...

http://www.fria.nu/artikel/119894

The report itself is a bit vague what it actually means by in practice.

TL;DR the study is a 30 hour/week study and in practice the employees work 6 to 6.25h a day. When you speak about the study in laymen terms, you can say 6 hour/workday pilot because that is what it is in practice , however to be scientifically correct it is 30 hours/week pilot.

Full explanation ->

From the report with Google Translate

> Full-time dimensions in the study is 30 hours / week compared to normal working hours at 38.25 hours in the daytime alternatively 37.00 hours (depending on working agreement at the time of appointment) and 36.33 hours for the night.

So the report clearly states 30 hours/week as "heltidsmått" (a measured full-time). Not 6 hours/day.

What about "in practice"? If you look at the first report after 6 months

http://goteborg.vansterpartiet.se/files/2015/10/2015-10-07-6...

Page 6, two tables of example schedules, one to the left before the pilot and the right during the pilot. Remember that a work day includes a free 30 min lunch break so there is a difference between the two columns Period and Timmar (Hours) for 0.5h except the night shift, no free lunch there!

As we can see all day shifts are either 6h or 6.25h during the pilot.

So what about the 5 to 7 hours? I think that is the range what the pilot accepts as "6-hour" workday measurement, i.e you have to have min-max otherwise you could put everything on two days.

Found in the summary after 12 months slide 8

http://we.gu.se/digitalAssets/1574/1574441_2016-04-21-1445-s...

Left column, the Trial 5-7 hours/day as "ram" (frame, within these numbers, budget)

But in practice the schedule ended up as 6 to 6.25h. I guess to try to be true to 6-hour workday ideal.

Note: working hours in Sweden is regulated to 40 hours/week.

https://www.av.se/arbetsmiljoarbete-och-inspektioner/lagar-o...

New note: one of the political parties behind this pilot, the Left party, calls the pilot "six hour working day/30 hours working week". That should keep it covered!

http://nyheter24.se/debatt/767075-pilhem-v-darfor-infor-vi-6...

They're abandoning it because of an obvious requirement? Did someone not realize that in a 24 hour operation that consists of physical activities, cutting hours would require more people to carry the same workload?

Then again, the hours that were cut also wouldn't have to be paid to the people not working them. In a perfect situation this would have led to higher employment numbers and happier employees. However, the Bloomberg source[1] also mentions that pay was not cut, which led to the overhead costs. You are right that this consequence could've been seen from miles away.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-03/swedish-s...

> You are right that this consequence could've been seen from miles away.

Which is why this is very close to just propaganda against a 6h work day.

I'm commenting on rebootthesystem comment which is flagged and dead. I don't understand why - he makes a perfectly valid and coherent point.

The language used in his comment has no place on Hacker News [1].

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

He was trolling. Look at all the hyperbolic nonsense in his comment.

I think the idea is that costs ballooned more than expected.

That shouldn't be shocking either - each shift change requires people to scrub in, pass on information from the previous shift, and so on - but it's a deeper question than adding new staff to cover the missing hours.

The numbers suggest this is not the case. They needed 17 extra employees for 68 existing staff members. Naively, one would expect that for 68 x 8 = 544 man hours per week, one would need 544/6 = 91 (rounded up) employees. Yet 68+17 = 85, which is six employees less!

Presumably some shifts require managers/bookkeepers/etc not required on other shifts. The overnight shift is less likely to require a receptionist dedicated to walk-in visitors and phone calls for example...

Ouch, I didn't stop to do the math. I had assumed the naive addition turned out to be too small, but this makes it hard to understand what surprised them!

I'd be interested in how long they've had 68 employees for; was it 68 two years prior to the trial, or even 51?

I wonder if there's a balance somewhere here too. Perhaps have employees work 7 hours at a slightly reduced rate.

This trial alone is probably difficult to draw solid conclusions from, other than to say if these employees work less they produce less (albeit not proportionately it seems).

In the US the 8 hour work day was established by FDR with one feature being that it would tighten the labor market (and reduce unemployment) by forcing employers to hire more people.

The lower hours also reduced workplace injuries and provided longer term economic gains [1]. This study is probably too short measure the arguably more important gains that would take a long time to show up.

1: The Rise and Fall of American Growth, by Robert Gordon.

Yeah this sentence was a bit of an anticlimax:

"Preliminary results concluded that it achieved all of these aims, but the city had to employ an extra 17 staff, costing 12m kroner (£1.4m), Bloomberg reported."

Am I missing something because that seems painfully obvious without even having to to undertake the experiment no?

That being said I absolutely love that the Swedish government was willing to entertain such an idea and undertake such an experiment.

My interpretation is that the cost could be calculated beforehand but not the benefit. If the outcome was a dramatically improved care and well-being of patients that saw much shorter hospital stays OR an unanticipated reduction in the need for staff as a knock on effect of shorter workdays, then the benefit might have been considered worth the cost.

I see. That certainly makes much more sense. Thanks.

The experiment was to find any positive benefits. If you look at it from that perspective (as a research project) it makes much more sense. Before we could guess what benefits would result, but now we know.

For those not familiar with the swedish currency: I don't know how they calculated but 12 million SEK is more like 1.07 million GBP.

It was kind of a weird scenario to test this in. Regardless of productivity gains number of hours staff would need to be on hand will of cause remain the same, if nothing else do to regulations. Still there might have been a ton of complaining, had they tested on staff in public administration.

I'm a huge fan of the idea of shorter work weeks, it's obvious that some jobs won't be able to introduce them without cost. Also, assuming Sweden and Denmark aren't to different at this point, there might not actually be enough skill people walking around without jobs to fill in the gaps in the sectors where people are required to be present, regardless to productivity boosts.

It cost the city more, but it saved the national government 4.7 million in unemployment payments.

My utopian society workweek is 4 days/8 hours.

That extra day off would do far more for people than one or two less hours every day. So 4x8=32 hours, vs 6x5=30 hours. I would even bargain for 4 days/9 hours, or 4x9=36 hours.

That third day is huge. It's the difference from having only enough time for some leisurely weekend activities, to having enough time to take a mini-3-day-vacation every week (short flights, etc.).

I'd much rather do 5x6h, I suppose the difference might be if you have small children.

I agree. I preferred working 4x10 or even 4x12 before having kids (while working flexible resturant shift work).

Now that I have kids and work an office job, I would much prefer a 5x6 to a 4x8.

With kids I prefer 4x8 to 5x6 but my wife wouldn't.

> but my wife wouldn't.

Why not? You'd get to spend more contiguous time together.

Maybe she doesn't get to work 4 days a week? I could see that cutting into their together time on weekdays.

Good point. I didn't think of that. Thanks.

You're probably right, if I did have kids I would prefer 5x6h until I shed that responsibility (they leave the house once adults).

But as someone without kids, being able to take short flights or trips every week over 3 days would be awesome.

I guess ideally, since 5x6h and 4x8h are only two hours apart, a utopian workplace would offer its employees either option -- the people who chose 4x8h would make 2h more wages weekly.

I do 40 flexible hours already, so I do a couple of hours in the evening or on the weekend, just to get a 6-7h typical day, to fit the schedule with school pickup etc.

If I wanted, I could work 4x10 (With some sweet talking to a manager perhaps). I'd very much prefer to have 30, 32 or 35h to distribute over the week though, it would make the planning a lot easier. In that case I'd do e.g. 5x6 now that my small children needs early pickup, but I'd go to 4x8 when I have larger children who can bike home from school, so we can go on a weekend trip with friday off.

Having a 4 day work week would mean one day off without kids (they are in school/sitter/day-care) which would be great and would give you tons more freedom just to get things done. Either chores around the house, need to take the car to the shop, visit the DMV, any number of things that are extremely difficult and busy on a Saturday with kids.

Of course, if everyone works 4 days a week and has the same 5th day off that advantage goes away I suppose.

Agreed. Especially when taking commuting into account - for me, one day off means 2 hours less commuting.

During the past year, I've actually started trying this out. I've taken a couple of my vacation weeks and spread them out - instead of taking one week vacation, I've taken Fridays off for five weeks. It's been amazing. Somehow it feels like that extra day counts twice: your weekend gets one day longer, and your work week gets one day shorter!

I guess it makes less sense for a business though: you're probably less productive the longer you work on a same day, and most businesses will still have to work according to the traditional Mon-Fri schedule. 6 hours per day over 5 days might be the right balance.

A large part of the reason I took the job I'm currently working at is the slightly shorter work hours combined with flexible work hours means that I can put in a bit less than two hours extra for four days and take the fifth one off. Do that on both sides of the weekend and your mini 3 day holiday becomes one where you get waaay more time at your destination and more than the travel time even if you're spending a large part of a day at each end travelling.

Hmph. Mine is 2 days / 18-20 hours per day.

Currently working at a digital agency doing 4x8 (32 hours). It works really well for us and the extra day really does make a huge difference with work/life balance. Really huge.

It does mean the week is more compacted and there's less time spent "twirling your thumbs", but it's a much better schedule over all and we continue to produce great work.

I imagine the optimal working day depends on the work one is doing. I used to work 8 hour shifts at Circuit City and leave with plenty of energy. But 8 hours of solid coding leaves me exhausted.

I'm more curious to see the results of Amazon's 30 hr work week because I believe that includes developers.

I believe Amazons program was something like come to work from 10:00 to 14:00 Mon-Fri. The problem with this is that I think it's a lot easier to be pressured to stay longer over the course of a week than if you only worked 3 days a week.

This is why I like Google's version, where you can work on personal projects. You are still around if people need you, but you can work on other things as well rather than burning out trying to work on one thing for 40+ hours a week.

Last I heard that 20% time thing was pretty dead in reality, or that it became 120% time, no?

I heard once anecdotally that google side projects are sometimes "supposed to be work related" so not quite as free as you'd imagine, FWIW...or perhaps they're not dunno never worked there.

I think they are supposed to be work related, but that's still a change of pace. There are things I want to fix at my job that will never be fixed because it isn't anybody's job, and nobody would let you mess around with it because it would be circumventing the normal decision making process. It would be really nice to just say "I'm just trying something out," without needing to schedule an hour-long meeting with 8 people to create a roadmap.

Ouch. I feel lucky to have enough autonomy I can blow a few hours out of a week "just trying something out" without being grilled why I wasted a few hours over it.

If I were being grilled I'd consider a new job.

And truthfully, it is going to depend on the person to at least some extent as well.

IMO, anything that doesn't include being at work as part of your actual job duties should have no number of required work hours. You either get enough work done or you don't. If you aren't getting the expected amount of work done, then you'll eventually get fired. If you can out perform everyone else on the team and work 8 hours a week, so be it(just don't expect to get any brownie points when it comes raise time unless you put in more time).

Things like retail/food service are obviously things that require being at work certain hours so talking about shortening hours for that time of work is productive. For creative work/management/executive work though, I think we should move to a more flexible approach.

When I was in sales/marketing, it was all about hitting your quota. If you were good, your boss didn't care what you were doing as long as you hit your quota every month. It gave the higher performers the leeway to work when they wanted to, and also give an incentive to the average sales people to up their game to be able to do the same.

As a developer, a majority of the companies I worked at there was no incentive to go above and beyond, even at the end of the year in terms of bonuses. Sure, the guy that was burning himself out for that extra 1% yearly raise usually got it, but it never made any sense to me to work that hard for a few more pennies over the year.

Now in my 30's, my attitude is to get my stuff done and stay off my managers radar. My sanity and work/life balance is too important at this point in my life.

your boss didn't care what you were doing as long as you hit your quota every month

Where I work (software/hardware for research) the basic principle is actually not different: boss doesn't really care what I'm doing as long as I'm not unhappy and the stuff which needs to get done gets done in time. Sure there are no fixed periodic deadlines or money-based quota, but the same principle nonetheless. I wouldn't want to work in another way because of all the freedom it gives you. I do see the same 'drawback' regarding carreer opportunities etc but the older I get the less I care. I earn enough money to sustain my lifestyle so yeah I'm definitely not going to work my ass off just to earn a bit more or get a better position, as I know that won't make me any happier anyway.

So here's a question that I continually ask myself as I work at my remote, salaried 6-hour-a-day developer job that I've been doing for the last year:

how do I know how much work is enough?

If I gauge by productivity, that's cool... I'll just be really fast and get my stuff done and then go play banjo or whatever.

But then when folks hand me a crufty WordPress site that is misbehaving and it could be anything between "visit the route that resets the route cache" and "debug three or four broken and unfamiliar JavaScript libraries and their interaction with terrible PHP code" there is a problem, because to my boss those could be the same amount of work.

When I am doing green field work, or working with very nice, clean technology that I understand well, it's easy enough for me to have expectations about how much to do, even (or perhaps especially) when I am dealing with a large, multi-month effort where there is a lot of fluidity in hitting specific goals.

But how do I say "oh, I worked enough today" if I don't have an hourly commitment? I agreed to a certain period of my time specifically because sometimes I look up and have worked 8-10 hours.

I'm the only programmer on my team, by the way, so there aren't a lot of metrics we can pull from about performance.

This is a real question I think about a lot, and I'd be happy for an answer: how do you set a workload expectation with no reference to how much effort or time I am expending when time estimation is difficult?

Absolutely. I don't fully understand workplace cultures (including my own) that claim to care more about "getting your work done" than "hours in a chair." The problem is that output is in many cases a very crude measure of effort. And not just because some people are vastly more productive than others, but also because it's often the case that when reading a bug report, you don't know if the fix will take 3 or 3000 lines of code until it's actually done.

Of course, over time your output averages out, and if you work about as hard as someone at about your skill level you'll have similar outcomes. This works ok for yardsticking at engineer-heavy organizations. Doesn't solve the problem for a solo developer like you though.

And even worse you don't know if the 3 or 3000 line fix will take more time.

Good points... It all depends on who sets the milestones for "getting the work done".

If a sales guy commit more features to the customers than reasonable, do you need to put in more hours to "getting the work done"? Does he need to stick around late till your are done to penalize him also? If a sales guy doesn't make a sale as aniticipated does he need to stick around until he makes a sale and "gets his work done"?

> The problem is that output is in many cases a very crude measure of effort.

Unfortunately, businesses and companies are mostly concerned about output. Does the line below sound familiar?

> I don't care how you do it. Just get it done.

Did you negotiate the 6-hour-day up front or just...uh...you know...work 6 hours, as it were?

I started out as an hourly contractor doing projects for a really good salesperson, and then she bought all my time that I cared to sell (about 30 hours a week), and then we formalized it as a w2 position about 10 months ago.

It's a very small company with doing web dev projects; there's only the boss (who pretty much just does sales), the "Design Dept. Head" out in SF, the "Chief Project Manager" in Az, and me (I'm an hour outside of Austin), plus a couple of off and on freelancers.

TBH, the expectation is mostly that "we get stuff done"; for example I had to meet with a client for a sub-contracted NSF gig on our NYE holiday. Or I have had to fix broken stuff in the middle of the night/ work late to make some magic happen occasionally. That has been rare enough so that, like the once or twice a year I have to travel, it's novel and kind of fun.

But between the limited sales pipeline, higher-margin clientele, and being fairly efficient the formal office hours that I agreed to are easy to maintain.

I play a lot of music, and I suspect that it's very much like being in a successful band would be like (I wouldn't know specifically what that is like, though, I only gig on the weekends at bars).

> and then go play banjo or whatever.

I'm taking this example. This is mine now. Thanks. :)

At least part of most people's job is being available, however. If you work on a team or are even nominally in a support role, you've got to be available for questions, meetings, collaboration, and so on. Very few people at places I've worked in the past have a job that can be easily defined by "I cranked this many widgets, now I can go."

Additionally, the 40 hour week protects people who got a difficult task from being held over. I realize there are stories of working 80 hours a week, but in my experience most people leave at 40 hours, which forces managers and sales people to set realistic delivery dates based on those hours.

I understand the concept of being "available" because my employer has a rule of core hours that one can be expected to be available for questions/meetings/whatever.

At the same time though, sometimes you can learn a lot by not being available. There's documentation that can be written, and sometimes users need to actually read the manual instead of interrupting you to answer a question you've already answered to them three times before.

Sigh. That last one is the worst. Especially if you've written documentation, pointed it out to them before, and been told "I don't have time to read that".

In the article though, the benefits to nurses weren't disputed. It was a success from a quality of life perspective. Costs were the issue.

Possible that costs might vary from role to role, but that's less satisfying if the goal is to improve life.

It also mentioned patient care was improved, which is important because it establishes that the gains went beyond the employees who got two extra hours of free time. That could establish the groundwork for some similar studies in different disciplines where perhaps the costs don't increase in the same ways.

That's interesting. 8 solid hours of coding leaves me wanting to go for a run or go out singing with my friends.

OTH, back when I was paining houses and hauling ladders around all day, I felt like sitting down in front of a computer for the rest of the evening after finally getting home.

Me too; not that I often code 8 solid hours (I take out time to walk in the mountains and cook for instance) but when I anything more than 4 hours solid I have tons of energy. After 3 hours of meetings however, not so much.

> I'm more curious to see the results of Amazon's 30 hr work week because I believe that includes developers.

I hope you're joking, otherwise you don't know Amazon at all. (source: I worked at AWS for six years)

I believe he's referring to Amazon's pilot program for part-time employees doing 30 hour workweeks:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/08/26...

Funny to see this now. I left Amazon about 3 years ago, because there was no career path advancement for fewer hours.

I would've stayed at Amazon longer if at the end of the year instead of paying me more money they would've been willing to just make me work fewer hours.

It doesn't seem like the best type of business to experiment on. It would make more sense in a business where hours worked more obviously is not the same as productivity.

When I read about this in The Guardian way back when, they mentioned three other cases:

Brath

For Maria Bråth, boss of internet startup Brath, the six-hour working day the company introduced when it was formed three years ago gives it a competitive advantage because it attracts better staff and keeps them. “They are the most valuable thing we have,” she says – an offer of more pay elsewhere would not make up for the shorter hours they have at Brath.

The company, which has 22 staff in offices in Stockholm and Örnsköldsvik, produces as much, if not more, than its competitors do in eight-hour days, she says. “It has a lot to do with the fact that we are very creative – we couldn’t keep it up for eight hours.”

Toyota

At Toyota service centres in Gothenburg, working hours have been shorter for more than a decade. Employees moved to a six-hour day 13 years ago and have never looked back. Customers were unhappy with long waiting times, while staff were stressed and making mistakes, according to Martin Banck, the managing director, whose idea it was to cut the time worked by his mechanics. From a 7am to 4pm working day the service centre switched to two six-hour shifts with full pay, one starting at 6am and the other at noon, with fewer and shorter breaks. There are 36 mechanics on the scheme.

“Staff feel better, there is low turnover and it is easier to recruit new people,” Banck says. “They have a shorter travel time to work, there is more efficient use of the machines and lower capital costs – everyone is happy.” Profits have risen by 25%, he adds.

Filimundus

Linus Feldt, boss of Stockholm app developer Filimundus, says the six-hour working day his business began a year ago is about motivation and focus, rather than staff simply cramming in the same amount of work they used to do in eight hours.

“Today I believe that time is more valuable than money,” Feldt says. “And it is a strong motivational factor to be able to go home two hours earlier. You still want to do a good job and be productive during six hours, so I think you focus more and are more efficient.”

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/17/efficiency-up-...

In the Bloomberg story, but not in the Independent story:

"Still, the added hiring by the municipality has helped the coffers of the national government by reducing unemployment costs by 4.7 million kronor during the first 18 months of the trial due to new jobs, according to the interim report."

Something in those numbers doesn't add up. I gather they maintained the salaries. Good. They had to hire more people, at a cost of 12 million kronor. This mechanically reduced unemployment, and saved the state 4.7 million kronor. Shall I deduce the unemployed people were paid 40% less than the salary they got? Something is wrong there: in France, unemployment insurance maintains 75% of the base salary. Saving only 40% looks quite low.

I need a more detailed analysis. If generalised, this would significantly reduce unemployment. We could thus lower the unemployment insurance rates. I've seen predictions this basically balances out: we can sustain the current effective salaries at no cost.

The way this is presented here, this theory appears to be false. Does it? I'm sure we can draw a more definite answer, but this article is not enough.

It could be their first job, they could have been long-term unemployed (you don't get aids forever) or they could have had jobs with lower salaries before.

So far we haven't been able to cure aids.

Pretty sure they meant unemployment compensation or the like.

I think the parent meant: "you don't receive aid, forever"

the costs outweigh the benefits

Well, if you put a low enough price on people's happiness, health, and quality of work, then yes I guess.

Anyway: I hope the people involved in the pilot and happily doing 6 hours shifts now, won't take it too hard if the pilot should be stopped and they're back to 8 hour shifts.

They are now back to 8 hour shifts, as the two year pilot ended with the close of 2016.

The trial was for 68 employees and cost $1.7 million USD (they had to hire additional staff). Imagine you took that $1.7m and spent it on those 68 employees. $25,000/employee would go a long way to increasing happiness with perks etc.

Yes I suppose the real question is would those employees "elect" for a 6 hour day with a 25% pay cut, or not...that would give you something of a feeling for whether the benefits out weight cost, as it were...

As mentioned elsewhere in this message, it depends on the job really. Nursing staff in a nursing home might benefit more from shorter shifts. Someone that is sitting at a desk taking phone calls or entering data might benefit from a bit longer of a day.

I'm more in the latter camp and my colleagues and I have been talking about doing 4x 9.5 hour days and just rotating who gets Friday's off vs the rest of the week. I could easily come a bit earlier, leave a bit later and get tons of benefits from 3 day weekends.

Though I suppose if there are performance improvements, it might be more of a 15% pay cut, or 10% [?]

Sweden is one of the most liberal countries in the world. When they conclude the costs outweigh the benefits I'm inclined to believe them.

The main reason this _very_ small scale experiment seems to be scrapped early is not because of costs, but politics. Right-wing politicians have seemingly wanted to end it as soon as possible for quite some time now - and obviously voted against the proposal from the start as well. And at this time and age, employee satisfaction and health benefits doesn't hold up against screams about costs.

Source on that?

Only in Swedish unfortunately: http://www.gp.se/nyheter/g%C3%B6teborg/sextimmarsprojektet-s...

It seems like the experiment was concluded as planned in the end but they still tried to end it early.

I'd like to see more experiments with a 4-day/8-hour work week.

https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/396527/case-32-hour-...

Agree. Six hours a day seems foolish. All that time getting ready for work, commuting, etc only to spend six hours at work. I'm a much bigger believer in just being closed on Fridays if possible

Somewhat on topic: I work 4-days/10-hours: 2 morning hours from home, commute to the office clears my head, 8 hours in the office, and Friday is free.

Pros:

- three-day weekends all year long

- 20% less commute time

- magically enforces the "Read-only Friday" rule

- if I have to handle an emergency on Friday, it means overtime pay

- Friday is good for running errands

Cons:

- clients/coworkers still work on Fridays, so I can't ignore my email entirely

- occasional meetings happen on Friday

This is probably not a good schedule for everyone, but I have been working it for 2 years now and I like it a lot. Although none of my coworkers are following this example...

Problem for Göteborg is lack of money. Göteborgs economy is one of the worst in Sweden, about 50 billion SEK in debt. City took money from other areas to fund this pilot. This is always going to the problem in a well regulated budget like for a city. Therefore they ended it.

These kind of nursing jobs in public sector is low wage and high work load, no regulation on formal training, but usually some sort of grammar school education. 97% who works with it are women.

What the public employer want to do here is to use the number of work hours, instead of high salary, to attract young people. Thats the long term scheme.

Wages in public sector in Sweden is falling behind private sector more and more. You can get more paid to clean someones apartment than a newly educated registered nurse with proper training from a university gets when signing up for work in the public sector.

Lots of young Swedes go to Norway and work there instead and get much better pay.

This was a bad industry in which to pilot this. There are obviously hard time requirements in terms of when such a facility has to be staffed. Obviously, cutting everone's hours means that other people will have to be hired to pick up the slack. It's hard to believe that no one saw this coming. I'd be more interested in seeing the impact of a 6-hour working day on a business that doesn't function in this way.

So, 1.5 million US dollars over two years (less, if you account for the saved unemployment costs. ref. trynewideas comment), for happier employees and better care. I personally have a hard time seeing this as any form of indication that it's "spiraling out of control".

I agree with other commenters, this smells of politics more than economics.

Unfortunately it may not work due to the politics, but it's one of those things where govrrnment-subsidized research will help businesses down the line. The cost on paper versus real cost is not immediately obvious.

$1.5 million for 68 employees at a nursing home.

I work in a healthcare system with 120,000 employees. Let's say we reduced hours to 6. Using the Swedish numbers, that would cost our organization $2.6 billion dollars, or roughly 10% of annual budget.

The costs are not trivial, I agree. But neither are the stated benefits. I personally value those benefits, even at a 10% premium.

I personally would be willing to have a 10% pay cut to work only 6 hours a day

Unfortunately, at least in the US, going down to 6 hours a day makes you a part time employee, at which point you lose a lot more than even 25% of your pay. Frequently benefits are pared down to the point of extinction, including health, vacation and holidays.

what's stopping you from being a salaried employee that just happens to work 30 hours a week?

Employer expectations of 40-50 hours of work a week, with corrective action as the stick that enforces it.

Yeah, that's true. My point is that nothing is stopping companies from offering 30 hour work weeks and also benefits.

The hope of the study was likely to show a net financial benefit after making the change.

I'm mostly amazed that their nurses are only working 8-hour shifts. In the US, it's common to work 12-hour shifts (but only 3 days/week).

This was in a nursing home, so depending on the level of care, there might only be 1 nurse on staff overnight. They could still be doing 8 hour shifts.

If this experiment shows that the costs are too high reducing working hours, I wonder how UBI could be cost effective.

UBI can't be cost-effective as a living wage. Living wage UBI would cost more than the entire current US government budget.

Some UBI proposals aim to replace all of the current welfare systems with one UBI system that costs the same. (That wouldn't be what happens, but let's consider it for the sake of argument.) Those proposals have to limit UBI benefits to an amount that is below a living wage in order to stay within the budget of the current welfare system, assuming everyone receives the same amount of money (that's the definition of UBI, and any system that gives different amounts to different people is not universal or basic.)

Plus, the government's budget would have to shrink if tax receipts drop, which they would clearly do if lots of people chose to live off UBI instead of working. So even the non-living-wage UBI proposals are probably unrealistic.

UBI seems like a good idea at first, but it seems less attractive the more you look at it.

My own really short story, I (sysadmin/ops/programmer) currently work remotely about 4 hours per day, and I'm way more productive than when I worked 8.

Do you mind expanding on why that is? I hear this often and I'd like it to be true, but I find it hard to believe.

I suspect it's a number of reasons.

- I work to my own schedule. There's no artificial start time. If I feel like I've got something to contribute at any point I sit down and do so. If I feel inspired or get in the zone I'll do 6 or eight hours, if I don't I'll do none, or just a couple of hours.

- Conversely, if I don't feel up to it, uninspired, tired, whatever, I can stop. Taking a break/nap and coming back to something is incredibly valuable.

- I'm so much less stressed than when I was working an 8 hour job. Way more relaxed, so my mental state overall is way better.

- If I sit down and program/operate for 4 hours I spend the rest of the day effectively letting my brain churn on problems. I'm still thinking about the problems that I am working on, I have way more "shower moments".

6 months ago I worked an 8 hour per day job (from home still) and my own personal observation is that I'm way more effective in 4 hours now than I was in 8 at my old job. I feel productive.

This might not work for other people obviously, maybe I just need/like a larger proportion of my time to be thinking time over implementation time.

I agree, working 4 hours a day will feel more effective than the last 4 hours of an 8 hour day, but the question is whether it's actually twice as effective. And perhaps it's so for very high level tasks, but I'm pretty sure for some things you just need to clock in the hours, like closing 100 tiny bugs because you're launching in a few days.

I agree, though a lot of the time what I need to do requires just thinking about stuff, sometimes I need to plough on and just do stuff. 6 hours of coding something, writing, whatever. When that happens I just do the work.

I'm lucky in that I can work the hours I need to work. Last week I did days that lasted 4, 6, 1.25, 1.75 and 4 hours (the 1.x days I had other stuff on).

To be honest I think thats not a nearly throughout economic analysis.

To begin with, as noted in the article by having to pay more people, it removed some from unemployment. That as noted in the article basically halved the cost of the extra cost.

But hold on. Someone removed from unemployment doesn't just sit and look pretty. Unemployment benefits are usually nothing to write home about compared to an actual wage and where previously one could just subsist they newly employed individual could now Consume much more strongly. Consume in this case means buying tomatoes, buying starbucks, buying cinemas tickets, buying dresses and whatever. All this stuff moves the economy.

The question is then, has the economic impact of all this economy moving been taken into account?

Note that "Sweden" did not conduct any 6 hour day experiment.

This was done in one municipal workplace with a few dozen employees.

http://www.snopes.com/sweden-6-hour-workday/

Url changed from http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/sweden-six-h..., which points to this.

Submitters: please don't submit an article that's clearly lifted from another publicly available source. Submit the latter instead. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

What a waste of a study. If they the end result is that they didn't realize the cost up front. I think this is just a poorly written click bait title.

100% they knew the cost. The outcome was :

>The take away was largely positive, with nurses at the home feeling healthier, which reduced sick-leave, and patient care improving.

While we are headed to super automation and the reduction of workforce (And a stagnant or growing GDP) it is either free money for the non-workers or reduced work hours. It's Jetson's again.

If you did the study in the IT-industry. What would the result be if you would measure code commits and code quality for a large sample of programmers with [4,6,8] working hours?

I would think you have to extend that to number of hours worked prior and rest intervals. I am quite sure that a number of developers can put out good code is a short crunch that has long days, it is sustained output that I would like to see.

In general it's difficult to measure the productivity of developers, since the a single commit can mean years of maintenance. Measuring the code quality is equally hard: linting and code conventions will only get you so far, designs need to be reviewed by humans.

In short: http://nesma.org/2015/01/programmer-productivity-is-waste-of...

Maybe instead of automation taking away jobs, people will end up working less hours. This was a reduction of hours without automation, so 17 nurses had to be hired

You absolutely nailed it.

This felt like click bait, it's about a Swedish nursing home - I was assuming this was related to office / tech work as it was high up on HN. It does sound ridiculous that reducing hours mean hiring 17 other staff - I've heard of tech companies being able to handle a few less hours per working week and benefiting from it.

Everyone in the job market needs be on such a roster or it won't work, thus it is not a failure in itself.

If every business was required by law to have a tea lady (or man) per every 50 employees it would not make any business uncompetitive, and would be sustainable, and it would reduce unemployment, and I'd get a cuppa.

I would take a 10 hours day, 4 work days and a three days long weekend over a 6 hours workday routine.

Edit 1: 9-6 is 9 hours -_-

> a 9-6 10 hours day

Everybody would.

Would you take it if the 10 hour day was 8am-7pm with an unpaid hour for lunch, and the 6 hour day was 9am-4pm (with something approaching a 25% pay reduction.)

9-6 is 8 hours + lunch, aka a standard work day.

We do 9-5 or 8-4 and everyone "kind of" take lunch during those 8 hours and managers don't throw a fit about it. Unlike my last employer, where managers were sticklers about covering lunch hour or favored eat your lunch at desk kinda deal. I would be totally fine with a 8am-7pm -- disciplined 10 hours day. I don't have a family, but i can see people appreciating and spending a three day weekend with their kids. Also for young people, this can take the concept of "seekender" to more literal levels.

Here on HN I always read people saying that you are more productive working 5 to 6 hours a day instead of 8. According to the people claiming that, the people who got a 25% cut in working hours should have performed better thus accomplishing the same amount of work. That obviously did not happen.

I think it's different with physically intensive jobs, such as nurses in the trial, and mentally intensive jobs, such as programming etc. The latter may very well end up being equally or more productive, while physically intensive jobs probably would end up with reduced productivity.

Well as another commenter pointed out, they had to hire fewer people than a naive man hours calculation would suggest, so their productivity did increase.

I am under the impression that 6-hour days are widely adopted in France. Anyone know more of it?

This is completely false. French workers (at mid-management level and above - not hourly workers) work long hours. Longer than German and Nordic countries, for example, where leaving at 5pm is the norm and leaving later is more a sign of poor work planning than of dedication.

I think workday hours are similar to American employees, but work less in the weekends and have more vacations.

> French workers (at mid-management level and above - not hourly workers) work long hours.

Why?

Why what? What do they work long hours? I don't know, "culture".

Leaving at 5pm is the norm in Germany only in very particular circumstances. Most people I know are stuck until 18:30 or so.

Interesting. I worked for a multinational, we had a (brilliant) German intern who worked in our FR headquarters, very long hours. Then she moved back to Germany in a local division, where she was always the last one closing the lights, by a long shot. It might be the effect of headquarter vs local company, perhaps, but 5pm is what I saw in most plants in Germany.

stuck? i'm amazed at how negatively most europeans view "work".

Or how positively we view life.

This is not my experience. I work for a French multinational games company and I'm situated in Sweden.

It's astonishingly common for my French counterparts to "arrive" at there computer at 10:30 each day and head out the door shortly before 17:00. Not to mention the 1.5hour or so lunch they tend to take.

This is a sample of maybe 20 people, and maybe it's a culture of the company more than the country, but I've noticed they like to shake hands with everybody on the floor before starting their day, and they also like to take a coffee first and have a chat. For me though, I operate "remote" and when they are not available on Lync/Skype then they may as well be not working because they're.. not.. working.

it is a stark contrast to my team who are jacked in before 9, and save for a few hourly strolls to the canteen and lunchtime do not leave until 18:00. (unless something breaks then we stay, which is common in crunch times.)

I think I work for the same French multinational games company ;-)

I do work with people from both our Swedish and French studios and I can definitely confirm what you said, both ways.

That is 180° to my own experience (CAC40 company) but hey, "company culture" :)

It's essentially a myth [0]. According to the latest stats from the European Commission [1] the French work 40.4 hours/week on average (including paid/unpaid extra hours; excluding meal breaks and travel time), which is close to the EU average of 41.4 hours.

[0] http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20140312-frances-mythic-35-...

[1] http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/tgm/table.do?tab=table&init=1&l...

In theory, it is 7 hours a day (for 35 hours a week contracts). In reality, most office workers are pulling unpaid extra hours.

It's also possible to get 38.5 or 40 hours contracts, where you would get extra holidays to compensate (over a year).

I've worked as a programmer in France, Canada and England. In my experience France and England are pretty much the same in terms of work-time (8 hours/day, 5 week holiday), Canada is behind by lack of holiday (8 hours/day, generally 3 weeks holiday)

Edit: bare in mind this is based on my experience and will presumably be very different depending on the employer.

For the holiday length mentioned, out of curiosity, which length is it?

   5 weeks x (5 days / per work week) = 25 days off

   or 

   5 weeks x (7 days / per week) = 35 days off

It means 25 days off.

Contracts always state the period in days, or hours for part-time workers, but it's normal to divide by five and say "weeks" in conversation.

In France it's 25 paid vacation days or 36 if you include paid public holidays. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b.... 20 paid vacation days is the EU minimum [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive_2003

Nobody works 6 hours/day. Most contracts will be 35h (7 hours/day) to 39h per week.

In engineering/programming/etc. you either have such a contract or often unlimited hours contract (so the only limit by law is something like 72h/week, IIRC), and, in practice, you generally do about 45 hours/week. It doesn't matter if you have an unlimited hours contract or a nice strict 35h contracts: you'll work 45 hours anyway and your 10 extra hours per week will not be paid. And when I say they are not paid, I don't mean they are just not paid more than the regular ones, I mean they are not paid at all.

Only in large traditional companies, the extra hours are counted and either paid or exchanged for extra vacation. But large companies have now outsourced most of the work to subcontractors, which use unlimited contracts or simply do not give a fuck about respecting the laws and are small enough so that there is no union. And anyway, go and try to unionise engineers/computer scientists...

I'm wondering why they didn't begin with 7 hours, if it should have been expected that more money would have been spent. I feel the world is so wrapped in money that we are stuck choosing money over wellbeing...

Probably so the shifts could be organized better. If the nursing home runs 24 hours, it's easier to move from 8 hour shifts to 6 than to find a way for some people to be on 7 hour shifts.

The article is light on details. What "costs" are they talking about?

They needed to employ 17 extra people on top of the 68 employees taking part in the pilot, in order to guarantee the level of service. Which to me is a win (17 people got a job) but it is clearly a cost increase that the employer was not ready to accept.

I think it's not a good business example to test cutting hours. Taking care of somebody 6 hours instead of 8 leaves a 2 hours shortage, which therefore must be covered.

The headline reads: "the costs outweigh the benefits."

Except there's no mention of the greatest benefit: improved quality of life for all participants.

I still miss the days when I was working in a power plant and worked a 40-hour week, over four days. Especially since the schedule was arranged so that the off-days were staggered to produce a four-day weekend every other week.

The only downside was, ironically, on holiday weeks, because the holiday pay was only 8 hours, which resulted in still having to work four shorter days, and often screwing up a long-weekend cycle.

Wow. The sad state of journalism... and of critique from readers at this site.

Obviously bumping salaries by 1/4 is not reasonable.

In order for costs not to outweigh benefits that clinic would need to be some kind of utopia...

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