A 4-Day Workweek? A Test Run Shows a Surprising Result
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
At the start of 1974 there was a national miner's strike. In order to preserve coal and power all commercial users were limited to 3 specified days electricity consumption in every 7. That lasted 2 or 3 months, and came right after the oil crisis.
At home there were regular power cuts and houses were freezing places illuminated by candle. This is when the UK became very interested in central heating.
From the government's own figures, a 40% reduction in working hours caused just a 4% drop in productivity.
I am surprised there haven't been studies to try and validate that experience outside of of strikes and crises. The government's own study and the result seems to have been silently forgotten.
and
> That lasted 2 or 3 months,
It's quite possible that people 'pulled together' to get through the crisis, similar to how people managed in the war with the 'Dunkirk Spirit'. Just because we seemingly did well through a three month crisis does not mean that is a long term sustainable plan.
Despite living through it, and revising for A Levels by candle light, I knew nothing of the surprisingly minor effect on productivity until I saw a BBC documentary looking back.
It would be interesting to know more about the effects of that crisis. Presumably many companies kept afloat by methods such as using accumulated stock or putting things on back order and such like. If I was ordered to go down to 3 days rather than 5, I’d be running long days if possible, or doing all the things that took a lot of energy on those days. These things are obviously unsustainable but how much did they come into it?
Broadcast TV shutdown at 1030pm, a 50mph speed limit was introduced as was a low max temperature for offices (63F).
Hospitals, food shops and newspapers were exempt. Power cuts were often - but because of the regulations you knew when they were due. My parents collected a selection of camping lamps, a good supply of candles, and a single gas ring to connect to the mains gas point by hose as we had an electric cooker.
I remember much sitting in candle light wearing coats and blankets in the house.
This from a Conservative govt. The dispute and three day week ended when they lost the election to Labour.
A little more here: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.natio...
I don't want to get too embroiled in historical politics here but reading http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/november/6/... gives :-
> 1972: Pay and price freeze aims to curb inflation. The Conservative Government has frozen pay and prices in an attempt to halt spiralling inflation.
and
> Wages and prices had started to spiral out of control after the collapse of agreements between the previous Labour Government and the unions.
> The Conservative Government's moratorium on price and wage increases passed into law as the Counter-Inflation bill.
As tends to be the case one change of Government tries to fix an inherited problem and that generates it's own set of problems.
> moratorium on price and wage increases
Economically the seventies were rather a mess. A wage freeze would be challenging with double digit inflation. I remember power cuts at other times throughout the decade, I think up until the Thatcher govt came in to push back the unions.
This was an extreme situation though, as one of the other posters mentioned revising for A levels by candlelight, I'm sure that's not something we'd want to become the norm.
Although one would need to tally this with worker stress.
Did companies have three continuous days of power?
Also this could mean there was only one day of overlap if two companies were working together.
Quite often there are trivial blocking details that just take a second to resolve, the benefit of experience to provide needed information upfront to ease things through.
Working a full time job, I had gone from my usual "doctor visit every 10 years" to "doctor visit at least once a year", with an added flu or something each year on top of that. So when kid #2 came along, I used the excuse to drop down to 4 day weeks, and once the family was ticking away on all cylinders again I started using that extra day for climbing, cycling, and other "selfish" things. The idea being that this was "my day" and not just an extra day to do errands.
Boy what a difference it made. I haven't had more than a case of the sniffles since. I'm healthier, happier, and get to spend more time with the family.
I've since packed in the job entirely (to live off my business stuff full time) but if I do ever take another full time job, I'll be sure to negotiate 4 (or even 3) day weeks in to the contract. It's just night and day.
However, here in New Zealand one of the most important is the work life balance. Everything is about being happy and enjoy your life.
For this reason, it is quite common the 37 hours workweeks, flexible hours, working from home at least one day a week and go for coffee or lunch when you want...
super cool country actually ;)
It's actually a bit annoying if you care about some project though. If you do, you get quite frustrated by the people who don't care (the majority) and you have to work with them.
A better test would be to announce a 4-day work week, and tell people it's a permanent change. (Of course, if people's productivity drops, and then you go back to 5 days, morale will take a hit.)
> He said the results of Perpetual Guardian’s trial showed that when hiring staff, supervisors should negotiate tasks to be performed, rather than basing contracts on hours new employees spent in the office.
> “Otherwise you’re saying, ‘I’m too lazy to figure out what I want from you, so I’m just going to pay you for showing up,’” Mr. Barnes said.
> “A contract should be about an agreed level of productivity,” he added. “If you deliver that in less time, why should I cut your pay?”
The times I've seen managers worry about time spent it's tended to be someone non-technical. They can't really tell whether the goods have been delivered, so their best proxy is whether the staff are in their seats. Now of course you can sit in your seat and not deliver...
Ok, then a part of my salary should be proportional to the quality of the ideas I bring to the table when I work (which is just as hard to estimate than it is for "tasks to be performed" if you look at our kind of creative industry)
And that's also why some people get paid a lot more than others in this industry. It's impossible to put in more than 168 hours a week, but undoubtedly there are people who make more than 4x the average full time salary.
Working 40 hours a week is too much. "Working" 50 hours a week is absurd. Occasional crunches are ok of course, but as a constant minimum, those are just idiotic numbers, and people who support this sort of work ethic should be deeply ashamed and possibly fired.
Really? What makes 40 hours the magic number? What number of hours a week isn't too much? 30? 20? 10? 1? A few minutes?
How many hours of work is required depends on the job. To say that anyone who supports working 40 hours a week "should be deeply ashamed and possibly fired" is way, way, way too strong a statement. How the heck do you know what is required by every single job?
We've had decade upon decade of substantial increases in productivity since then. Why hasn't our weekly working hours since the 30s ever been reduced?
Apply that to a household and the average family didn’t have 2 parents working 100 hours in paid labour. The typical breakdown was likely a male in paid labour and a female mostly doing household chores. There was about 60 hours per week of household chores in 1900, and that was down to just under 8-15 by the 1980s [1, 2].
The number of hours that are spent at work would appear to have declined for males and females, through when unpaid work is factored in, a household consisting of a male and a female shows a much less dramatic decline. This brings us to a household work week total back at somewhere around 100 hours. Sort of what you said, but sort of not.
[1] Table 7. https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/
Job requirements, especially working hours, aren't part of some natural law. They are set as high as possible by bosses as they can get away with.
Really? How do you propose to support yourself without working? Or do you just mean work is dumb and bad for you, so you'll live off the work of other people?
Original studies were done with factory work. It is harder to evaluate mental work.
I think that's the question that TFA, and parent, and a lot of other people in between, are asking.
The answer tends to be 'because that's how it's been for a while'. Or, if you like, it's what mum and dad taught us, and various governments & employers advocate.
Parent was suggesting this is an unnaturally high number, but you're right that coming up with a replacement number - if indeed that's the best approach - is not as straightforward as just picking another one and making forcing everyone else to agree with it.
> How many hours of work is required depends on the job.
...
> How the heck do you know what is required by every single job?
I think this is a dangerous, though obviously prevalent, way of thinking. That every job currently requires ~40 hours a week to perform is, objectively, a ludicrous claim to make.
It suggests a massively tightly coupled relationship between scheduling, specific personnel, and output.
I'd suggest that's a fallacy because western societies have typically settled upon ~38hr of 'being at work' per week ... and apologists try to work backwards from that number on the assumption it's normal / sensible / just right / tenable forever.
And that's not what I was saying. I was simply suggesting that there might be some jobs where 40 hours a week is needed, since, as I said explicitly, how many hours is required depends on the job. Therefore the blanket statement the post I responded to made about what a proper "work ethic" is, was way too strong.
My point was that this way of thinking requires that the job is done in a certain timeframe, can't be split between multiple people, etc.
It's probably some jobs have genuinely tight timeframes and a focus that can only be satisfactory obtained by engaging a single person to perform the role for short periods, and quite possible some number of jobs are much easier to manage with this thinking.
But given the time, resources, and scope triangle, it's hubris to assume three of those are fixed (and fixed at 40hr/week) in (m)any cases.
No, it's not "hubris"; it's a common belief that, when looked at closely, might not be on the firm ground that many people seem to believe it is. But that doesn't justify a blanket statement that anyone who has this common belief is therefore guilty of hubris, or "should be deeply ashamed and possibly fired", which is how the post I originally responded to in this subthread put it.
To me, it's you and the person who posted "deeply ashamed and possibly fired" who are guilty of hubris, for claiming that your own personal opinion about how all jobs should be organized outweighs everything else.
Very much not what I was claiming.
6 hours would be ideal since you would have time outside work for family, kids and hobbies. It would create a society where people are happier and have more energy, which benefits us all.
Furthermore, you can work remotely.
And also, different people on the same position and with same work have routinelly deferential salaries in all eu countries. It is truly something between you and management.
Do you think that if Bill & Joe find out that John earns 4 time their salary at the same position they will think “oh well it’s only fair, he sorts 4 times as many packages as we do”. Or what if john is paid the same but can leave at 10 ? Do you think people will be happy with that setup ?
That’s one of the reason why piece-work is usually forbidden
2.) Reality is that people are paid differently and it does not causes massive social issues. It causes occasional smaller social issues.
3.) Another reality is that different people stay differently longer - some bare minimum and some have larger overtimes.
4.) Rewarding productivity is not same as rewarding piece work, especially in collaborative complex work.
It is happening right now and I don't see much large issues around it. What I am saying that ambition to reward productivity is better then rewarding but-in-office time which motivates people to hang around office and work ineffectively.
My theory is that all perceived advantages will disappear once we all expect 3-day weekends, ie increased weekend travel lenght/ frequency or intensified efforts at our hobbies could end up draining more of our energy.
For instance a 3-day "work weekend" could make starting and running a separate company or working a 2nd job much more doable. A 4 to 3 proportion in days can easily fit a 32h + 32h double workweek in one. Once that becomes the norm, retribution economics may reflect that, in a way that one-jobers would lose buying power due to an inflated 2-job workers economy.
I feel productivity and work-life balance could be a zero-sum game.
Currently, there's 168 hours in the week in which one could almost theoretically work. Plenty of people do double-job but in reality they tend to be more low-income jobs where people are struggling to get by and need the 2nd to make ends meet. In reality, the majority don't overexert to make more money if their current income is sufficient; only an exceptional minority will do this.
> one-jobers would lose buying power due to an inflated 2-job workers economy
I find this conclusion odd, as I'm not sure what you feel is the issue here. We currently have wealth inequality anyway: it's not ideal/desirable but it's what we have. This wouldn't be a disimprovement (but won't happen anyway as I really don't think being a 2-jobber is as desirable as you make out: there's quite a lot of research to the contrary).
Imagine you had a 2-day/wk job that pays half of what you make in a 40h/wk job. Would you mind having a 2nd job that pays the other half?
Anyway, my point is that having more free hours will change how society behaves and colaborate and how the underlying economics work, therefore eliminating some of perceived advantages of a shorter work week.
Where "half of what you make in a 40h/wk job" ~= (a) enough, OR (b) not enough.
If the answer is (a), then yes, I would mind. I would stick to 2 days.
That answer is not only true for me, research has shown it to be true for the majority of people for a US value of "enough" = $75,000/household (possibly could be updated for inflation/cost of living but the point stands).
You might be in the minority who wouldn't mind—in fact I suspect a disproportionate number of HNers may fall into that particular minority—but it's not true for most of the population.
I have a feeling that employee motivation went up because of the fact that something changed - working 32 hours instead of 40, and only 4 days - rather than the actual new reality which they were placed in.
We tend to enjoy changes all around, especially if they are for our own benefit. And I do think a shorter work week is a step in the right direction. But how long would it take for those employees to get used to the new reality of a 4 day work week, and going back to old habits of working more slowly during those days?
Ideally an experiment would be made with young adults who just started their first job and will land straight into a day work week, and comparing those to the same age group but with a 5 day work week.
The biggest issue was that people didn't like government services closed on Fridays. But instead of doing shifting or trying anything to mitigate that, they simply gave up.
The depressing thing is that this pattern happens over and over, be it remote work, work hours, work days, work dress, or a million other things. Society just "pins" normality arbitrarily then keeps returning to that.
[0] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102938...
We need to automate a lot more of the public and financial sectors than we currently do. As long as a significant portion of work needs to be done face-to-face, there will be pressure to synchronize everyone's working days and hours.
In order to utilize shifting in a typical government office, you will need to train a lot of people to perform many different tasks involving many different laws, and come up with new procedures to assign clear chains of responsibility. Especially if the shifts are as complex as you describe. Utah might have decided that it's not worth the hassle.
Besides, if you could simplify and streamline a task so much that any on-duty employee can handle it, you might as well automate it all the way. In other words, tasks that are well suited for shifting also tend to be well suited for automation. The only exceptions are 24/7 jobs such as the police and emergency services.
I agree that shifts are often not possible.
A flexible four day workweek would help a lot with this. Got Tuesdays off? Find a dentist that's open then.
I am most curious about the meeting reduction. Were the previously longer meetings containing inefficient communications that were replaced with efficient ones? long debates that no one had the desire for anymore? wandering conversations that were curtailed? completely pointless stuff that simply vanished? How did the meeting runners handle their diminished role?
This would take a ton of process maturity, but I’ve seen that level of maturity a couple of times. I think it could be done.
Thinking about a spouse? Kids? Hell, friends? A dog? See how much they appreciate how inconsequential your choosing work instead of them is.
What are you here on earth to do?
John Calvin is dead and gone. So is the Bushido Code. Nobody is waiting around handing out big rewards for your personal sacrifice. And it is a sacrifice. What are you getting for it? Not what are you hoping to get, what are you actually getting? If that answer is enough for you, great, if it isn’t then you need to back up a bit. Those midlife crises can be a doozy.
"You haven't taken vacation? Nah I can take it whenever! It's not big deal! My team needs me and I love my job!"
I believe he was referring to it can be dangerous to view your work as something you love. Make sure to give space for your loved ones and your own free time and be conscientious of that. Naturally, your company will do it's best so that you do love your work, but understand there is more to life than that.
Most businesses are run in a very 'cargo cult' manner, where the managers and executives still read books written by manufacturing magnates and then turn around and apply the same practices (or close facsimiles like tribespeople crafting 'headphones' with coconut halves) to their own companies. There is vanishingly little actual thought that goes into it, or consideration of the constraints and principles. Manufacturers found it beneficial to makes as much of their process routine and checklist-driven as possible, so modern companies blindly try to do that too. They don't realize that with mental work (whether something like software development, marketing, sales or art creation or much else that now dominates) this is actively destructive. No one pays a company to do simple checklist-driven routine thinking for them. When it comes to mental work, customers want novel solutions to problems. They want something that hasn't been done before. Every time. If you do manage to reduce your product to the outcome of a checklist performed by disposable workers... you've successfully destroyed the entire value of your product.
When a company is built, they hire workers. Workers are human. This places restrictions on the company. They have to install bathroom facilities. They have to offer breaks for lunch. These aren't just legal requirements, they're necessary to get good performance out of human workers. Being annoyed with the restrictions born in human nature and seeking to squeeze workers at those points is counter-productive. And humans have limitations to their mental capacity as well. These aren't rigidly defined and understood yet, and there will certainly be further development of our understanding as we go on, but we do know a good bit already. Extended periods of mental exertion are counter-productive. Given the cost of poor performance in most mental work, it would be wise to guard against this. Humans can not multitask mentally, as our brains facilities for attention simply do not permit it. Mental work suffers in environments where people are subjected to interruptions, and where they are continuously concerned with preserving social status and similar factors.
Socially we have a long history with notions of endurance and vigorous exertion being identified with virtue. That was very socially useful when dealing with physical labor. It is, however, very destructive when dealing with mental labor. Likewise, extroversion was very socially useful when dealing with collaborative physical labor projects, while introversion is far more useful when dealing with mental labor projects because significant portions simply can not be collaborative. (A systems design might well be collaboratively created, but once decomposed into manageable portions it becomes counter-productive to pile many people on a single manageable portion. They end up spending most of their time trying to synchronize everyones mental model of the same thing.)
What would surprise me is if experiments like the one described in this article actually resulted in any significant change to most companies. We literally have over 1,000 studies establishing the productivity-destroying nature of open floor plan offices, for instance, but they continue being used. Different excuses are always proffered (reduced expense, some people wrongly guess it would make them more productive in defiance of all research, etc) but they never compensate for the costs. In reality most of it is done because 'everyone else is doing it' or 'this is how its been done before.' So, research is great but implementing it is an entirely different story. Few are courageous enough to defy social convention and stick their neck out trying something new that is not intuitively obvious (from an intuition developed out of a manufacturing-driven working world).