Unilever to try out four-day working week in New Zealand
reuters.com
reuters.com
Unilever said all 81 staff members at its offices across New Zealand will be able to participate in the trial...
I'd be curious to see the results of a trial involving thousands of employees. Some subset of 81, though... almost meaningless.
There's a tremendous inertia when it comes to work weeks. The five-day is locked in pretty firmly in the developed world, and a company that tries to change that risks getting out of synch with suppliers, subcontractors, and partners. "Today's Thursday. Our office is closed on Fridays, so we'll have to schedule that call for Tuesday, because one of our suppliers is closed on Mondays."
I mean, they can try it, and employees might like the extra time off, but it might well slow things down and ultimately result in commensurately lower salaries and bonuses.
Perhaps you could run one at your company?
Absent that experiment, this is the one that Unilever is running for everyone in their offices within one country for a full year.
Consider the wonderful Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics [1] and how it applies to any kind of experiment or well-intentioned initiative, when presented to 'people that know better'.
> The five-day is locked in pretty firmly in the developed world, and a company that tries to change that risks getting out of synch with suppliers, subcontractors, and partners. "Today's Thursday. Our office is closed on Fridays, so we'll have to schedule that call for Tuesday, because one of our suppliers is closed on Mondays."
Well, a) just because it's common doesn't mean it's good, or that it's still relevant, or that it's healthy, or that it's ineluctable.
b) there's no suggestion with ANY of these trials, or any organisation already offering part-time work for their staff, that they shutdown entirely for one or two days per week - rather, their workforce is spread over the (for now, common in the west) five weekdays, with varying personnel engaged. If you think organisations that are looking to reduce working hours for their staff are assuming the company is going to operate on a 4-day week, then you may have misunderstood the intent.
[1] https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...
Which brings up an interesting reality of our time, that a push to bring about sane changes is coming from companies and not the workers (which could sadly be caused by the fact that workers have been utterly wing clipped in our hyper competitive economy to ask for anything at all).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day
^^ That came about in America because average people were fighting for it. Our new changes in remote work or short work week is oddly coming from ... god knows where. What incentive does the company have here? Someone has to follow the money to find the truth if companies are the catalysts for these initiatives.
I have a hunch that if a company is behind the movement, the end goal is to simply cut the reliance on labor and cut staff or freeze hiring.
This potentially wishful thinking may end up being proven wrong, but ultimately what we all have going on now simply isn't tenable over the next 10+ years, so any and all kinds of experiments are probably a good thing.
One possible explanation is to reduce labor costs while still keeping around key workers (and their irreplaceable institutional knowledge) most of the time.
For example, there is little point in keeping an old and experienced technician on full pay 5 days a week, when you know he's mostly overseeing others and fixing the occasional issue; might as well put him on 4 days, saving a day's wages (or moving the equivalent of his net wages to tax-efficient pension funds), and sell it to him as a quality-of-life improvement. Overall productivity is probably the same, but costs have gone down and morale up, as s/he moves towards retirement.
Or take a smart developer. Instead of haggling over 20% time, unofficial side projects, conference talks etc, sell him an extra off-day that is paid as a half-day.
Amateur athletes? HR people? etc etc... I mean, modern offices have people dedicated almost exclusively to organizing silly group activities; there is plenty of spare time that can be cut, to everyone's benefit.
I would sign tomorrow.
Not taking away anything from your point, just pondering the implications of shifts like this in the economy.
Edit: I also want to add that many people in the service economy literally fight for extra shifts. The only hopeful outcome from these types of moves from companies is if they genuinely maintain salary and headcount amongst white collar workers. We have watched the blue collar economy get fleeced over and over and it’s important we remain vigilant against companies bearing perceived niceties. The incentives just don’t align.
That might be true at the same time as the realization that they are increasingly struggling with loss of knowledge on employee turnover, since they rely on complex systems more and more.
> I also want to add that many people in the service economy literally fight for extra shifts.
Anything shift-based already works under custom rules most of the time. Where trade-unions are a thing, for example, they often reduce working times "in solidarity" to avoid layoffs, it's been the case for decades. Or they do week-on-week-off etc etc. I don't expect those areas to significantly reduce their hours across the board, at least not until it's normalized in white-collar sectors first.
> The incentives just don’t align.
I am as suspicious of the owning classes as the next guy, but it's not unusual to see the most enlightened industrialists trying to find a better balance for all parties in the equation. See for example XIX-century mill-owners building entire towns out of their own pockets, including schools and community centres, because it benefited them in the long run as much as the workers in the immediate.
I am not particularly suspicious of intentions here, but rather skeptical that it can work piecemeal. France tried something like that in the '90s but got weak-kneed when it came to enforcement, which means it didn't work in practice and got watered down into irrelevance very quickly (I don't know if it was eventually scrapped entirely).
Last week I was surprised to find our engineering team in our Washington DC were all out of the office on the Thursday, I needed a remote machine repowered.
Friday is a bad day when you work with the Middle East. I believe some countries work Saturday-Wednesday and have Thu/Fri off
Of course right now in New Zealand it's 3AM on Tuesday, but it's 6AM on Monday in LA.
We somehow manage to cope scheduling meetings.
Sounds like your company's bus factor is too low. This is such an obtuse and presumptuous observation. How do companies open 7 days a week exist when the work week is 5 days?! Just because your employees only work 4 days doesn't mean the company is only open for business 4 days. You can shift your employees in such a way as to avoid these pitfalls. Use your imagination a bit.
It’s not that hard to adapt to.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/02/no-downside-ne...
Oh wait that’s basically the normal arrangement isn’t it
Though I have noticed a dramatic shift in companies offering WFH for 2 days a week etc.
Speaking personally, over the years I probably wasted 10,000 hours... sitting in an office in the late afternoon, waiting for silicon valley traffic to clear enough to go home.
Why are some professions doing a shift? Does your software open at 8am and then close up for the night at 5pm? If so, then yeah you need shift workers. If not, then please, just stop it.
And probably all that use such a webopac system
The shifts are good for you, because they limit the times when work can command your presence and force businesses to hire multiple people to staff the day. Remote work is already showing the flaws of the reverse, because now people have issues separating work and real life since there is no clearly modeled time delineation any more.
Companies have found that it is much more rewarding to keep workers working 40 hours (in Europe) or more (many parts of the world, including the US) or more, and to translate the productivity gains into bonuses for top management, dividends for shareholders and increased share prices (for shareholders and top management) [1].
Without the necessary regulation, this process will not be significantly altered either, in my opinion. I firmly believe that hardly any (large) company will be prepared to significantly improve conditions for employees without external pressure - at the expense of shareholder value.
For example, it is perfectly normal for a company like Accenture to pay a 10% higher dividend for the past fiscal year, while dismissing 5% of its employees worldwide. We don't even have to dream of wage increases for employees in the 10% range here. And ACN is just one example because I happen to know the numbers right now.
What company increases its employees' wages by the same amount as it increases the dividend for shareholders? I hardly know of any company that does that.
[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=development+productivity+wages+us&...
And, what this would mean in comparison with other employers (i.e. comparative salaries, etc), we could think about whether we can speak of an (ideal) free market. To do so, the possibilities to change the company as well as the actual profession would have to be transparent and open.
In addition, most theories on the free market also assume rational actors. Which has been sufficiently refuted as a model of reality.
But even this would not be the problem if the basic assumptions above were fulfilled. But in most cases they are not. I do not know what the colleague next to me earns. I don't know how much ROI my employer gets with my work performance and I certainly don't have the chance to get analogous data to other companies in the market. In addition, as an employee I am also very much tied to the local area due to family situations and therefore cannot act like capital on the free market worldwide.
All in all, in this "game" of the employee is always the weaker market participant - which is why, for example, there are facilities and institutions in consumer markets that protect the consumer, because there is an imbalance in information.
For this reason there is (at least in Germany) state intervention in the employee market just as there are trade unions or works councils. There are analogous instruments in many markets worldwide - to create a counterweight to the imbalance of information and power.
It would be especially possible if you lived similarly to how average people did in Keynes' day: e.g. smaller housing, limited car ownership, home cooked meals, simple hobbies. The beauty of it is you still can take advantage of new tech because it has become so cheap.
In terms of reward, this is like a 25% raise. Imagine getting a raise of 25%.
I'm interested how much the raises the past ten years were. Is this a big thing, or is this an overdue raise for the past ten years.
Will they compensate the lost labor with new hires? If not, you could also see it as Unilever firing 20% of its workforce, and it could indicate something has gone wrong with their business (I know, corona is probably the cause, but what if it is something else).
Initiatives to work smarter sound promotional. It sure sounds better than 'our sales people have nothing to do during corona'.
Overall, I would be happy to have more free time.
I believe this is lip service. They will still ultimately expect 40 hours of work to be done in 4 days, regardless of what they say now. I'd rather stick to 5-8s, so I have some personal time in the evenings.
Perhaps for some reason that I don't quite understand people get more (or an almost equalivent) amount of work done in four days as they do in five, but if not, this is just going to result in lower wages.
If you work a 6 hour day or 10 hour day instead of an 8 hour day, do you have more or less output as a developer? If you're a sysadmin, what's more productive, the admin who automates everything and sits there on call in case something breaks, but otherwise watching TV or riding a bike, or the person who spends weeks doing repetitive work which looks busy but leads to a far worse outcome?
At the risk of sounding trite, I suspect a hundred years ago some people were wary of the 5 day week too, and yet here we are, for the most part, enjoying <sic> the arrangement of two days off per week.
> Less production will result in less revenue.
I gather the intent is that there won't be 'less production', and consequently won't be less revenue.
And/or perhaps the reduction in production won't be linearly correlated with the reduction in revenue.
> Companies are only going compensate employees for value of their labour, so less labour will eventually mean less compensation.
As with any large multi-national organisation, examining the remuneration of the exec layer may reveal some disparities with how profit is shared, and there may be some interesting options to explore there.
> Perhaps for some reason that I don't quite understand people get more (or an almost equalivent) amount of work done in four days as they do in five, but if not, this is just going to result in lower wages.
Consider that Unilever, a company valued at around $150b, likely has people that have already thought out the implications and risks of this plan.
Don't be. Working time has been declining for a century (especially in Europe) while GDP grew.
Depends if you're talking per individual or per household.
Whether this is a net positive or net negative is basically boils down to whether you think people are better served working outside the home or better served doing household things.
Also, all your comments are dead by default. You might want to make a new account.
My theory, at least with software engineering, is that we all struggle with burnout. You can spend 40 hours "in the office" per week, but as you get burned out, the amount of value you add in those hours decreases. If you take a day where you don't open Slack or think about work, then you reset some of that burnout, and your next 32 hours will be significantly more productive than 40 would have been. (You can probably measure it sometime. Look at the 40 hours before someone goes on a two week vacation, and look at the 40 hours immediately after that vacation.)
This isn't data, but my team has one person taking every Friday off. We do Thursday-Thursday oncall shifts, and outgoing oncall takes Friday off. I haven't noticed any change in productivity from myself or our team since we've implemented this policy. One person-day per week doesn't matter much; there is probably some tiny and low priority task that doesn't get done as a result. But the important stuff keeps happening, and the team is in a better mental state the rest of the time.
I don't think that 32 hours of software engineering per week would look a lot different than 40 hours of software engineering per week, averaged on the scale of months or years. 40 is an arbitrary number that has nothing to do with the mechanics of thinking about software, or even the typing-in of software. It's probably worth another look. (I have no idea how it translates to other fields.)
If you visit any Unilever factory you will find they are heavily automated. They really don't need many staff to run.
The value creation in these sort of businesses has been shifting to knowledge workers for some time now. It would be foolish if Unilever and similar companies didn't start questioning all their traditional working practices.
Ironically, the free lunch, is an actual example of a free lunch in economics that does exist (The free lunch was in olden days, where bars would provide a free lunch. This endeared it to its customer base driving traffic back for evening drinks. The cost of the free lunch was much less than the profit from the extra alcohol sales, resulting in $$$ for the bar)
As far as a 4 day work week goes, there are tons of factors. Maybe the worker is happier with lower wages and more time off (i could make more money if i worked 80 hours a week, but i don't because the cost to me is more than the value of the extra mo ney). Maybe people have similar levels of production for 4 day work weeks. Maybe there's not enough work to employ everyone for 5 days but is enough for 4 and they think that is a better trade-off than laying peolle off. Maybe 4 day work week is non-monentary compensation that allows the employer to attract better talent. Etc.
If Americans were compensated for the value of their labor, the minimum wage would be around $28/hr.
Labor is paid the 'going rate'. Whatever the employer can get away with. That's all.
Btw the work week in America used to be 6 days, 12 hours a day. Went to 5x8 - didn't change pay much.
The country consists of two islands, the North and South. The North is warmer and the South colder, especially when you go to the South of the South island. New Zealand is extremely diverse in nature, you have everything from tropical jungles, to sand dunes, volcanoes, glaciers and amazing mountains. The North island is more populated than the South, but in comparison to the US or UK the whole of New Zealand is very sparsely populated. The country has more sheep than human and is geographically extremely isolated when you think that the closest neighbour is Australia which is a 4 hour flight and even Australia is extremely isolated when you compare it to an international melting pot like the UK. Like with everything in life this has pros and cons. Overall it's a beautiful place to be, stable and good economy, great work/life balance, amazing outdoor opportunities and a friendly culture. If New Zealand wasn't so far away from everyone else then I'd consider moving there myself, but not being able to quickly jump on a two hour flight to see old friends and family is a huge problem, especially when people get older they seem to value their relationship to friends and family increasingly more.
Nobody's moving to NZ now, but covid will be over in a few months and it will be back to normal.
(To the poster upthread asking how it compares to the UK: I only spent ten days in New Zealand, but I thought it was great. Sort of like the Lake District here, but on a vast scale. I also recommend the beef and cheese pies - a lovely healthy snack.)
With timezones as well, NZ takes 36 hours.
But both of those are intercontinental trips
2 hours from London will put you in a dozen different countries
4 hours will get you anywhere in Europe, as well as Cairo, Morocco, Turkey, Jerusalem
8 hours will get you to East Coast US, middle east, India, and even the north parts of sub-saharan africa (Kenya, Nigeria, The Gambia)
12 hours will get you to the Carribean, the West Coast US, and much of the Far East
2 hours from Aukland will get you to other parts of NZ
4 hours will get you to Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and the Great Barrier reef
8 hours will give you a choice of a few pacific islands
12 hours will get you to Singapore, maybe Hong Kong
There's a lot more choice to see the world out of Europe.
The northern tip of New Zealand is the same latitude as Sydney Australia, but because the country is relatively narrow (east-west) the climate doesn't have the variability that you get along the comparable latitudes of AU.
No matter where you are on the planet, you're a long way from 'most everybody else' - it depends if your criteria for happiness are proximity to a vast number of people you don't know, compared to low cost of living, healthy environment, sane governance, low population density, good soil, gentle climate, etc etc.
When I was a teenager I hated that aspect and considered it a bug.
Now I'm in my 30s and have enough experience of the world, I love that fact and consider it a feature.
You dont realize how far away from everything it is. Sure there are the 12 hour flights to anywhere except Australia, but also the jetlag, opposite seasons from the North.