Belgium approves four-day week
euronews.com
euronews.com
Unfortunately it's a compressed 4 day week, instead of a "proper" 4 day work week (i.e. 4 x 8 hour days, e.g. https://4dayweek.io)
A step in the right direction however
What IS new and interesting is getting employees who work 20% less, AND THEREFORE are 20% more productive (and presumably 20% happier), at the same cost.
That's not remotely true. There's a real stigma about part-time work and most employers would just say NEXT! if you said "please can I work 4 days a week for 80% pay?".
ADDED: Assuming it really is a 20% cut in productivity which, for office workers, probably isn't the case but would be for many others including white collar jobs like lawyers, doctors, consultants, etc.
But thanks to global changes, country by country, this mentality will slowly be changed and finally 4-day week won't be some strange option but a norm.
Then again, I'm just n=1.
I don't know of a consensus, but I've seen many studies where >20% of people self report working ~20 hours per week.
Many studies like this: https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-aver... - say that the average white collar worker only works ~20 hours per week.
There is little reason to believe the vast majority of workers can't keep the same work load with less hours. Sure - maybe 20% or your workers get 80% of your work done - and those people actually do work the full 40 hours (or more). But who's to say they won't continue working more than "required"?
For non-white collar jobs - particularly service workers - I think this is a completely different story. You can't give the same amount of hour-long massages in 4 days as you can in 5. You can't wait on as many tables or work the cash register for as many hours and so on... The thing is - most of these people are paid hourly - so you just need to find more workers (which currently, at full employment, is hard).
If you're trying to push up wages - this seems like it obviously will. I can see why businesses would be against that. But in a world where all wages go up - there's obviously winners AND losers. Not all businesses will be hurt by higher wages. If your labor inputs are a large portion of your COGS and you don't have pricing power - that's bad (traditional restaurants, discount retail). If labor inputs are low - and you do have pricing power (digital services, luxuries) - now you have many more people with higher incomes and more time to buy your products!
To me, this seems like it is good for the biggest businesses and lower-end salary workers and bad for the most common small businesses and upper-end salary workers. But I have no clue how this will turn out. I don't think anyone does, really. But I think it's a very exciting experiment we shouldn't be too pessimistic about.
> Many studies like this: https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-aver... - say that the average white collar worker only works ~20 hours per week.
Another way of phrasing this is that people tend to be productive for 50% of the time they spend "working". It's not self evident that people will still be productive for those 20 hours if the work day was shortened. It could just as easily be the case that people will still goof off for 50% of the shortened work day.
I actually think if I took every Friday off, I could probably hit pretty close to current productivity but I work a pretty flexible schedule and don't have to do a lot of coordination.
40 hours isn't some magical "right" number. It was something that was decided before computers, Internet, global fast communication, etc etc etc.
I think its beyond late for us to reconsider those hours and decrease them.
To answer your question directly: Why would they change what's been "working" for them for decades? The only way we can see big companies change this is if a startup gets really successful and just has this as the norm. That'd create market pressure for change.
Where that market pressure doesn't exist, regulations can play the same role.
They won the 12 hour workday, then the 10 hour workday, then the 8 hour work day and that's when the unions were defanged.
And now the working hours are going back up. I can talk about my country in Europe, that after the 2008 crisis, and due to the increased competition pressure form globalization, many workers' rights and protections were reduced "to increase economic competitiveness", and many professionals, blue and white collar, are now doing more than the 8h/day either willingly or forced by the circumstances of a poor jobs market with little alternatives.
And with stuff like real estate getting more and more expensive, faster than wages are growing, it's tough for anyone but the most privileged, to have the luxury of working less than 8h/day and maintaining a good lifestyle.
We're already kinda seeing something similar in the US. Where a lot of republican voters are part of the "lower class" of society, and their anger is being taken advantage of and translated to xenophobia.
Combating this and creating a fair society is the hardest (yes, including climate change) challenge I see in us going forward.
As examples like recent protests show, the true core are people like business owners and wealthy suburbanites who are very much voting for their interests, not against them. This is also shown by how in every presidential election since at least 2012, voters below $50k always voted firmly in favor of democrats while voters above $100k voted firmly in favor of Republicans.
For the “how”, from l what I’ve been hearing, actual productivity follows a curve analogous to the Laffer curve for taxes, where 40 hours weeks is only the most effective weekly rate for manufacturing jobs in particular, while it’s probably more like 20-30 for intellectually focused work.
I have no idea what the “best” might be for e.g. baristas or bank tellers, where it’s important to have someone physically present even if there’s no actual customer at any given moment.
Clearly some tasks are more like an endless thing that can be mined at, while others are more like you are paying for the availability of some expert. Since people do a combination of both types, the proper compensation for 80% of time should be somewhere between 80% and 100%, depending on the weight.
What evidence is there for an increase in productivity when moving from 40 to 32 hours/week? I believe productivity increases have been demonstrated in some cases for hourly reductions when moving from overtime (say, 60 hours/week) down to 40. This is grounded in two parts - the diminishing returns of working more than 40 hours/week, and the fact that above 50 or 60 people start getting too tired and too focused on narrow tasks to make good long-term judgements. But I haven’t seen studies showing what you’re suggesting, which is a complete 100% reversal of productivity from 32 to 40 hours/week.
The logical extension, of course, doesn’t work. It’s not possible to work 100% less and therefore be 100% more productive or happier. (I mean, maybe happier, but not more productive, right? ;)) And we already know the delta change in productivity for a given delta change in hours depends heavily on how many absolute hours we’re starting with, and also depends heavily on the job at hand. So is the question about what number of hours gives people peak productivity for a given job? Or peak happiness? Or is this just about making sure employment has reasonable limits, and not even trying to optimize productivity?
* Edit: I googled it, and found the story about Microsoft Japan and it’s 4 day work week. I totally remember reading about this a few years ago. Lots of commentary on HN. The claim is a 40% increase when going to a 4 day week. It was measured for only 1 month, and they changed many other aspects (notably, they capped meeting times). Many people pointing out this is likely Hawthorne Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect). Personally, 40% seems completely implausible, which is why I wrote it off and forgot about it. It seems obvious that if that’s true, it means something was going terribly wrong with their 5 day week. Or that this effect isn’t measuring the change in hours at all.
We probably have some shared view that it’s Laffer-curvish without being sure of the shape.
It just seems unlikely to me that 40 hrs is a total system optimum since it was a historical accident. Personally I think it might be 50 hrs/week but it just seems strange that we’d believe that 40 is the peak of this curve.
I would say that 40 hours/week was no accident though. That was something workers battled for hundreds of years. It was the result of a prolonged debate about what is a reasonable work/life balance, in response to widespread employer abuse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day
I’m sure you’re right about 50 for some jobs, but it really depends. There’s a big difference between blue collar and white collar work, just to point at the probably the most obvious distinction.
My own experience with long hours is in film and video game production, where in film we were on a 50 hours per week contract and it went up to usually 60-70 with overtime pay near the end of production. In video games, it was 40 hours a week with extended crunch periods of 80 or even (kill me) slightly more. At 80 hours/week sustained, all life outside of work is over, it’s barely enough time to eat & sleep and no amount of money is worth it. And my productivity went down, I’m certain. At 50 I’m compromising on my family & friends a bit, but I’m probably as productive or slightly more productive than at 40. At 30 hours/week, I feel like I’m barely working, and that meetings burn what little time I have.
When I had my own startup, when I could be flexible with hours and work from home (pre-pandemic), it was probably easier to do 60 hours/week, happily and productively, than when I was working 40 for a larger corporation.
Personally, I find the "societal outcomes" argument much stronger. I personally would like to work less and get paid the same.
Claiming that productivity will increase as hours worked goes down is a big claim that requires big evidence.
Where are these rainbow unicorns who produce 20% more value in 80% of the time?
It's literally more productive for less hours.
The government doesn't know how to run businesses better than the businesses themselves.
The postwar era status quo of people travelling hours each way to their job, then to spend most of it in meetings or in an open plan office (chosen for managerial oversight, not productivity, which is a clue we will come back to) with too much noise to be productive are being challenged (cv19)
The research is clear, most white collar workers report much less productive work time compared to their work hours.
Reporting and data collection in this ever increasing era of cognitively demanding work is becoming far more accurate. In previous times, people's fear of redundancy has caused false overreach of business hours, and competitive presenteeism. Between this, and micromanagerial institutions like the open plan office, there is plenty of activity that doesn't accurately report productivity up to the business. Assuming the business has perfect information here is the fault. There are forces shaping these standards that are beyond the reach of produtivity, cultural normalisation of unhealthiness is rife. Look at China.
The reality is that people spend some percentage of their time being productive. During the day they take coffee breaks, chat with coworkers, check Twitter, etc.
Assume people are productive for 20 hours now. If you reduced the work week to be 20 hours, productivity would go down. There would still be meetings, coffee breaks, etc that eat into those 20 hours. Now people are only productive for, say, 15 hours a week.
I mean, I and most of my colleagues did that when my employer had 4 day work weeks during the summer. Instead of “summer hours” we called it “some of the hours”.
If this is free productivity, why don't companies already do this?
It takes a leap of faith to make big changes like this. Sometimes the decision makers don't have the courage to try.
For instance, there are many companies that have taken the pandemic as an opportunity to enable permanent remote work even post-pandemic. It would have been a massive recruiting improvement to have had that pre-pandemic. (And it was, I worked at a place that was like this). But in the end, it was better to just focus on the business itself. There’s only so many things it’s worth not standardizing on.
As someone who prefers both in-office and more than 40 hrs of work, I find this whole thing interesting
The point of the 4 day week is to decouple the link between output and time. Most employers aren't paying people for 5 * 8 hours of their time. They're paying them for "however much of X work you can do in 40 hours". But, and this is the key point, if tech has moved forward to enable people to do "40 hours of X work" in 32 hours then people could work a 4 day week for the same money that they're earning now.
For a large number of jobs that absolutely is the case, and people sit around wasting 8 hours a week doing very little because they can get all their work done in less time. Rather than them wasting the time, which doesn't benefit you at all, why not just work 4 days? People get more time for themselves, so they're happier, and you benefit from happier, more motivated staff. Everyone wins.
I literally cannot work 9 or 10 hour days.
In IT it makes a real difference as it wiil change from a de facto 50h to 40h. ( You work 50 h but are only allowed to put 38h on the official time-sheet)
For highly-educated jobs where people need 6 months of onboarding and institutional knowledge matters, it's probably more efficient to reduce churn.
That would be lovely. Unfortunately, many places would rather you move job than give you a raise. It's cheaper in their accounts, and that's what (ah) counts.
This is consistent with many studies showing that above a certain level of revenues, money matters less and less, while free time matters more and more.
Since training is expensive, what companies are looking for are people that are willing to work more so that those costs are divided amongst more working hours. And they notice that paying more does not translate in people working more, for the reasons outlined above. A equilibrium is reached when people work the amount that they need to reach a certain comfort level then switch to looking for more free time.
And to be sure, there is no one-size-fits-all answer. What the number is probably depends on the task at hand--though I would argue that (all other things being equal) it's probably closer to 0 than 18 for any job.
Specifically “doing agile” seems to encourage this, I always see lots of supporting infrastructure being skimped on so a new feature can be delivered faster, with some hand wavy plans to fix it in some future sprint.
> I always see lots of supporting infrastructure being skimped on so a new feature can be delivered faster
That's bad management and has nothing to do with agile. Reserve time for bug fixes (or have fire fighting capabilities) and refactoring, include time for tech tickets. ALWAYS. Plan workload jointly with developers, talk to them regularly. It's that easy.
If anyone's interested, I can only recommend "Scrum and XP from the trenches"!
/e: sorry for the long text, tl;dr: have the right priorities to produce good software, agile is not the cause, your shitty management is
Fact remains though that back when everything was waterfall (proudly) and we shipped physical media to clients, when a bug often meant flying a support engineer out to the customer’s office, software was generally delivered more completed and vetted, and the QA group wasn’t allowed to report to the same org as developers because it was considered a conflict of interest. Now some software companies don’t even have a QA organization, we are inventing new organizational and technical structures to ensure that the developers are perpetually on call to resolve issues, and there is definitely a school of thought that says delivery of a complete product is an anti-pattern because after all every feature is just an experiment that you are testing on your users. But whatever, two different times, two different needs, two different practices, and to my point now we seem to be entering a new post-COVID era where just as waterfall doesn’t scale to a continuous delivery paradigm, “you build it, you run it” as practiced today is going to struggle with an “always on” business which has no “after hours” due to more flexible working schedules.
Are there companies today that run true 24/7? Sure, plenty, but they tend to be larger and have the staff to cover this. A great deal of business software today is still very fragile operationally and has deployment, management, and maintenance tied to the 9-5, M-F business schedule. I think it is going to have to evolve.
That's bad management again imho, not tied to agile. I hope you're not working like that! We are a small startup and have a ratio of 2 QA per 7 developers. And QA is kind of outside the scrum process (with more QA resources I could have some integrated and working on new features directly, that would be nice, but you know, money and stuff). We actually run automated end-to-end tests via selenium via CI on every new docker image release on a production-like environment. Plus manual QA.
My point wasn't that "agile" wasn't done right, but that management is shit and it wouldn't even make a difference if you used waterfall or agile in this situation.
Also, > to ensure that the developers are perpetually on call to resolve issues
That's a good way to get rid of your developers lol.
You're points about "always on" business are interesting, but I don't experience it like that. Maybe depends on the country/sector?
I guess that it's quite common situation for office workers, unless they are under strict surveillance and control(f.e. Amazon, EPAM).
(genuine question plz, I have no clue either way)
Without mentioning "work" or "job", the title looks like week in Belgium would consist of only 4 days now: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday.
There are no such days in Belgium anymore.
Do not worry, the construction workers together with all the foreigner workforce will continue working 70h+ per week.
Ofc, this is very foreign to all current running economy models.