Companies ran an experiment: Pay workers their full salary to work fewer days
npr.org
npr.org
It just feels to me like some sort of secret we all share and pretend like it's fine, but being honest and just doing the same stuff in say 32 hours and cutting out the cruft in between would be great.
Or maybe it's just my add that likes a bit more pressure, I don't know. But what I do know is that, even with a very relaxed employer that allows you to take your time and chill, go workout or play a game for an hour, I can't fully relax or disconnect knowing that I'm expected to do those 40 hours, regardless of how often they say it's fine.
Even years ago when I was in the office, everyone would go on insanely long lunch breaks on Friday instead. If you work an office job, I can assure you that the number of people actually working on Friday is statistically irrelevant.
> In October, the average workweek for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls was 34.5 hours for the fifth month in a row.
I see the report calls out part time workers at 3.7m yet still I wonder.
A UK company did a study which showed the average office worker, who is in the office 40 hours a week, is only productive for less than 3 hours a day.
https://www.vouchercloud.com/resources/office-worker-product...
I would guess the average workweek, only counting the time people are actually productive, is 10-15 hours a week. The rest of the time people waste procrastinating, posting on social media etc.
What if at least part of the 20% is spent doing social activities, water cooler conversations, etc. that enable the remaining 80% to flow more efficiently?
It's foreplay but for work. Forework?
Most people structure their days based on what they want to accomplish (goal driven), rather than how to spread out work evenly across a fixed number of hours (time driven). So if someone knows that they are expected to deliver task A + B in one day then they will do it. If they have a 4 hour work day they'll do it in 4 hours and then happily clock off. If they have to do it in an 8 hour work day they'll do it in 4 hours and then waste time for the remaining 4 hours.
Also, when we consider capacity to focus instead of just time spent at work, I think normal rate is 2 focus bouts of 1.5h each per day. You can get to 3 if you train, but not much more. (I got this from Hubberman's lab podcast, not sure what's the underlying research)
So if you decrease work time to 5h, you give 2x bouts of focus + 1h break between bouts and have 1h left for marginal stuff/meeting.
Maybe going up to 6h would allow for the extended stuff (email, meeting, discussion, lunch) But I feel like 8h just create a world where you need to waste time in the end, just because of physiological concerns.
At my previous startup we saw an 8% productivity _increase_ from moving to a 4-day work week, and this was across a variety of metrics like issues closed, lines of code, etc. We don't even know if 4 is optimal, it could be 3. Only way to find out is to try it.
Maybe they were burned out from the extra hour of the previous days, but considering the Thursdays of the remaining 5 day weeks didn't display this behavior, I doubt it. Now there was the complication that once management saw a dip in productivity, there was a near mutiny at the mere suggestion of going back to a normal workweek.
The implication is no matter how long/short the work week is, people will adjust to make the end a slack day.
This seems to land in the area of untested hypothesis. Sure, we can speculate on all kinds of mechanisms. I could speculate that by going to 3 day weekends would lead to a bigger "rejuvination effect" and more productivity. But the data gathered from my org showed the opposite. Productivity went down. And now management had a lot of pushback to just get back to their baseline (more productive) schedule.
Now I'm willing to concede that it's going to be different industry to industry. It may very well work well in SWE and I think we see a lot of that bias in tech-centric circles. I also think it’s an error to assume it holds for most industries. My example was from an R&D area and not strictly software engineering. Do you, for example, think your doctors office would have more patient throughput if they went down to 4 eight-hour days? Or manufacturing? I'd be skeptical until I see the data. And I concede that a lot of work cultural differences also matter. And leadership matters. My original post was not claiming some definitive answer, just giving some pause to the sentiment that reduced hours is a generalizable rule to increase productivity*. I think a lot of people let their cognitive biases get the best of them and run with the idea.
* I also think "productivity" is the wrong way to frame the problem. Some things, like work-life balance, are a net good and worth a hit on productivity. The economy should serve society and not the other way around.
I mostly agree with what you're saying, especially about going across industries, but I do believe it is quite easy to lower productivity, regardless of the industry, by dramatically imbalancing work-life balance. Put another way, having good work-life balance is a net good, partially _because_ people with good work-life balance are more productive than people who are burned out.
Your medical doctor isn't going to be very good at diagnosing patients when he's in his 140th working hour of the week, if he were to attempt such a thing (with ~3 hours of sleep per night and no time off other than that)
This is actually what I'm pushing against. I don't like productivity being a primary principle. I'm saying it's worthwhile irrespective of the impact on productivity. (the use of 'net good' was a bad choice on my part because it implies a balancing act).
It's quite common for healthcare workers (particularly surgeons) to work extremely long hours, but that's being re-thought in some areas (esp. in regards to residents). To your point, though, I think a lot of the rethinking is driven by trying to reduce medical errors. It's more related to quality than productivity, but I don't think they can be easily parsed.
They will work more than 80%, less than 100%, say 87%. And that is what you want: keep some off time for conversation, recovery, etc..
You don't want 100% (very short hours) and you don't want too low a percentage (long hours). There is some balance in between and no slippery slope.
Given humans are highly adaptable I imagine we will adjust to the new normal and keep finding time to mess around at work.
White collar work, is of course, way worse. There is a lot of slack time in between tasks and meetings and so on.
So during those 40 hours, let's say a person delivers 100 work units. If we were to say, from now on you only have to work 32 hours, some people will still deliver 100 work units, but many will deliver an approximation to 80 work units. Many people will automatically adjust. People have a "pace of work" that is like breathing.
Perhaps in manual labor, but I don't think this applies to white collar work. The limiting factor in output for this line of work seems to be intellectual exhaustion/burnout, not pacing.
Personally I assign development to more of a "creative" role than a lot of people tend to. Your productivity can often depend on your inspiration, moreso the more senior/architectural your role is.
I've certainly had moments where I accomplished more at one 3am moment of clarity than an entire week before - and I think most experienced developers can say the same.
My “work hours” in my pay slip say 75.8 for every 2 weeks. I work maybe 50 hours in a busy week. It is irrelevant to my organization. So we are already there in terms of intellectual white collar work.
If the company cared only about getting certain amount of work done in the time they paid for, they would hire an external. And continuing the analogy, it's usually more expensive in the long run to rent a tool even if you use it only a couple of times a month, as well as having to get used to unfamiliar equipment, having no records of how well the rental tool performed earlier.
I'm so happy to be out of the office. Being able to work whenever works for me (and my ADHD brain) has probably given me at least 50% more output on average. Hours don't mean anything to me and nobody has ever complained about my work pace (rather the opposite).
Pretending to be busy in an office was torture.
Wish the promise of "Salaried means we pay for the job to be done" ideal was more of a reality.
She Has collapsed before when total was getting above 80 for several weeks.
They want to promote her to VP. They work even more hours then she does.
I make more then triple what she does.
This part doesn't make sense to me, can you please explain (I'm genuinely asking). My children are in elementary school, and the day is from 8:45-2:30. I can understand being there at 8am(i definitely have seen teachers showing up later than this though), and when I've driven by the school at 3pm nearly all the cars are gone from the teachers lot (if not all). I can understand that there's a lot of work outside of school, but I don't understand how you could ever get to 60 hours at school.
Before: you take a stack of papers, and go through each one with a red pen.
Now: you log on a system, wait, click on something, wait, click on something else, wait... the stupid tests are auto-graded, but chances are there is still something you have to grade student-by-student, and that's now slower to do. Plus, obviously, the usual annoyances (got to update this, got to reboot that, my typing is 5WPM, etc etc).
You know, if someone wants to write The Next Great JS framework, give me one that above all else prioritizes latency and expert-level usage. There's no fundamental reason we can't have most of the nice things from the modern graphical web, and get to the legendary efficiency of those text-based consoles... but it will take some work and thought. (For example, you're going to need to insert yourself in between the user and the browser's concept of events, so you can buffer up commands the user is typing while their target hasn't quite loaded yet. This is one of the fundamental reasons why GUIs are less efficient than TUIs, though by no means the only one.)
This framework won't take over the world, but it sure would save a lot of people a lot of time.
Sooooo tiiiiirrrrreeeeed of programs that take seconds to do every... little... thing!
I remember having to use educational software in college for a discussion board and it was terrible and sucky. I could only imagine what the teacher end of it looked like.
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For a comedic look at how this affects teaching, the new comedy show Abbott Elentary has an episode on this. It’s like Parks and Rec but at an inner city Philadelphia public school.
Until 2011, my local school district was using a DOS-based attendance and grading system. No GUI.
In 2011 they switched to an internet-connected system that looked like it was built on Windows 3.1. Non-resizable text fields. Inability to tab from one field to the next. A tiny non-resizable window that you had to scroll manually with the scrollbar to enter data in all the fields, so to enter attendance for a whole class you had to scroll left and right with the mouse for each child.
It crashed every morning for months. Teachers would coordinate with each other to ensure they didn't overload the system.
My wife’s school is big on community, which is great in some ways but leads to long days with staff expected to attend dances, games, etc.
My dad was up at 6 and at school for 7am. Worked 7am-3pm (8 hours). He did marking for an hour or two most evenings, and a solid chunk on the weekends. Probably 50 hour weeks. And that's after 20 years of teaching the same classes, so he had all the materials.
My ex-wife was brand new to teaching so had to develop curriculum on top of this. She worked 7am-5pm every day plus weekends.
Calling parents, dealing with kids with special needs, developing curriculum, marking, department meetings, making lesson plans, running extra-curricular activities or clubs, private lessons, doing paperwork or photocopying, etc etc, it all mounts up. There's a lot of behind the scenes work.
Now, some teachers simply don't do this. You can easily skate by, work the bare minimum 6 hour days, and not give two shits about the kids. But most teachers care about children and education (I mean, you don't become a teacher for the money).
Bezos has given interviews about his habits. He works maybe 10-20 hours a week.
Billing 40 hours every week to run scripts that generate a Github repo structure in minutes has been profitable for me though. Not going to knock Musk and Bezos optimizing for themselves by gaming others agency.
Also the ultimate test is whether after confessing to your real contribution, people are ok. I don’t think any amazon employee was annoyed after hearing this so called interview, whereas is your company knew what you were charging them for, they would fire you.
He’s not a genius just well networked.
Idle idolatry of normal human beings with no effort to verify their real outputs creates an unfalsifiable truth Bezos is a lynchpin to reality.
Ooo oo I heard it through the grapevine, Bezos is not what you might call “divine”…
The rich did not invent science, engineering, and economic activity. Human behavior gives rise to those things organically. The rich are merely playing information awareness constraint games; a man named Farmer is a farmer, an engineer is an engineer, and there’s no reason to allow them agency to learn other things.
His value is rooted in traditions of political correctness to buy into that narrative, not immutable laws of nature.
Every worker faces the risk of their livelihood vanishing tomorrow. One slip of the tongue costing their job. Why are these guys insulated from the same?
It's not entirely rags to rich because gramps indeed did well for himself and had a nice big ranch out in the middle of Nowhere, Texas. But it's pretty close to it, and overall a pretty cool story.
That alone is a testament to how the country has changed. How many McDonalds burger flippers have that social network now?
His childhood and his family greatly benefited from pre-Reagan social programs.
How sad if the mega-mega-billionaires were mega-mega-millionaires. The rich of their childhood got through high taxes ok.
If such taxation is immoral, let’s discuss then the advantages immoral taxation in the past provided them and accept them as less uniquely gifted and successful on their own then.
If my boss is happy to pay this amount for my level of work output, why should it matter whether I'm spending 40 hours or 4 doing it? In fact, to suggest otherwise is downright Marxist, asserting that the value of my labor is the time I spent doing it, rather than the value someone else is willing to pay.
Do you subscribe to the labor theory of value for goods, or just people?
I used to do a lot of walks (before I moved from Upstate NY to Houston) where I would escape the code and think about the product. That was all billed time, and understood by my clients. Just because my fingers are not furiously typing, doesn't mean I'm not actively engaged in my work.
This company's policy is the clock is only running if you're 100% engaged. I try to stick with that. As time has gone on I've gotten better about mentally turning the switch more all the way on/all the way off. There's some grey area on both sides that I figure comes out in the wash. And if I have a serendipitous moment, it's not hard to turn the clock back on and have at it.
It'd also look more different if the billing increment was wider. In a very past life I billed at 15 minute intervals. So if I was "on" for 12 minutes but stepped away to clear my head, the full 15 was billed.
Yeah this is a pretty interesting phenomenon. I feel like as a kid I had no idea it would be this way, but every job I've worked, blue and white collar, has involved a lot of "time wasting." It's very surprising at first.
40 -> 32 -> 30 -> 29.5 -> 29.3 -> 29.2 -> really, we are talking about minutes(?). Just keep 29-ish and check again in a century.
Arguably, you can't turn it off when you clock out either. It's why I argue for a retainer model on intellectual workers.
Do you have any books you'd received recommend that have any additional tricks?
When I get into a “flow” on a project I can work 12+ hour days. My productivity dwindles as the day gets old for sure, but I don’t think it ever gets to zero or close. I dream/think about the project and the first thing on my mind in the morning is the next step on the project.
Last time I was in flow, I single handedly built the next generation of a tool in 2 months. It’s currently taking the other team about 6 months to do the same but for another platform. The complexity is roughly the same and I think the engineers are as smart, if not smarter than me. I think the difference was that I did 12-16 hours for 2 month (including weekends).
This is not sustainable of course. I developed my back and wrist pain at the end of the 2 months. This is something I consciously stop myself from doing ever again because health is all you got at the end of the day.
I typically code for like 3-4 hours a day, maybe 6-7 when I'm super into what I'm doing. BUT, I very frequently think about my work when I'm not working.
The benefits for the employee are pretty obvious, but there are also many benefits for the company:
- Staff are more productive (for previous pilots: output almost always hits 100%)
- Job listings get (way) more applications
- Staff are happier
- Staff are healthier i.e. off sick less
- It's better for the environment
- Staff turnover reduces
- It attracts experienced candidates
- Costs reduce
- It's better for gender equality
Most of these companies on the site offer 100% salary, some offer 80% (but I hope to remove these in the future)
One problem is I genuinely believe it has to be mandated. Every company has people who will take any action purely to make themselves look attractive for the next promotion cycle. And if even just one person is actually putting in 50/wk at a company that's supposed to be 32/wk, everyone else is going to feel pressured to work 50.
Since open floorplans became universal a while ago, and are only getting partially replaced by work from home because the rent is cheaper, what I wonder is if that is the rule, instead of the exception.
Shorter workweeks are an encouragement tool. Longer ones are an enforcement tool.
I work in finance and I can attest that 90% of the work people do in my office could simply be left undone and no harm would come to the world or even the company. The industry just has a culture of "being very productive" which leads to people doing something all of the time, even when they don't have a clue what should be done.
How do you know it wouldn't just allow you to slack down to working 24 hours a week and feeling the same degree of guilt you are accustomed to now?
I have no idea. It just reminds me of the saying about lottery winners "If you weren't happy before you won, you won't be happy afterwards".
Also the increase of sabbatical years tends to show just how unsustainable this can be over a long period. Especially in a stressful position.
I don’t think productivity is the right word to use. I would say efficiency is better. Output vs outcome is important in knowledge work.
But yes you will see productivity go UP with 4 10s. That's a full days worth of break and lunch interruptions that isn't there.
I switched to 4 10s a couple years back and it's nice, but the days are quite long so anything else you plan to do probably isn't happening. Like gym time, which is going to cost long term.
> That's a full days worth of break and lunch interruptions that isn't there.
A constant battle I've seen between superintendents and schedulers/penny pincher types. "oh no we can't pay any over time!" without realizing the productivity gains the superintendent is chasing from the extra working time unencumbered by extra breaks.
When things get busy having a additional 10 hour day in the week can really get things moving too. They do pay overtime for that though.
Plenty of jobs (like a lot of tech) should be based on "if you're producing what we need from you (or more if you want) we're happy" regardless of the hours.
Curious, why would want to be paid by the hour instead of getting the same pay for less hours as this experiment would want to do? Technically thats a pay raise and better for your quality of life.
Story points can easily be translated to dollars. If an engineer and a product manager can agree that a story is worth 3 points, they can agree that it's worth, say, $1,500. Whether the work ends up taking 30 minutes or 30 days, neither party can complain because they both agreed on a price.
Although it would be nice to be paid by line of code. Except in python or any other language where line ends are significant.
As an engineering manager I can regulary see the same in my reports. Moreover, best ones are doing it on the vacation: coming back they just start typing and don't stop for 2-3 days. Normally typing/thinking cycle is at most 50/50, usually 40/60.
There's one exclusion. All said things are not working if an engineer is working for two employers. When COVID mandatory WFH started, I initially thought that some of my direct or indirect reports just can't adapt to it, but it always turned out to be a second job or a personal project.
I am 100% sure that 4 day workweek will lead to a lot of people in IT taking second jobs/side gigs, and it will severely impact their performance.
When I get tired and unable to focus, I go home and rest. That might be 2:00 or 7:00. If I go home early, chances are that I'll end up doing more work in the evening.
I work as much as I want and am able to, which turns out to be an order of magnitude more work than when I was trapped in 10-12 hour shifts 6 days a week.
I find that I'm very rarely "killing time" at work. I'll pop open mastodon for a few minutes now and then, but I've never had to waste multiple hours waiting for my shift to end. If I'm done working, I just leave. If I have a doctor's appointment, I just throw a note in the group chat.
At this point, I don't think I could ever go back to a traditional workplace. You'd have to be some kind of idiot to pay people per hour to waste time on their phone just to tick off the requirement of being in a chair for 8 hours in a row. This is just clearly the wrong model for many industries.
Not everyone wants interesting work. That’s just a hobby you get paid for.
Minimizing work and maximizing income (aka minmaxing) is what you should do as the employee in the equation, just as the employer will try their best to set up a contract where and they maximize your work while minimizing your income, to do otherwise is just blind naïveté.
And for some of us less hours spent on the job means more hours we can spend on the cultivation of hobbies, physical health and overall improving ourselves. Working as a software engineer is but a small facet of who I am.
They work you less so that you will have better morale and energy and loyalty while you are there. But you use the time to collect a 2nd paycheck, and the gets the same tired employee they would have had if they just worked you fully the old way.
I don't know what could practically be done about that.
It also seems like a 6 month trial where the participants are still the exception not the rule, doesn't really predict what would happen if it became the rule. If most companies adopted this as a norm, surely simply the average salery would just inch down over time until it became essentially necessary and the norm to work 2 jobs, since the 4-day job won't actually be enough by itself except in theory, like how minimun wage is supposed to be enough in theory.
There will always be huslters aggressively trying to maximize every minute, and they will always set, or at least perturb, the going rates for things. I think this experiment can only really exist as a special bubble experiment where the ceos just wanted to do it, and all employees were convinced to voluntarily play along and not just fill the gap with a side job. Maybe there can always be some few companies that can do it as their particular distinctive policy just like there already are different companies with different cultures and norms. But across the board? I think the hustlers and hungry scrappers will just set the going rates.
<personal anecdote or opinion> pro 4-day workweek = upvote
<personal anecdote or opinion> skeptical of 4-day workweek = downvote
I guess it is human nature to dismiss skepticism of an outcome when the outcome is strongly desired
it reminds me of the macchiavelli quote:
> “How we live is so different from how we ought to live that he who studies what ought to be done rather than what is done will learn the way to his downfall rather than to his preservation.”
productivity study is interesting but that's not how the real world incentives are aligned.
Thus the key measure that this study would need to demonstrate would be not that the productivity/worker-hour ratio goes up but that also the productivity/worker-dollar goes up. If the latter is true, a lot of companies are going to take a close look at this because more is more.
Of course, it means that you are actually working more hours than what hourly workers do but on the flip side no one can tell you anything if you disconnect for an hour in the middle.
Once you have the answer to that question, the answer to your question seems very straightforward.
The concept of hours per week is shaped by it's origin in production manufacturing.
Most people who are in a position to discuss 4 day weeks are in the Service Sector or otherwise 'creative roles'.
This is analogue to the argument of why do we not pay developers by lines of code. Both time and LOCs are not necessarily linear with productivity and delivery of function.
Arguing for pay to be linked to time is in my view an artefact of the production & manufacturing origins of modern work.
So to come back to your point. Previously both parties agreed that 40 hour week was worth this much money. Now both parties agree that this link with time is a bad metric and that pay is provided for the realization of certain function or deliverable.
Here are some downsides to paying for deliverables:
Any job that requires talking to other people will suffer, as they won't work at the same time. Some jobs this is okay (e.g. open source development is very asynchronous) but many are not.
If you move to deliverables, what happens if you don't deliver on time? Do you not get paid?
Who sets the deliverables? How are they paid, if they are the ones creating a nice deliverable structure for others to get paid for delivering bits of?
How do we measure the value of each deliverable, to pay accordingly?
How do we measure if you really delivered?
If the company decides the deliverable is no longer valuable and stops it halfway, do you not get paid? Do you get paid based on the estimated value (at the time the work was agreed) of the bits you did do? Do you have to negotiate that?
If you go on leave, should you not get paid?
If you deliver twice as fast, do you get paid faster?
How does "realisation of a function" work except based on time? If I'm at a service desk, should I be paid nothing if no tickets come in? Or should I be paid for... my time?
What I'm driving at is you've invented something that already exists: the fixed-price contract. Scope is agreed, lawyers get involved to approve it, and finance for its budget, you do the work, the scope slips in a way that the customer believes was implied all along, you bring in lawyers to fight, and you get paid at the end, or not, and the work at the end probably suffers quality-wise because you had a fixed-price deliverable, and the faster you do it the more money you get. I don't think many people are up for that; nor are many companies going to go through that pain per-employee.
I think the idea of 4 days work week is asking to work outside the box for a moment on what benefits this could entail for different industry.
> To work all week is to surrender your will, working less is the core of motivating man
(see this quote disagrees!)
Four-day weeks are just the right balance, though I wonder if I'll like three-day weeks even more.