A pilot scheme to trail the four-day workweek in Britain deemed a success (2022)
economist.com
economist.com
Indeed, I've seen fewer meetings, and meetings defaulting to thirty minutes, rather than sixty. I've also seen more async communication -- not once have I received the dreaded lonely "Hello" in Slack. It's of course not all sunshine and lollipops. People aren't always available, so you have to work around or wait. On a personal level, I find I approach each day with more energy and enthusiasm, and I love that I get to spend more time with my family and can (shock!) go out to lunch with my wife during the week while the kids are at school. There seems to be a direct correlation between my improved personal life and an improved professional life.
I would have thought if everyone moved to four-day workweeks, they would all take the same day off, essentially extending the weekend.
If you're talking to customers 5 (or 7) days a week (restaurants, sales, helplines, healthcare), then the company needs to provide continuous cover.
Yes, more people take Friday than Thursday, but quite a lot of people enjoy the zen-like lack of distraction when they work Fridays. Or so I've been told!
Some enlightened countries pro-rata stat days, but New Zealand doesn’t.
If you don't know what a "stat day" is (I didn't), it apparently stands for "statutory holidays" which is like public holidays.
During my brief time in the US, I observed that over there the public holidays tend to be something like "nth Friday/Monday of so-and-so month"; that way you get a long weekend. This is how it's done in some other countries as well.
Unfortunately not in my country (where I'm lucky to have both Saturdays and Sundays off! (I should probably move...) ); if a public holiday falls on a Wednesday, you get the Wednesday off. But on the bright side, there's plenty of holidays here.
That way if you have a family and are all off you can spend it together, but if you have nothing to do can use it when it better suits you.
I’d guess that the bulk of fish and chips are sold outside 9-5 Monday to Friday, and that there would be rioting in the streets if school days were reduced 20%.
Why not move schools to a four-day week, too? If it works for adults at work, I'm sure children would see similar benefits. We already know that typical school hours deprive children of much needed rest.
Because the unspoken advantage of a four-day week is you get an entire day to yourself without your kids.
Do you have kids? I love mine completely and unconditionally, but a day off being an employee and a parent (well half the day at least) sounds like bliss!
If the kids were not all off on the same day, then teachers would struggle to get consistent teaching because 20% of the pupils would always be missing from a lesson.
(Genuine question) but why wouldn't someone be able to have lunch with their OH while working a traditional 5-day week? Surely a lunch break is something everyone is entitled to even when they're working that day?
Hell, even if I'm just going for lunch by myself there are lots of restaurants I cannot really go to, simply because it takes too long to get there, eat, and get back. Basically, while I always have time to eat lunch, but very rarely have time to enjoy lunch.
So, given we're talking about employers offering flexibility, how about allowing people to take a longer lunch break so they can go for lunch with their OH, but either start their day earlier or stay at work later?
I get in early, only take 10 minutes at lunch but then I head home at 3-4PM to miss rush. Sometimes I log back in from home and do more hours (especially if there is a problem), sometimes I leave even earlier and don't, sometimes I WFH on a Friday and spend 3 hours in the middle of the day getting the train out to my parents for a long weekend then the afternoon is half heartedly watching emails while drinking coffee with my parents.
At the end of the day as long as I'm not inconveniencing colleagues then it comes down to does my output make me worth my salary.
It’s not the same thing though. It’s avoiding the pressure to crush wasteful time in the working day (think 30 person zoom meetings that consist of 2 people talking and 28 people quietly doing emails). This pressure is unavoidable with the typical “100 per cent pay, for 80 per cent of the time, while maintaining 100 per cent productivity” 4 day approach.
My commute to the office is over an hour (London, England) from my home, so returning home for lunch is not an option.
The 4-day work week is fairly normalized here to try and balance careers for both parents with raising children, so these articles seem really weird to me. The tradeoff is you get paid for 32 hours instead of 40, and any other benefits (holidays, bonuses, expenses, etc) are adjusted according to how much of a percentage of full-time (40 hours/week) you work.
But slowly this also applies to schools. The teachers would want 4 day workweek. and then the kids would also love to have 4 days instead of 5 days. This would start happening across. The restaurants, grocery shops everywhere and people who come on off days need to be compensated accordingly and then the various other fall outs. :)
Rather highlights that restaurants won't get by on a four day week.
- same hours, same pay
- reduced hours, same pay
- reduced hours, reduced pay
Why is it always so hard to find this information when people discuss 4 day work weeks? The constant vagueness here is extremely toxic to the diaglogue. People talk past eachother.
I don't think I agree that it's hard to find at all. In almost all coverage I've seen of this in the UK it has been made extremely clear either in the headline or the opening paragraph that it's "reduced hours, same pay".
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-63808326 opens with "When Joe Dance was offered the chance to earn his full salary by working just four days a week, he was sceptical."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61570021 is headlined "The workers getting 100% of the pay for 80% of the hours"
The pilot scheme's own website https://www.4dayweek.co.uk/pilot-programme says "with almost every company that took part deciding to continue with a four-day week, with no loss of pay for workers."
Hopefully they do same pay, Less hours. It's a bit tough out there with inflation
Considering that the economy enjoyed 3 decades of basically uninterrupted growth, including right through all significant financial crisis situations (by massively supporting companies with taxpayers money), I couldn't care less how "hard" it is for companys with inflation now.
Baby-Boomers are going into retirement, the next 2 generations are low birth. The workforce is going to be an increasingly limited commodity. Supply and Demand also apply when it doesn't benefit the companies.
Either companies adapt, no matter how tough it is, or there will be less companies, easy as that.
If it's anything other than 100/80/100, it's flexible work rather than a four-day working week.
But that doesn’t create jobs or indicate growth to investors.
Shaking the wrong end of the stick as always.
You get to a point where there's two product managers and and a product owner per team, with like three or four engineers until someone realises.
If this is not actively kept in check, such a system can deteriorate over time, by a positive-feedback loop of newly created controlling facilities created to control the increasing amount of facilities.
This is not to say that managing roles are not required. Of course they are. Complex systems need control. But the proliferation of that control needs to be kept in check, otherwise, the mechanism that is initially helpful (creating structure to control complexity), will become a problem by creating additional complexity of its own.
There is a good way to do big management, but what usually happens is managers find themselves with time to spare and invent activities which do not directly add value, but eventually snowball into formidable tasks requiring more management.
Sears could have been Amazon.
Oh sweet summer child.
Though to be fair, HR expansion was triggered by the constitution replacement called the civil rights laws and the associated need to shield against discrimination lawsuits, so there is a real need for that.
That dies the moment a large enterprise client makes risk demands. Of course the large enterprise client is a shit show inside almost universally.
I'm sure almost all people feel better when given the option to work fewer hours for the same money ... I know I would!
How does that translate into increased productivity, though?
Since ancient times we have known that there is a tradeoff between days of work and days of rest, which is where the idea of "rest days" came from in the first place. Societies with rest days managed to outcompete societies without rest days, despite the former seeming to produce less on paper. Regardless of whether the optimal ratio is 2:5 or 3:4 or whatever, the general mechanism is not in doubt.
How are we planning on measuring productivity of our hypothetical worker, and what kind of job does she do?
If she's stacking supermarket shelves, or picking and packing in a warehouse, or repairing cars, or caring for the elderly, then I think most people would assume her weekly output is basically some fairly standard "unit output/hour" figure, multiplied by the hours she works in that week.
If she works fewer hours, her output decreases.
If she works more hours (subject to limits, and assuming breaks, weekends, and vacation), her output increases.
Here on HN we don't seem to tend to think about (or hear from) people like her, though...
Parkinson's Law says that you'll get your work completed in the time you're given for it. If you're given more time, the task will take more time. I think there is some truth to this.
But also...people burn out and get unproductive. There will be times in the work week where you just get a lot less done or work slower. If you shorten the time working, you can put more effort into being productive all of the time, because you will have adequate time to rest and recover afterwards. If you don't have the recovery time, then you need to take the week a bit slower so you don't burn out.
A lot of these companies in the trial took Wednesday off. So you can smash out loads of work and be productive for two days straight, and then completely relax for a day, rather than having to spend Tuesday pacing yourself for the whole week.
It also forces you to consider anything that stops you getting your work done quickly enough and have more reason to get rid of it.
Not sure how it works with a Fish and Chip shop but I suspect that even service organisations that need 24/7 cover could make up the shortfall by increased happiness and motivation.
For those of us who have a lot of work to do, I couldn't possibly do it in less days (although I guess I would have to drop stuff) but I guess at worst, I might get less interuptions from staff.
Same as how some people are just as productive WFH and some don’t seem to work at all from home without constant questioning and pushing.
Right company and right team it could work but just a few not on the same page and you’re going to have a lopsided team where resentment will fester from both sides.
>forces you to consider anything that stops you getting your work done quickly enough
Significant percentage of the workforce just doesn’t think this way and never will.
Having extra day to rest, do your hobbies, more time with loved ones ... etc __should__ contribute to less stress.
The extra day is not just about being at work, consider commute and other strings attached to going to work.
How much waste is incurred from not listening to frontline workers who know about problems/bottleneck and instead enact policy from clueless higher ups, or the proverbial “the beatings will continue until morale improves”, or the “strategic” decisions based on politics/the CEO’s gut feeling…
Just as people are very good at voting against their interests, businesses are very good at enacting (or keeping) policies that go against profitability/retention/efficiency.
Unless there's some conspiracy going on, we should see someone change the policy, get significant returns, and either outcompete the others, or at least have a higher profit, which should lead to investors pressuring other CEOs to also adopt the new, better systems. Like Just In Time production did, surely there was some guy who said "no, I prefer to have my year's worth of supplies in my storage on site", but they'd have much higher capital requirements and would be very inflexible for virtually no upside (supply chain breakdowns are rare).
People putting out as much work in four days as they did in five. That must mean that the previous requirement was too low and should be increased.
Good luck getting 5 days work out of a nurse in 4 days.
You can trebble that if you dont let the employees sleep or eat as well, for details you would have to sign up for the platinum package.
- https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/feb/21/four-day-week-...
Assume 20 productive hours per week (human cpu time) out of a total 40 work week hours (wall time, 9am to 5pm, 5 days a week). Productivity ratio 50%.
Assume 20 productive hours per week (human cpu time) out of a total 32 work week hours (wall time, 9am to 5pm, 4 days a week). Productivity ratio 62.5%.
Simply divide your productivity ratios by each other for a ~20%-25% improvement.
I wonder, if we tack on just an extra 20 productive minutes per day for a total of..
21 productive hours per week (human cpu time) of a further reduced work week of 24 hours (wall time, 9am to 5pm, 3 days a week). Productivity ratio 83.3%.
An additional massive 33% boost over the draconian slavery schedule of the current four-day status quo!
I think I may be on to something.
Further productivity increases are left as an exercise to the reader. Hint: there is a totally logical and clear path to a productivity ratio of 137.5%!
Inside the article the word trial appears:
“…mid-point survey by the trial’s organisers…”
Sloppiness by the Economist. Not surprising as their best editors have probably gradually been canceled or diversified out.
Better to support work from home. It should be considered misogynistic and "anti green", if employer demands work at office.
Tough to argue an environmental stance when it’s heating/lighting/carbon emissions for deliveries and couriers to 50 buildings vs 1.
WFH would also mean you'd need smaller/no offices
Stop using environmentalism as a crowbar to get your desires it’s disgusting and devalues the real movement with real issues beyond you wanting to sit in bed till lunch.