4-day workweek trial
apnews.com
apnews.com
They've threatened to get rid of it multiple times, claiming it's still a trial period (over a year of having it), which is fine, but they don't mention that it's a trial at all to new hires. I know a lot of the company that would leave in a heart beat if they got rid of it since it was a such a big part of why they chose the job.
I left, got a more interesting job that paid a lot more and they kept trying to get my to stay by referencing the unlimited PTO they gave me but I didn't use (less than a week taken in two years) and the four day work week that I hadn't taken advantage of since I joined. Needless to say, I got a big raise and I work the same amount that I did before.
An extra day off is absolutely additional compensation and is worth a significant amount. It's just that in my (small sample size and limited) experience, it's used as a crutch and there were pretty much expectations that you work on that extra day, negating the time off. I hope most other four day work week companies don't do this and I just had a bad draw, but that's my anecdotal experience.
We offered unlimited PTO, which I've found to just be a way to sound really great but in reality they can block PTO if it's over a given amount and look down on you for taking that PTO. It's never an explicit "you will not get a promotion", but you'll get less opportunities, potential for promotion, and such as you're not seen as a "team player" like they bring up during the all hands. It's a crappy thing.
Should I have just taken my time off anyway? Maybe. Working somewhere where you have an actual set amount of PTO has never brought that negative stigma with it. I'm not surprised if this isn't common for unlimited PTO companies, but I've read that the reason companies offer it is because employees take less time off on average.
So, while most companies aren't on a 4-day workweek, a fair number have at least some percentage of employees who are on sort of an informal 4+ schedule.
Now I work for a company that doesn’t have official 4 day weeks but it’s well known you can tell your manager you won’t be working most fridays and so long as your productivity is reasonable, managers are happy to oblige. So it’s “4 day workweek if you want it”
I think ya, a lot more people work 4 days per week than any data collection would suggest
What made this really work IMO is that if someone needed to sync on something or get a context download Fridays became the day to do it because no one would have an excuse to not do some knowledge sharing. Toss in grabbing lunch and coffee with other coworkers and it ends up being a great way to build company cohesion and foster cross-team/org relationships.
And, if you decide to leave after lunch to play tennis no one is going to give you the side eye.
The question is, if you had a 4-day work-week, would Thursdays then become normalized as the day people wind down?
It is entirely reasonable to expect people might be more lax on the last day of the week, defeating the argument that we might as well have Friday's off because noone's working hard anyway.
Could the 3 day week be next? Maybe! Let’s try the 4 day work day first so labor can get some of those gains by way of work life balance. Otherwise, this power balance shift will occur naturally as the developed world ages and the share of productive workers shrinks year after year (slowly some places, faster others).
https://www.statista.com/chart/23410/inequality-in-productiv...
https://www.statista.com/chart/18458/working-age-population-...
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/18/the-wealthiest-10percent-of-...
People work too much --> people slack off at the end of the work week
People work less --> people are less burnt out --> less reason to slack off
Somehow, this getting rolled up into
Thursday is the "new" end of the week --> people will slack off on Thursday
ignores the underlying change and incentives entirely!
And this is why this year I chose Friday as my day off.
edit: @yamtaddle: to be clear, I am on a 4-day workweek and I am paid for 4 days. I have to be really disciplined in shutting off work computer on Thursday (still working on that). No children for the moment, but it's clear to me I would choose a Monday off if that was the case.
Totally agree for more time off for parents and children.
[EDIT] But I do get your point :-)
In a formal 4 day policy I can be fully offline, fully disconnected, free from guilt or feeling bad about not actually working.
So while it might sound like 4+ and 4 are close, I don't personally think they're all that close. I am the type of person though who generally works through Friday solidly, because I'm expected to, even though other people take that time much more lax.
My question is, are a lot of the 'benefits' simply because people are contrasting it to a 5 day work week? Much of the logic i'm seeing about 4 day work weeks could be applied to a 3 day work week once people get used to 4 days. I'm not seeing anything unique about 4 days that makes it objectively superior.
The main argument I see is less work=greater morale, so lets work less!
Maybe that's also true of three days? I'm all for trying it. If it isn't, fine, that's a good argument not to do it.
Could it be not because its the 5th day, but because its the 'final stretch' to the weekend and would therefore apply to any final day of any workweek? In my experience, i've seen the same behavior before holiday weekends. Should workweeks be 3 days on this evidence? Should workweeks be dictated by productivity on the final day? Why? Is 50% productivity better than 0? Should the only important consideration about a company be morale? Should morale be directly tied to quarterly earnings? Why or why not?
It's like you're arguing from some other reality, what the actual fuck!?
That's a strawman argument for this study, which is not anecdotal but a large scale study with a statistically significant cohort.
> Much of the logic i'm seeing about 4 day work weeks could be applied to a 3 day work week once people get used to 4 days.
How do you know until you try? What makes 5 days the optimal number? It's just some historical compromise we settled on with no scientific support, which is the aim of studies like the one in the article.
> The main argument I see is less work=greater morale, so lets work less!
The argument is less time at work = (greater morale + similar/better business outcomes)
I never said it was anecdotal. Quite the opposite. Do you know what p hacking is? The number of methods to distort data without detection is too many to count. It's just a fact of life if you're exposed to enough studies on nearly any subject. Appeals to authority are just that.
>How do you know until you try? What makes 5 days the optimal number? It's just some historical compromise we settled on with no scientific support, which is the aim of studies like the one in the article.
Why not 6? Or 8? Or 2? 1? Define scientific support in this context. Going with a blanket approach to say 4 days a week should be the norm for every industry is quite unscientific. 4 day work weeks for any on call industry would be absurd.
>The argument is less time at work = (greater morale + similar/better business outcomes)
Then why aren't the businesses that already employ it outcompeting fortune 500 companies? Why isn't there clear evidence in the business themselves (being more competitive in their fields)? Why is it only the studies that come up with these results?
Yes, I work in statistics. P-hacking can be detected and should be exposed during proper peer review and by providing underlying data and methods for reproducibility. It would be nonsensical to throw out the entire scientific process and discredit all statistical studies because p-hacking can be done.
> Why not 6? Or 8? Or 2? 1?
Sure, let's try them all. But maybe not 8, because unless you're the Beatles that isn't going to happen.
> 4 day work weeks for any on call industry would be absurd.
Shifts exist for this reason. Nobody is on call 24/7.
> Why isn't there clear evidence in the business themselves?
The study itself showed the business benefits themselves are small. Probably smaller than time variability within a business or across many businesses. The point of the study was not to show business improved but to show that the business outcomes remain similar while employee satisfaction improved. Why wouldn't you want to live in a society where people are happier and business continues as usual?
A shift from a 40hr, 5 day workweek to a 32hr, 4 day workweek is utterly different than a 40/5 to 40/4 shift.
Also, 10 hours really is more than I can consistently do. I'm tired by the end of an 8 hour day. I can do longer days when necessary, but my productivity is not going to be as high if it's every day.
If a researcher finds the counter-intuitive results that working less leads to equivalent or better outcomes, it will be a headline.
If a researcher finds that working less leads to getting less work done, who would publish it? It won't get media headlines, but even scientific journals will not accept the results.
Individual firm metrics are useless to even bring up here.
The question is finding the balance, work that produces productive things people value. And it turns out, free market economic systems are pretty good at democratically converging on answer.
Though I'd argue there's also a bias in that there are likely very few researchers choosing to hypothesize the five day work week is more productive, structuring the study to confirm that, and executing the study.
The incentives are all in the other direction.
What? What are you talking about? Why would a scientific journal not accept it, if it's a properly done study that contradicts recent results?
Furthermore, there are plenty of "water is wet" studies that get published all the time—some of which are confirming things we "know", but don't have solid scientific data on, others of which are doing replications of existing studies. (I suppose you probably wouldn't get much traction with studies that rehash very old, many-times-replicated results...)
I don't think scientific journals work the way you think they do.
It’s really too soon to tell the results. As long as you don’t shut down, most companies’ revenue is affected more by what they did in the medium term past than the recent past.
Are there any metrics of productivity that companies could track which would be forward indicators rather than lagging indicators?
i.e., in a world where everybody had 4-day work weeks, we wouldn't necessarily see less job-hopping.
While remote work and four-day work weeks are awesome, these will absolutely incentivize leaders of big companies to find cheaper labor in other countries that are plenty fine with working a full five-day work week. This is great for lifting a lot of people and countries out of poverty but doesn't help the family of four paying down a huge mortgage.
Some leaders will (smartly) realize that it makes no sense to pay employees less just because they are available remotely for fewer hours of the week, but big companies run everything and crush views like this eventually.
Interestingly, I think this will nullify the remote work movement while permanently decreasing average compensation.
This would seem particularly effective for hourly employees, where you could supposedly expect to get 90-100% of the same work output, only pay 80% for it, and not change the timeframe on which it's delivered. It would be a huge competitive advantage given how big of an expense payroll is.
It's romantic to think they coexist, but in a practical sense they don't intersect at the optimal solution
If you can’t be a good example, you’ll just have to be a terrible warning.
Even something simple like google giving out free food increased employee happiness which translated to revenue growth from better workers. So it's not obvious that a 4 day week can't work, and at some companies a 4 day week could probably.
My main objection to the 4-day workweek is it optimizes for people who want a shorter workweek with a possible tradeoff of curtailing the ability to take big chunks of time.
I think its 6 hours for 5 days a day not 5 hours for 6 days a week. I agree with your point that when people do work on a day its easy coerces them work longer hours that day.
It appears you read it as 6 workdays for 5 hours each.
It's possible they're misunderstanding how 5x6 is intended to work, but they are the ones who introduced it to the thread.
It's really nice to be able to not set an alarm and just wake up and work whenever you're ready or be able to take an afternoon off and take the kids to the park if you feel like it.
Not that I'd disagree with that. Personally, I think it's absurd that someone writing JavaScript for an advertising company for a few hours a day should make more money than a nurse.
We do this weird thing in the US where you are tied so intrinsically to what you do for a living that it's become taboo to say the objectively true (and I would argue, very obvious) thing that some jobs are worth more than others. It's not a bad thing that one person gets paid $200k/yr to type JS into a computer and someone else gets paid $9/hr to fold clothes at Boscov's. It's because anyone can walk in off the street and start folding clothes with no training. That isn't making any comment on the people behind those jobs, just the jobs themselves.
I don't feel they're especially "entitled."
The argument that one group should suffer because other groups do is a strange one to me. I don't see software engineers asking that we guarantee that other professions work worse hours than we do.
So you think the article's mistaken that these workers are happier with reduced hours?
I don't doubt that there are people who are happy working 80h at something they love, but most people are not like that.
Make 4dww universal then ask them again after every service they use start taking 20% longer, being 20% more expensive, their favourite restaurants closing down from the lack of staff, longer lines everywhere from the increased demand for leisure and reduced supply.
It could work but it's far from obvious to me.
Your words, not mine.
Or are you saying that shorter work weeks will be an excuse to price gouge? That's valid. Any change seems to be an excuse to price gouge.
Price discovery. It's basic supply and demand. How can you cut short the supply and don't expect an increase in prices? Only if you assume a correspondent decrease in demand - again, as I said, not totally obvious to me. If anything, more free time would lead to more demand for services.