Study: 61 UK firms tried a 4-day workweek and after a year, they still love it
npr.org
npr.org
I do think there is one clear benefit as measured in the article - employee retention. It's an extremely strong incentive to stay with the current company, and domain knowledge gained over decades really is a competitive advantage if your employees commonly have it.
What remains to be seen though are if the efficiency gains are good enough to justify less hours. Are employees more productive? That's the question that remains to be answered or objectively measured here. Less burnout and better mental health means higher quality work for sure, but is output as a whole better with a 4 day work week versus a 5 day work week? That's what shareholders will care about more than anything else.
I'm currently working for a large corporation who went through several cycles of trying to get people to come back to the office after C19 slowed down. After three or four versions, they finally gave up and put an optional (hybrid) model in place. It was interesting to hear the stunned VP's glowing about the increased productivity and the company had two of its most successful quarters going into and coming out of the pandemic. I'm guess seeing those results made it easier for them to allow people to work from home more easily.
Some anecdotal evidence for your retention theory. Since my current company allowed 100% WFH, our team has had barely any turn over and at least three of the teams I worked with have also have little or no turn over as well. It would stand to reason you probably have a good point about retaining people when you allow them a little more freedom to do their jobs.
"Hello, this is General Smith." "Sir, ... um .. you are answering your own phone?" "Yup. My EA is working from home thursday-friday and we cannot get the secure phone to forward calls to her cellphone." "Did you talk to IT?" "It is friday. IT works remote on fridays." "How about I come to your office?" "Please do, I'm all alone here."
> Is the server not responding after the recent power outage? Too bad. The guy to turn it back on only comes in Monday-Tuesday.
A reasonable company would have some rotating in-office IT or at the very least an oncall that goes to wherever the server is to fix it.
> The plumbers and electricians still "work from home" half the week.
Pretty much the same thing.
As someone who is a big proponent of WFH, one thing I must still agree to is that organizational and cultural issues that existed prior to WFH at usually just worse in WFH. If your employees are so disfranchised that their install scripts to wiggle their mouse while they watch Netflix the battle is already lost.
That would be a lot of companies and workers out there, dare I say the vast majority even.
Believe it or not, many workers don't actually enjoy their work, their company, their boss or their job, but they put up with it because housing in expensive and it was the least horrible job they could find with the highest pay they could land, enabling them a lifestyle upgrade, even if they don't care for the work itself, so of course they'll take every opportunity they get to slack off and watch Netflix if they can.
Expecting all your workers to be fully invested and committed on work while on the clock is an exercise in futility and something no company past a certain size will ever accomplish because everyone just looks after themselves and their own self interest first, screw the company and their shareholders. And the companies know this, hence the culture of micromanagement, spyware, RTO, etc.
That's why start-ups and small companies can accomplish things the likes of Google can't, because they're formed mostly of motivated people who care about the product and the mission first and foremost, while the likes of Google are full of coasters who are there just to make as much money as possible with as little work as possible while the gravy train lasts.
There are a lot of people that don't enjoy their jobs, but do the work because they're getting paid to do it. You seem to assume that anyone doing their job _only_ because they're being paid to do it will _not_ do their job if they can get away with it (even though they're still being paid to do so). Not everyone is a horrible person. Plenty of people will continue to do their job even if they could lie and not do it; because they agreed "if you pay me, I will do my job".
I've had times where I wasn't enjoying my job, but I still did the work... because that's the agreement I had with the company I worked for. And, like a lot of people, I wouldn't see it as acceptable to scam the company I work for.
What if you're taking a break? What about drinking a coffee? Chatting with coworkers? Playing table tennis or some arcade videogame in the break area? Various studies point at a lower bound for endurance when doing knowledge work. Some say 4h.
As long as they get something done those employees will still feel like they put in their day of work and they will still get good reviews. Could they have done it in half the time? Maybe, but who can tell?
I'm my own boss and I'm paid if I deliver results (and I think everyone should work like this, being an employee is opaque and overall sucks for earning potential if you are a good performer) but sometimes I put on a movie on a second screen while I'm working, mainly to make dull work (it's crazy how much you can charge to write the same old boring API or the same old Reaxt component for the n-th time) more tolerable. I'm definitely working slower but at least I'm getting things done without losing the will to live.
Am I stealing time from my business?
How's that different from what I just said?
Overall you do make it sound like you condone this, I got the same read as the person you are responding to...
Even if there are some very rare individuals that go to work primarily for companionship or for personal fulfillment that doesn't mean it's even worth bringing up in a discussion like this
It's obvious that few people are going to subordinate themselves in a world where they don't get paid for doing so, and if they did it would look more like volunteer associations (only emergency response involves much hierarchy, most volunteers are only loosely associated with the org, individuals choose which shifts to turn up to, local leaders are elected and view it as a burden rather than a privilege) and less like work (you don't get to choose anything).
Edit: I should add that I'm in no way against jobs, I just think that people who are doing largely unproductive work for free are still working, even though it'd be better for everyone if they were getting paid to do something more useful.
When large established companies complain about productivity and lack of employee commitment, the answer seems very obvious to me... Swap platitudes, certificates of recognition and motivational speeches with tangible financial incentives.
If the executive wants everyone to come into the office 5 days a week, then offer a 25%+ pay rise and watch people flood in
I don’t think this is true for the vast majority of startup employees though. Maybe the founders get some crazy return 10 years down the line if they’re lucky. Most everyone else would earn the same or less if there is a successful sale as they’d have at a “normal” company. And if there is no successful sale, they’d have earned less.
Since I joined the workforce, I encountered something like two or three people doing actually nothing at work. And once they are identified, I just know that I can't expect any output from them and just do without them.
It's the opposite that I'm confronted with daily : people who are absolutely terrible at their job and who constantly try participate. Not only I know that I have to triple check their outputs, but I also have to come up with fake tasks to give them so that they are not constantly asking for things to do or worst, doing disasters on their own initiative. They consume a lot of time and energy from the productive members of the team, while having no positive output for the company. It's like daycare for adults. And given that everybody is paid at the end of the month, I have nothing but love for unproductive (in the eyes of the company) people who take care of themselves.
I'd rather have both those people doing what they enjoy outside of work instead of forcing themselves to be here because governments and corporations are saying that you are not a member of society if you are not selling your time to capitalism.
Ya. We had that. We had 10+ people doing trouble tickets 8am to 4pm across more than a dozen buildings. They worked hard, but were never actually done. There was always a priority list. Now they work half the week from home. Stuff is piling up and we are begging for more non-at-home IT staff to be hired.
Based on your description you don't have a WFH policy, you have a policy that incentivizes not working at all. What makes you think that these hypothetical new hires are going to actually work while the rest of their department doesn't? What sane person would put up with that treatment?
Would you be surprised to hear that most companies in the world are just like that?
HN readers are in a bubble where they can afford to be picky on where they work choosing companies that fit in their belief system in terms of organizational efficiency and work culture, instead of just choosing the least horrible job they can find with the best pay, like the other 99% of the people in the world.
I never said that's not dysfunctional, I said most companies ARE dysfunctional in one way or another, and it's something most workers who've been around the block a few times learn to live with eventually, since they prioritize hobbies, family and having a roof over their heads instand of finding that ideal Goldlacks company that's never dysfunctional in any way, because that doesn't really exist.
Especially traditional companies tend to be insanely dysfunctional when it comes to IT and SW engineering in general. And most people know this but still plenty choose to work there and put up with that dysfunctionality instead of fighting to change it, because like I said, it's just a job that pays the bills, not a personal identity, and a lot of the people in the real world aren't as fussy about this as HN is.
Again: I didn't suggest anyone fight to change anything or switch jobs. All I said is that hiring new people into the dysfunctional organization is going to do absolutely nothing to fix the problems OP is describing.
You're replying to what you imagine people on HN would often say, not replying to me.
This will make remote work mandatory, even if it still can't fix all the possible issues.
(Only due to your comment did I realise I was ambiguous, I meant remote work specifically for the IT department would be mandatory, not everyone in general).
It definitely feels like most people complaining about wfh have no friends and work is their entire life. I honestly do not understand how anyone can pretend they get anything done, while also being constantly interrupted or having conversations about what they're doing this weekend, or such and such sports team last night etc. Like... just get the work done and move on, jeez, it's work, not a social club. Ending wfh so you can force people to hang out with you is weird.
Maybe if you are working at Google, with infinite budgets and gleaming-new machines everywhere. But we have old stuff. We have phones that cannot be managed remotely. We have desktop computers that cannot get up and walk between offices unaided. We have fiberoptic wires that break when 60+yo buildings shift on their foundations. We have UPSs that cannot change their own batteries. We have antennas exposed to the wind/rain/snow. We also have innumerable systems that are either too old or too classified to be managed from a laptop at starbucks. None of this stuff can be fixed from home.
For the deployment I guess you can use something like ImmyBot or Intune, but at some point someone has to be there and connect a new machine to the internet/intranet. How does that work in practice?
If the delivery doesn't make sense they don't even ask to return computers, they just do a call where they superficially check you deleted company stuff.
IT just solves dumb problems on slack "I can't download acrobat reader" and owns the admin roles on all the saas we use.
In software development, there is usually an "infinite amount of work" to be done, so the important thing is to prioritize well as a lot of that work will never get done. But what does it mean to say "you've met all your objectives"? If you say "great, I finished all my objectives in 20 hours this week, see you at the beach", this company will eventually get killed by competitors who are just as productive yet work 40+ hours a week.
But fundamentally, the idea of "you've met your objectives, now you can go home" just feels like a fantasy in the world of software development.
If you work at a smart company, your manager doesn't spell out much of your job, and ROWE can encapsulate that if you and your manager have a shared understanding of what an effective month/quarter/year looks like. If you're that kind of senior engineer, the exercise should prompt some good discussion about reducing the number of hours you spend on more measurable, less effective tasks.
The goal is to create something that both you and your manager buy into, so they feel good if that's 'all' you do and you feel it's doable to review the list and feel good about it before the end of a typical workweek.
As you might be able to tell, it's not easy to come up with a list that achieves this. Most managers will be too timid, or won't understand themselves well enough, to put the real full expectations of a job on paper.
However, a 'certified ROWE' workplace undergoes coaching so they have a better chance of success, similarly to how some organizations do for OKRs if they want to use them as intended and not as fantasy aspirations.
In practice, if you have a boss that hates ROWE, you're going to have a tough time convincing them that you've met your objectives enough to step away from work for a bit, no differently than how any other flexible work arrangement stops being flexible the moment your boss stops trusting you.
(I'm close to a ROWE-certified organization that has been successful with it for about 15 years.)
That’s how I’ve done it, and have seen it done in the last 7 companies I worked at.
Your reasoning is so foreign to me. The only way it makes sense if you are speaking as a manager.
Well, to each their own, but that has never been the case in any of the companies I've worked at. In fairness, over the fast 5 years or so more and more the companies I've worked at have used Kanban over sprint planning, because usually the "estimation" part of agile (i.e. the cards, the voting) has proven to be the most useless piece of agile.
It doesn’t matter what you use for planning, you agree to do something in advance, and you provide a reasonable estimate of how long it will take. Your manager should trust your estimates, even if they are sometimes wrong.
I also believe everyone needs a mental break at the end of an accomplished iteration. The satisfaction of feeling done. You might only answer email or edit docs on that day but that’s definitely worthwhile.
Not to mention, when you have a family, weekends aren’t especially relaxing, so if you “sprint” every week for years, it leads to almost certain burnout.
In other words, we don’t run marathons at full speed for a reason.
Oh and by the way, even at the contracting place where we were given fresh tickets when done early, no one ever expected them done immediately. So in effect we’d sit on them, take a mental break, and everyone was happy with appearances—the theater of work.
In my job, every problem seems to take a random amount of time. It might be the thing I'm assigned is trival and done in 1-2 hrs. It might be it would be trivial but it pointed out an issue elsewhere than needs to be fixed first. It might be trivial but the CI was down for 6hrs. It might be trival but requires some other library to roll to a new version and the roll broke something else. It might look trivial but turns out to need a non trival refactor to work.
I ran into that last one yesterday where I started on an issue that seemed like it should be trivial, in an object with different options than it currently has. These objects are cached by their options since they are heavy. The code that gets an existing or new one is 5 levels deep. It creates them from a factory but the info this new issue needs needs to query the factory to figure out the creation options. So, what seemed like a 10-15 min change is going to be several hours to decide how to surface or pass that factory to/from the top level
the point being, from outside management is going to see different levels of work. It's not as trivial as "created N widgets an hour" nor is it as trivial as "lines per hour"
I feel like there could be lots of unintended consequences with people only taking the smallest tasks or whatever to avoid taking tasks that take longer or to find ways to account things so it looks like they're doing more, etc
Don't count the result, but the actual work itself. Meaning, you need to document every little step you do, every command, script, search you have. Write down your thoughts and conclusions, and so on. But this is very annoying, and barely anyone is well-equipped for doing this. And most people have some natural defensive for exposing themselves to this level. Though, it would also be helpful for yourself to be able to review your work. So maybe some balanced middle would be a way to go?
Maybe if tools would be designed in a non-annoying way to support this, more people would be willing doing something like this.
This just gives wrong ideas to the team.
Leadership churn is often high these days, so workplace experiments or innovations tend to just vanish, unless they become popular across multiple companies very quickly and become the new norm.
I’m not so sure. On the one hand, it seems nearly tautological. Yet, so much of the comp structure and general attitude towards employees in big tech seems to incentivize job hopping every few years. I would prefer not having to do that, but my hand is forced.
Additionally, having deep expertise in a particular technical area can protect you somewhat during a layoff, but also makes you easier to define a replacement for if there is more that one of you.
Companies will get what they pay for. They pay for short term gain.
Thats a very Murican way to look at it. You know, workers Can also just demand it, worked for a lot og stuff in Europe. Like 5week vacation minimum. Unlimited paid sickdays, Paternity and maternity leave etc.
The idea that everything has to be a net positive for corporations is silly. We are a society of people, and corporations have to be a net positive for our society not the other way around.
It's like in the Industrial revolution when kids (!!) shift were lowered from 18 hours to 12-8 hours. Adults that were assisted by kids also couldn't maintain the same 18 hours shift and for the factories to maintain productivity they had to implement innovations. And would you look at that, the average textile factory today is orders of magnitude more productive and efficient than that of the 19th century.
Those productivity innovations you mention would've come either way. In other countries with worse working conditions and even less labor power than the US, factory owners reap the benefits of applying such productivity innovations AND the increased output of longer working hours than is generally tolerated by US workers.
From the parent comment:
> but for corporations to adopt this there has to be a measurable benefit to the company as well.
This is only true in a world where workers are entirely subservient to their masters.
These worker movements are crucial to keep workers from getting both pressured to produce more AND work longer hours.
The parent’s line about a company needing to maintain or increase productivity in order to make an improvement to working conditions is one that only those truly part of ownership should be making. Especially when it’s never said so in both directions: if productivity improved (through automation or otherwise) then the workers shouldn’t have to work as long hours. Only actual owners get to work less if they wish to in wage labor business. And it is their privilege to demand workers increase or maintain productivity if they wish to work fewer hours.
My bet is literally nothing will change if we go to 4-day work week.
Can’t say about others but my productivity goes way up with an extra weekend. I am way more rested and eager to do some work in Monday.
From that a likely issue is a steep increase in people having second jobs so they work a 4 day job and a second 2/3 day job.
I suspect the 4 day week will work well for people with good salaries and market power, but encourage working class to 'work the weekend' in alternate jobs resulting in lower downtime.
For this I'd actually like a 4 day week but with it either more restricted business opening on Sunday type thing or significant wage multiples over 3 day weekends to encourage time off vs the 24/7 economy.
These days I wouldn't really care because I have a lot of flexibility.
Also of note, the increase in these costs from going down to 4 days will be substantially larger than the prior one (due to the smaller dividend).
The costs are not going up substantially or at all for most 9/5 businesses
This assumes that the company and employees must have adversarial priorities. This is only true if that’s how the company wants to be structured
Employee owned companies have no such adversarial structures
The fact that a large number, not all, of billion dollar companies are not employee owned, is not a proof that it’s the optimal way to run a company. It’s only optimal for Capital
In fact most companies are employee owned if for no other reason than they are small LLCs you don’t know the name of but are, for example, driving your FedEx packages around.
I got paid for 1 day LESS, so I eventually went back to 5 days. I'd rather get paid for a full day of work, while we all slack off a bit.
> I do think there is one clear benefit as measured in the article - employee retention.
Well, sure, I think that's a given. This is also, for example, why companies pay their employees money in exchange for their labor. The measurable benefit to the company is that very few people would work for free.
I also think the USA is marching towards making the gig economy the new normal so fractional employment will be come normal.
There seems to be a fine balance CEOs and board members want to hit between saving money and ensuring they have their boots as firmly placed on their lessers as possible.
If you come in with low-mid trust and say "Expectations are 9-5, 5 days a week, in office" that's what you'll get.
If you come in with high-trust and say "four day workweek, flexible hours, remote" you may well get 5-6 days a week most weeks and 7 days a week in crunch times, still with high morale.
People are fearful of the latter approach because if the wrong people are hired, it can absolutely be abused. The flipside is that the former approach will seem stifling to the right people.
You might still have 5 day work week employees who get paid more but to them the perk is money/earlier retirement.
PDF of the research: https://autonomy.work/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/making-it-s...
Didn't we already know this is the case with a five-day workweek?
Five days is such an arbitrary situation, obtained only through a LOT of effort by a LOT of people to reduce that down from a 'perfectly normal and reasonable' six-day workweek.
We're persistently lumbered by the inertia of pervasive systems we inherited, and the assumption that what we have is what we should have.
A coworker did eventually get 5 days, after 6 months he said, what have i done, My life is just work now.
I remember working 5, i made more money. It was just as easy to spend as it is now. Nothing changed.
Especially in software industry, it's not that hard to arrange I believe. Even easier if we do it collectively. And when more and more people do it and it becomes a norm, the income will just readjust and return to the current levels.
But even today, when it's still not a norm, and I have a reduced income compared to my fulltime working peers, I still consider it a bargain. Extra free day is totally worth it. I am basically paying for some extra happiness.
Most well paid developers would gladly take a 20% reduction in income for 50% more weekend right? So 4 days it is!
Well why stop there? I’ll take another 25% reduction for 33% more weekend. So 3 days it is!
But only the rich or a fool would then take an additional 33% reduction for a measly 25% bump to your weekend.
3 day work weeks are best. QED
Good for them. If the quality bar holds, they deserve to be rewarded.
Based on personal anecdata, the quality bar does not hold. Not in India, nor anywhere else.
Why employers can't see this on the balance sheet is a different discussion.
Because it isn't on the balance sheet. The job gets done, the overtime is unpaid.
They assume that if the hours reduce, the job won't get done, they don't see each hour of less hours being productive because they've but been convinced to try the fewer hours option.
hahaha, good to see some hopeful people around. But the MBA people will never let this happen.
They already reduce your salary based on location of your home (when remote), as if it matters if you do your work in office or whenever.
That article notes most people can't make enough money from 15 hours of work to save up for retirement. I also wonder if "leisure" has to be redefined, since work and life blend so much online. What does 15 hours of work really mean in a knowledge work job?
You learn much more if you start young and keeping the expertice on the floor longer would also help.
If we reserve the younglings earnings for specific purchases productivity would increase even more.
Edited to add that the 3 day work week totals 20 hours.
I guess and hope that simply directly asking for this is another strategy (and what I plan to do if I ever lose this job); otherwise, performing the above sort of misdirection, consciously, might also help justify the exception for management and peers.
No backlash or retaliation so far after more than 2 years.
I do my required work in 20 hours most weeks. I spend the rest of the 40 hour work week resting, learning, and working on myself. I am careful not to publicize this because I am concerned at backlash from colleagues who find they have to spend more time than me.
People work at different paces and provide different value to the company for many reasons. I may be efficient and effective, but I tend to burn out faster, hence the rest time.
- They don't randomize pilots, so any effect you see is likely to be confounded
- In this publication, it appears there was ~50% attrition between the initial pilot and the follow-up study — again, a huge source of potential confounding
- As another example, in another publication, they showed a plot of GDP per capita against average working hours, and insinuated from the negative relationship that less working hours somehow made workers (causally) more productive, without even hinting at the obvious alternative explanation that people work less as they get more productive because they don't have to work as much to maintain standard of living.
I like that things like this are being tried, but I wish the research conducted on it were more intellectually honest and less obviously geared towards pursuing an agenda. The level of analysis here is more like a company marketing whitepaper than anything bordering on scientific.
Don't get me wrong, personally I think companies where it's feasible should just define minimum presence where the business needs it and leave it to employees where and when to do the work within those constraints depending on preferences and their situation. I don't have an axe to grind against working less (and in my circles it seems like many people are making this decision by reducing their workload to e.g. 80%, albeit at a corresponding salary cut). But the whole thing just seems a big disingenuous.
If you do a trial of four-day workweeks, you're probably always going to have issues with the latter for any feasible setup. As you allude to, the companies that self-select into participating in such a trial are probably not a good representation of the wider economy, even if you randomize among them.
Now if you randomize rollout of four-day weeks at least among those willing to participate, and you didn't lose about 50% of participants between the start of your trial and the follow-up survey, you would at least get an unbiased estimate of what the policy did for those companies. But alas, they don't even do that part.
(The same can be said for almost everything related to nutritional "science".)
If we don't have a good mechanism for knowing something is true or not, we should acknowledge that and approach the problem philosophically / aesthetically.
We need to know what we know so that we can use knowledge as our building blocks, not fake information.
You can't magic science into existence and then use it to make decisions.
Which one would you rather work for? Which one do you think will have a relative abundance of applicants (read: supply of labor)? Which other one do you think will have a lower supply of labor and might need to pay more to attract candidates?
It seems logical that a company offering 4-day workweek would be more attractive and, on a balance of factors, could pay less to attract the same workforce.
Flip it around. If a four-day workweek was the standard, I feel like literally everyone would agree that companies who are trying to introduce a five-day workweek would have to pay more.
I think that the balance of supply and demand will tend to have the market-clearing comp be somewhat lower, assuming that the offered labor for four-day weeks is well in excess of the demanded labor for four-day weeks.
If you made me bang rocks for 5 days, I'm sure I'd do an even a better job if you told me that if I finished early I could work 4 days a week.
The 4 day workweek seems to currently work without loosing productivity in wealthy service based economies like Amsterdam, the City of London, etc where a lot of "work" is just Blue Chip companies with theatrics and endless meetings while riding the gravy train of other peoples' productivity from across the globe who don't have access to a 4 day week doing all the heavy lifting(basically economic neo-colonialism), but this obviously can't scale across economies that actually depend on actually designing and making the stuff the wealthy economies speculate on.
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/02/ageing-global-populat...
People keep saying how the declining demographics will mean the workers have more leverage but when will that come? As currently I'm struggling to find a job and a recruiter who rejected me just told me they have huge supply of "strong candidates" and they don't need to compromise anymore on offering WFH or accepting only English speaking candidates.
Maybe by the time I retire I can see that leverage?
Longer convo for another thread, but TLDR yes, "structural decline." Trajectory is a function of how fast folks age out of the working population (retire or death), because cohorts coming up behind them keep shrinking.
EDIT: Put some contact info in your profile.
That’s a particularly strange demand to make as someone who doesn’t expose your own contact info.
I’m connected with over 2k recruiters and was low key trying to help.
For what?
When was the last time you saw a widget factory running 8 hours a day 5 days a week? Factories already run 24/7/365. They hire enough workers for their own economics to make sense (either enough so they all work no more than 40 a week or they just pay a bunch of overtime). If a 4 day workweek became standard it would just mean hiring more people or giving more overtime, since it's not the people that need to be optimized in that equation.
But for knowledge work it makes a ton of sense. It's been repeatedly shown that knowledge workers are equally if not more productive at 32 hours a week vs 40 hours a week.
But then why hasn't it become the norm already and even in some cases, like in Asia, people are forced to stay in the office way more hours than 40?
If I take that research and show it to my boss saying I should work 32 hours/week instead of 40 for the same pay, he'll most likely laugh in my face and tell me to go back to work.
Clearly the vast majority of companies don't believe the same research, otherwise we'd be working 32 hours/week a long time ago.
I think my manager would also like to work just 32 hours/week instead of 40 for the same pay. So weh do we stop blaming them?
It's the C-suite that is doing it. The C-Suite got where they are because they are extroverts who excel at in person interactions. They can't use that skill unless you're there in front of them. They also came up in a world where everyone worked in an office 40 hours a week. And since they are in charge, they get to choose the rules of engagement, and are seemingly choosing to ignore productivity studies that show their decisions don't make sense.
Eventually they will be eclipsed by C-Suites that follow the science as they will get out-competed. But it will take decades.
I also don't buy this. Companies are all profit oriented and don't like leaving money on the table if research shows there is left over money on the table.
They can't monetize control but they can monetize money. If research would show they would make more profits using AWS instead of Azure(example pulled out of my ass for simplicity), they would immediately switch to it.
So if research would be universal and clear cut that working 32 hours outcompetes those companies working 40 hours, then at least a significant proportion of companies would be using this new way of work as leverage to outcompete their competitors working 40 and beat them at profits and market share, and then that would become the new norm as it's the proven winning strategy, since that's how competition in capitalism works.
But so far that's not been the case.
https://www.businessinsider.com/return-to-office-mandates-re...
"Any one of the three economic factors described above (real estate, retention and recruitment), by itself, could justify the alleged loss in productivity. When you consider all three, it is extremely hard to imagine any organization for which the losses resulting from a strict RTO policy would be offset by a possible increase in worker productivity. As a further consideration, a strict RTO policy will also disproportionally impact certain traditionally disadvantaged groups, leading to further decreases in organizational diversity.":
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paologaudiano/2023/08/14/here-i...
People return to offices, productivity plunges:
https://ktla.com/news/money-business/people-return-to-office...
The return to the office could be the real reason for the slump in productivity. Here’s the data to prove it:
https://fortune.com/2023/02/16/return-office-real-reason-slu...
Expecting a return to office will boost worker productivity is ‘magical thinking,’ says Meta’s former director of remote work
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/expecting-return-office-boost...
> So if research would be universal and clear cut that working 32 hours outcompetes those companies working 40 hours, then at least a significant proportion of companies would be using this new way of work as leverage to outcompete their competitors working 40 and beat them at profits and market share, and then that would become the new norm as it's the proven winning strategy, since that's how competition in capitalism works.
If only it were that simple.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/15/alibabas-jack-ma-working-ove...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/175400/workers-sense-identity-j...
https://www.fastcompany.com/90955495/happiness-work-survey-u...
https://www.careerchange.com/newsletters/working-standards-u...
Also, "immediately" switching across cloud vendors is not even a pipe dream, it's an impossibility and the very act of switching is incredibly expensive both short and long term (unless your cloud usage is one VM or so). So there's no simplicity in that example, it's a counter-example.
How do we decide which model is the sustainable one?
It's my goal indeed, but not the goal of my country, the economy and the businesses in it who provide the jobs I work for and also lobby for the labor laws my EU country has.
Of course doing no work at all while getting paid loads would be the dream, but I wasn't talking about dreams, I was talking about reality. And the reality is way different than what you dream of.
How do we make less working days a reality for everyone, instead of just ~60 companies form the UK?
Solving super hard Sudoku puzzles 40 hours a week will take a toll on your brain that solving super hard Sudoku puzzles 1 hour a week empirically cannot.
>How do we decide which model is the sustainable one?
Through the exact science you say you "don't buy" because you seem to believe companies operating in a flawed market are better at finding ground truth than literal science.
I'm saying companies believe in science that leads to profit, as the market can stay irrational longer than companies can stay solvent.
Same how science showed switching to EUV lithography is better than sticking to DUV and then all companies adopted that, if science would also show workers working 32h per week results in more profit for them than 40h, then they would all switch in a heart beat to capture all that money left on the table by their competitors still stuck in their ancient 40h workweek.
But that hasn't happened.
The problem is if they pay you $x per year, they don't care how many hours you work, as long as the job gets done. So something that makes their life a bit more annoying (no replies on Friday) but makes your life amazingly better won't get done.
Because more money is what most candidates prioritize when job hopping, because when buying a house they can pay it with that money but can't pay it with more time off.
The only people who prioritize less hours for less money are those who are already fortunate enough to have enough money but those can always choose to work less hours for proportionately less pay.
Like it or not, there are so many people in this rat race trying to build wealth that 40h and more money is preferable to 32h and less money. That's why the 40h sticks and the negotiation is done on money.
Although you could argue that's already the case in a lot of Europe vs. parts of the US. Of course, it's an imperfect comparison because of the barriers to moving countries or even acquiring a remote job in a different country.
And there are things you can do to turn money into time, it's possible but not as easy to go the other way around when you're salaried.
So I'd have two criticisms of your "X-20%" figure. The first is that just because individual workers are only in 4 days a week, doesn't have to mean the factory only operates 4 days a week; indeed a lot of steel factories do some kind of shift work anyway because firing up a furnace from cold is hugely inefficient. Sure, that means more heads total and so more HR expenses than if everyone worked 5 days, but I don't think it adds up to the 20% you quoted.
Secondly, as in Ford's case, the extra productivity you get this way might be enough to more than offset the losses, and even increase your profits.
[1] https://www.morningbrew.com/sidekick/stories/history-five-da... [2] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/american-... (But note, the claim that moving to a 5-day week was a pay cut needs some context. The 5-day week started in 1926. But in 1914, Ford already doubled his workers' wages from $2.50/day (which was already not bad by the standards of the time) to $5/day, almost unheard of at the time - though initially with strings attached [3] which were later removed. So working 5 days a week at Ford's factory could well have still brought in more net pay a week than 6 days a week at a competitor in 1926. [3] https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/henry-ford-implements-5...
Henry Ford's revenue boost firstly came from his improvements to automation and innovative highly optimized production line assembly processes, not because le let his workers work 5 days a week instead of 6.
It was those innovations that allowed him to reduce the numbers of worker hours needed while get same productivity levels or higher, not vice versa as they didn't just magically come from working his workers less but from innovations to production lines efficiency. Workers working less was a consequence of that, not the cause.
> Ernst Abbe, the head of one of the greatest German factories, wrote many years ago that the shortening from nine to eight hours, that is, a cutting-down of more than 10 per cent, did not involve a reduction of the day’s product, but an increase, and that this increase did not result from any supplementary efforts by which the intensity of the work would be reinforced in an unhygienic way. This conviction of Abbe still seems to hold true after millions of experiments over the whole globe.
This was written 1913, about the time when Ford's automation was just getting going - the "many years ago" and the fact that Abbe died 1905, shows his studies were referring to a time before Ford's production lines and efficiency gains.
> That output does not rise or fall in direct proportion to the number of hours worked is a lesson that seemingly has to be relearned each generation. In 1848, the English parliament passed the ten-hours law and total output per-worker, per-day increased. In the 1890s employers experimented widely with the eight hour day and repeatedly found that total output per-worker increased. In the first decades of the 20th century, Frederick W. Taylor, the originator of “scientific management” prescribed reduced work times and attained remarkable increases in per-worker output.
This too is from a pre-Ford time.
So I would reply that while Ford's innovations might have compounded any gains from shorter working hours, such gains have been found in many other places and times. indeed, the IGDA summarises their evidence by saying "five-day weeks of eight-hour days maximize long-term output in every industry that has been studied over the past century".
The number of widgets produced and the price asked for them is not a function of workdays.
You’d need to control for quality of widget produced - and since buyers are human that may mean perceived quality rather than some absolute assessment of quality.
You’d need to control for location & distance to market/customer for each widget produced.
You’d need to control for efficiency of production process.
You’d need to control for… you get the point. The only possible way your idea could stand would be if all else was held equal - and that’s simply not possible outside of horse shit models.
Models can be useful, but not like this. This is a BS way to think about an economic model.
Exactly. And most companies and factories in the west have already optimized for all these factors to get maximum output on a 5 day work week. Moving to a 4 day workweek would be an automatic production loss and therefore a loss on economic competitiveness compared top those still on 5.
What you're talking about, companies who can lower working hours without loosing productivity and competitiveness are very few and far between, usually world champions who have a captive market to themselves like Nvidia, ASML, Airbus, high end service jobs, etc, but that's only a microscopic share of the total amount of players on the market. The rest are firing on all cylinders trying to overtake or catch up to those established market players, and if you ever worked at a startup, it usually means longer hours, not fewer.
>This is a BS way to think about an economic model.
What's the better way? If all companies could get the same levels of productivity form 4 days a weeks from 5 why haven't they done that already?
Factories and companies start and die all the time. The idea that some steady state equilibrium exists is only in these BS models.
>> production loss and therefore a loss on economic competitiveness
Apple is less competitive because it makes less iPhones than Samsung?
>> What's the better way?
Stop pretending models predict reality perfectly.
But what it reality to you and how do you describe it if not by models?
Complicated. It’s rare for any interesting scenario not to be complicated.
>> how do you describe it
By aiming for honesty and accuracy but with enough humility to realise these absolutes are unachievable in most interesting cases. To make it more concrete in this particular case It means being careful to state assumptions is essential.
There is a massive hole in your logic.
It's inevitable really.
Since that will never happen—no.
Look at remote work, it was fairly uncommon in programming and very uncommon outside of programming.
Then everyone was forced to do it with Covid and now it’s much more common because it works. Everyone was free to negotiate at any time before and after Covid, but anything that was even mildly radical would be met with a hard no. Simply because nobody else does it that way.
I agree that it shouldn’t be mandated with laws, but I don’t agree that it should be left totally up to employer / employee because the power balance of negotiation still sits with the employer too much.
Unfortunately I don’t know what the solution is, we need some external force that’s not as firm as a law to push a large number of companies to 4 days, what could that be I wonder… ?
Great for you to manage to find those gigs, it's not representative of the more general trend.
It was always there, for a very few select opportunities. I only got 2 remote gigs for very early stage startups without an office before COVID (and I've been in this industry for 20 years), after it's been 70% of offers from recruiters telling me "we're remote friendly".
Do you understand the difference? If you don't like unions, don't join one, you're free to do it, as others are free to associate and be part of one. If you don't like a unionised place you can always move to another job, it will always be there for you, no worries.
"Do I understand the difference?"
Sure, the free market is favourable for some. Others stand to benefit more from collectivisation.
You seem to conflate your experience with the general experience, that's an extremely harmful bias to have since it signals you are unable to see the bigger picture, nor empathise with how others have very different life experiences...
Again, great for you, it wasn't the common experience.
Of course employee are going to report happy. What next? a study saying "Employees love more money for the same work?"
isn't this also about the firms loving it? If it's a win/win for both sides, what's the problem?
Some examples:
* Never-ending optimism about UBI, despite the maths clearly not working. Kind of similar to this really.
* Expecting salary to exactly match value - i.e. to get the same pay remote working no matter where you live. The number of people here that fundamentally don't understand that salary is a supply/demand negotiation is weird. And they really don't think it through to the obvious conclusion if it did happen - they'd get paid the same as people in Eastern Europe or India.
I think a 4-day work week could eventually happen, but HN types like to pretend it will make people more productive which it absolutely won't. It probably won't reduce productivity to 80%. More like 90%. But it will happen as a cultural shift; not because it increases productivity.
More diversity in this area could bring a worldwide increase of productivity, wellbeing and result in an economic boost.
There is no reason not to ratchet down the work week as productivity has increased, and most people work to live, not live to work (as indicated by the satisfaction indicators in these 4 day week trials).
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-29/japan-s-t... | https://archive.today/jXo6a
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/apr/13/uk-worst-pe...
[3] https://www.google.com/search?q=us+school+districts+4+day+we...
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39261177 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39254455 (citations)
but I'll take a 4 day workweek (I assume 8 hours a day)
Since https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/ "productivity" in not a thing really interests companies, they are much more interesting in having an effective grip on their workers, with remote workers the sole grip is fair conditions and nice work environment. They do want to keep the geographical grip and various other small potatoes grip on workers. Here the popularity of shorter workweeks, of course "if you go in the office", meaning if you live nearby.
I can work 6 days a week, no issue, but if the job can be done from remote it MUST BE done from remote.
More discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39457728
There was corporate in-fighting over who would would be responsible for some work, and my team lost, so my team no longer had any work to do. My manager quit, but his manager didn't actually know what we did on a day-to-day basis so basically left us alone. He was extremely occupied with the work from another one of his teams, anyways.
It was actually kind of stressful. I was always waiting for the day that my acting manager would discover that we had no work to do and would eliminate the entire team. I ended up leaving and getting a job where I actually had important (to the company, anyways) work to do at a significantly higher salary.
And if so, what's stopping them next to increase it back to 5 and chase 5 days worth of productivity out of 5 days/week instead of the previous 4 using the same efficiency gains as performance benchmarks of the 4 days/week?
I don't think anyone can truly deep focus 8 hours a day without burning out at some point.
Of course, but if this is a known fact, why are we still working 5 days a week as the norm and not 4?
Clearly inertia is more important to companies and legislators than facts.
Or that probably not all jobs are so leisurely and inefficient, that 5 days of actual productivity can be don in less.
Many? I doubt it. Maybe many very privileged tech/big-corp workers in developed rich western countries, but globally that's not that many.
Your argument is exactly the argument companies use to justify not going 4 days a week. If workers already have it so good that they have free time to slack off one day out of 5 days per week what's to say they also won't slack off for a day at 4 days per week once that becomes the norm?
Don't get me wrong I'd be al for it, but your comment proves many already have it so much better even at 5 days/week.
And obviously people won't dying because they're sleep deprived but because they're lazy.
Management can say anything, it doesn't make it true.
It reminds me of the way that as we improve in our ability to automate laws, we're going to need to do a better job of thinking about what laws are for rather than assuming that simply reifying the current laws exactly into computerized enforcement will do what we expect: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17094010
Just because a butt is in a seat does not mean a butt is doing work. It wasn't true before, it isn't true now, and it won't be true if they try to squeeze another day out at the new efficiency levels. It may be a common delusion but there is no magic path to that level of productivity.
How didn't it work? Probably the devie you're typing this on was made by a person working 5 days/week, or way more if we're talking early iOS /Android devices.
If you're going to roll with "actually people have in fact been productively working 5 days a week after all" than I would advise FirmwareBurner of 6 minutes ago to take the debate up with FirmwareBurner of 1 hour ago. I don't see that I'd add any value in mediating that discussion.
The top post tries to identify the results as reducing the hours of 5 days of work into 4, the response to that was highlighting that the goal wasn't to make up for missing hours but to try and measure the efficacy of needing that fifth day's 'worth' of hours. You then selectively choose how you interprete the topic to be either:
1) questioning why they couldn't use their results of 5 days VS 4 days to effectively say "if you're effective in 4, then why not 5?
then when questioned on how this doesn't make sense in the context of the article, feign confusion on the distinction and ignore the results of the article to flip flop to your other point:
2) questioning the articles results by asking others outside of the study to personally prove to you what the measure of "success" is since you see modern technology built with this framework (phones) as a reason why it shouldn't change
despite this being a nonsequitor that isn't a point anyone has shown interest in discussing. Then when asked why you went from being confused on why they couldn't use the results showing their effectiveness to try and enforce another "effective" day, to then denying the results and saying that it's already effective and to ask others to personally prove to you why it isn't effective (instead of reading the article).
Do you have any answer yet?
In manufacturing industries this type of schedule is quite common. Not all industries are like tech or will follow it.
Companies that won’t do 4 days (32h) per week might do a slightly longer day instead. Maybe 9 hours worked with an hour lunch
Being paid for less hours (32) per week for 4 days is fine too.