I wish these stories would say if the hours are changing or not.
32 hours, 4 days a week seems better to me. But if all you do is take 40 hours and make it 10 hour days I’m not that much happier.
32 hours, 4 days a week seems better to me. But if all you do is take 40 hours and make it 10 hour days I’m not that much happier.
But in order to do that we had to work 9 hour days Monday - Thursday.
That extra hour those four days felt torturous, so it meant four days of feeling awful just so I could leave a few hours early on a day in which most people (and myself) already weren't working too hard anyway.
I hated it.
This was at a very low output insurance company, btw, so there often wasn't huge pressure to get things done quickly (new software releases were once a quarter, and IT would complain that two months lead time wasn't enough time to provision a single new server that was a clone of an existing server, as an example of how slow things moved), and the days dragged on way long.
I worked more high pressure startups before where I was often there for 9 or more hours by necessity to meet deadlines that didn't feel so bad.
Many people took the 4x10 but then discovered they couldn't handle 10 hour days every day. Like you said, the last 1-2 hours were so unproductive they might as well have been not working.
So some people didn't even try to work those last 2 hours. They'd sit at their desks and watch things or play games, pretending to work when anyone came in. Kind of ruined it for everyone.
Sounds like you spread Friday across the other days. Still a good deal to me, I'd take some online courses or something I wanted to do anyway in my free time.
Oh, joy. I definitely wouldn't prefer a prison cell with a bed, tv, bookshelf, and privacy. What were those WFH people crying about?
> But in order to do that we had to work 9 hour days Monday - Thursday.
This is SOP at my work in Spain. It's fine for me, they're very flexible anyway. And I work from home so much that it doesn't really exhaust me.
But I have been WFH the past six years and at this point I can't really handle going to the office for a full day anymore. Every once in a while I go into the office for something and after 4 hours I'm staring at the clock and itching to leave (even if I have work to do).
I usually duck out after about 6 hours, I say it's to beat the worst of the traffic (which is true, it's still pretty bad, I still have a 60-90 minute commute home), but also just because I feel super antsy by that point.
And my current office isn't terrible (but it's not good either). The one where I had to work 9 hour days that one summer was twice as sterile, with terrible dim flourescent lighting, and it was way too formal.
Agreed. I have to go twice a week officially but I wouldn't know how to cope if I actually did that. I end up going once every two weeks or so and I come late and knock off early. And yeah like you say I'm super drained after it. One time my vision even started flashing when I was in the metro. Now I have to say I'm neurodivergent so these things take a lot out of me.
But the office has changed also. Before the pandemic I used to come 2-3 times a week but I had my own desk, sat beside colleagues who I actually worked with and that understood the thing about IT which is if I have my headphones on I don't want to be interrupted because I'm concentrating on something.
Now we have people from all departments all over the place, like sales and marketing blabbing on the phone. It's very distracting. We have to fight over desks (often people take my booked desk and other people book one and don't show up), I have to carry around my stuff like I'm in playschool. It just feels like it's just a show, it no longer accomplishes anything. It's a very hostile work environment now.
WFH is just so much better. I'm more relaxed, my head is clear, I have more time to chat with others on Teams, and if I need to do something at night I just grab my screen because it's all open anyway. There's much less barriers.
We actually work 9hs here in Argentina (1h is for lunch, although you're probably still at the office and discussing work-related things anyways so...)
Is the common thing in the US to work 9-5 (8hs) with lunch included? Or do you guys just not take lunch?
One fewer day of needing to context-switch would be a major life improvement.
Tasks expand to take up the available time, even if usefulness doesn’t.
I suspect you’d see little loss in cutting down to 32/hr/week, and I suspect it would be more than made up for by the gains of giving people that extra day. So it may be a net positive.
I guess my main concern is that a lot of companies (not speaking about Japan here, just the US) might decide to use four days a week as a way to make people crunch four days thinking that having three days off would make up for that. And things wouldn’t really be any better.
If you took a 4x per week job, you'd usually get a 20% pay reduction; however, many jobs could be compressed to 4 days without any loss in productivity.
but if you've got a project, and you can just put your head down and work, then 10s are really nice.
The biggest issue with 10s is commute time. If you work 10s with an hour+ commute, that's just awful.
probably not long-term sustainable.
Otoh, if you take mass transit, waiting an hour or two may put you into all stop trains which could increase your commute time.
Things improve, jobs take less time to do, so they give us more. But it’s the same number of hours so pay doesn’t go up.
We all get screwed.
It was so much easier since then.
I'd much much rather work 4 x 10 than 5 x 8. Having a whole day without work makes a huge difference. Also, I find myself working 10 hrs a day anyway, so 5 x 10 (or more like 5 x 12).
Most of these four-day workweeks are almost always bullshit, because they insist on keeping the same hours. I hope that's not the case here. Some companies have been experimenting with just slashing a day a week completely and it always increase productivity, retention and happiness.
We've just implemented it for the winter and, while kind of good, the expectation is that you'll just get your work done with no conversation about capacity or differences between employees and departments and workloads.
I've actually said it ... I'd prefer 5 days with hybrid than a 4 day week
Who thought everyone wants a 4 day week? ... I just want the freedom to choose a balanced life and get a job done ... effectively giving the employer a day back!
I feel like we've learned nothing from Covid.
Having ranted that. For those implementing this properly. Kudos.