During mass layoffs, why haven't companies offered employees the opportunity to drop down to a four day work week? I'd think many would take the extra day off each week, even if it included a proportional reduction in pay.
1. Full carrying cost of an employee is much more then their salary so this math is not as straight forward if you’re just cutting time and salary to account for that time.
2. You should assume most people aren’t counting hours in places like Meta, reducing to a 4 day week imho will start making people think more about counting exact hours they’re working. It’s partially why the “4 10s” concept is also a bad idea that permeates the defense contractors.
3. Staying focused 5 days a week for one person probably has better compounding effects for that week than a few people working part time and taking longer to get the work done with longer breaks in between “sessions”. Harder to measure of course but it’s one thing I’d be worried about. Easier to think about if you say each person works 2.5 days a week for half their pay, I’d rather just have one person.
4. Layoffs let you cut by performance.
Like this:
> will start making people think more about counting exact hours they’re working. It’s partially why the “4 10s” concept is also a bad idea that permeates the defense contractors.
Maybe that's a good thing? [1]
I have no doubt that Meta is thinking like your four points and hiding behind "it's the corporation making the decisions, not a bunch of people at high levels", but... Ugh.
[1] Nitpick - I was speaking to a friend about a decade ago regarding their OT/IOT work in the defense industry, and they told me that they had to aggressively track every hour. The feds were punitive when it came to unreported overtime.
If you're doing work on a cost-plus-fixed-fee contract (which many software development efforts are) then you have to count hours anyway because you get paid based on what you bill. The fact that nothing substantial gets done in the additional 1-2 hours a day is immaterial because these arrangements are really just fringe benefits in the form of additional time off for employees. As a practical example: people working "9 hour days" with mid-afternoon on-site customer meetings and a half Friday from home certainly aren't fitting 40 hours of productivity into their week and nobody cares - everybody gets paid, the job gets done (for some value thereof), and millions of Americans stay employed. One might even argue that this is a feature since working less efficiently means more billable hours to the government and a larger economy.
Though the bigger reason is the belief that people who are willing to take a paycut in order to work less are not the people you want on the team. There's still a stigma to not making (or least pretending to make) your job the priority and treating every other part of life as a support role for it.
Also, theoretically Meta is getting rid of their worst performers, so their cuts and declines in productivity would not be proportional, especially as the cuts inspire fear to motivate productivity from the remaining employees.
Haha, no, it inspires motivation for finding a new job. Interview prep takes time!
> Haha, no, it inspires motivation for finding a new job. Interview prep takes time
Everyone's circumstances are different. Many people - especially those with dependents - would reasonably be afraid. Whether that would inspire lasting productivity is questionable. It could also inspire less productive ways of getting ahead.