I know that there is the argument about "if I have fewer hours they will be more focused", but that to me sounds like it's entirely wishful thinking and in a few years will be having the same amount of wasted hours in those days too, as people start thinking of Thursday as the new Friday.
I assume there is some sort of middle ground between working too much and working too little. Are there any actual evidence that that optimum middle ground is 4 days and not 3, or 5?
I would find the whole idea much more palatable if it wasn't sold by claiming something likely isn't true (people working fewer hours do more work), and instead someone was honest and admitted that this is a political project.
What I find much more interesting is switching from a 7 day week to something else entirely, for example working on: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday is free, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday is free. I can see how that might result in people being more productive, as they still work the same amount of hours, but they don't get as exhausted as before.
You did a reductio ad absurdum in one direction, let's do it in the other: if hours worked directly translates to productivity, then we should be able to add more hours and continually get more productivity. Why not add Saturdays and Sundays back in? Then we can go to 10 hour workdays. Maybe 12 hours?
Even aside from the humanitarian arguments against this, it should be obvious that there reaches a point where the marginal return for additional hours is negative—where adding extra hours reduces total productivity.
Experiments like this are designed to find out where that inflection point is, and the evidence that's coming in so far suggests that the inflection point is somewhere below 40 hours. More research is needed, but that's exactly what is happening.
If someone's job is in customer service and the key part of their role is to answer the phone when it rings/respond to the email when it arrives ... you don't need research to determine that if they are not there, the phone/email doesn't get answered.
If you let them stay at home on Fridays, either you pay someone else to come in on those Fridays, or you accept that phone calls/emails won't be answered on Fridays. Ever.
This appears to be really easy to propose/promote when it's not your company :(
The first is munitions production in England during WWI. There was linear production in hours worked, up to about 48 hours per week, then the marginal product went down; going negative after about 63 hours. See Figure 5 of "The Productivity of Working Hours", John Pencavel, 2014 at https://docs.iza.org/dp8129.pdf for a graph.
On a more national level, "The effects of working time on productivity and firm performance: a research synthesis paper", Lonnie Golden (2011) at http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_protect/---pro... points out:
] A recent analysis of 18, mostly European, Member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development explores the degree to which longer annual hours have been associated with per-hour productivity at the national level, since 1950. It finds that the responsiveness of per-hour productivity for a given increase in working time is always negative. Not only are there decreasing returns on added working time, the returns in the form of added production diminish more rapidly for longer working times. When annual working time climbs above a threshold of 1,925 hours, a 1-per cent increase in working time would lead to a decrease in productivity of roughly 0.9 per cent at the threshold and a fully proportional decrease of 1 per cent past the threshold of 2,025 hours (Cette et al., 2011).
30 hours work at 40 hours office time vs 30 hours work at 30 hours office time would have different outputs for sure.
a) There is loss in productivity but it isn't (or can't be) properly measured or does not make an impact on the business, e.g. a help desk responds to customers with 1 business day rather than 4 business hours.
b) People are more motivated (including it being a novelty) so employees are eager to work harder in their reduced hours to ensure they can continue a 4-day working week. If this becomes the norm after a while you may see this slack off.
c) Lots of people are doing busy-work or "bullshit tasks" which do not actually affect business productivity or are simply just looking busy and procrastinating, e.g. office workers browsing Twitter, Reddit or HN for a short time every couple of hours which is eliminated.
It highlights saying "don't confuse activity with achievement/productivity".
Going forward with the idea that workers deserve a bit of a break:
> sounds like it's entirely wishful thinking and in a few years will be having the same amount of wasted hours in those days
I can see that to some extent, but if expectations stay the same I think "trimming the fat" would be a more likely outcome - i.e. more push-back on pointless meetings and other inefficiency. I'd expect it to take a longer time than just a few years for apathy to set in - at which point we would have more data about the effectiveness of the plan over time.
> Are there any actual evidence that that optimum middle ground is 4 days and not 3, or 5?
I think lots of us have anecdata that "meaningful work done" does not drop by 20% (if at all) in a 4-day week, and satisfaction increases substantially. I can imagine a future push to reduce further to 3 days - but isn't that a realistic expectation given further productivity-boosting technology will arrive?
That is exactly what I meant by this being a political project to which we try to will evidence into existence.
Microsoft Japan did 4 day workweeks and saw 40% increase in productivity.
https://mashable.com/article/microsoft-japan-4-day-work-week...
Its likely because a 3 day weekend allows people to totally disconnect from work and rest. It even allows you to travel, visit family etc.
1) Many office workers spent some 50-80% of their work hours on overhead (meetings, email), leaving very little time for actual focused tasks, things that actually need to get done. When you work one day less, you just optimize the overhead part whilst still outputting the same net productivity.
2) The human mind cannot be cognitively productive 5 x 8. Consciously or subconsciously, you'll bleed downtime into your day, quite a lot of it. Pretending to be busy, sitting out the time. Not because you're a slacker, you're just human. Office work is deeply unnatural.
If it were that easy to cull out the overhead it'd be done by now in the existing 5-day week.
I can see no reason (and none is presented in any of the comments) why moving to a 4-day week will suddenly reduce pointless meetings. It's asserted as fact multiple times, but it isn't.
First and foremost, this discussion doesn't always mean 4x8 hour days, it could very well mean 4x10. Same number of hours, in fewer days. By your admission this should be the same amount of productivity, however you define that.
You're also admitting it's reductio ad absurdum, so why not just stop with that? Clearly there is some maximal point of work-per-unit-of-time (e.g. productivity). 0 hours of work will be 0 production by definition, and 40 is whatever it is now, P. Who's to say that 38 hours instead of 40 wouldn't be 1.01P? Who's to say that 45 hours wouldn't be 0.9P? Being so against these types of experiments presupposes that we've magically landed on the 40 hour work week and it just so happens to be the maximal point of productivity. The odds of that being that case are pretty small.
> Are there any actual evidence that that optimum middle ground is 4 days and not 3, or 5?
Maybe that's the whole point of doing things like this? You don't get evidence like this in a lab or in a thought experiment, you get it by having companies try this out and see what happens to their revenue, their worker retention, their customer base, etc. Maybe 32 hours a week will result in less total revenue but a wildly loyal employee and customer base, that could be translated into a larger business in the long term even with higher per capita expense?
> What I find much more interesting is switching from a 7 day week to something else entirely, for example working on: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday is free, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday is free. I can see how that might result in people being more productive, as they still work the same amount of hours, but they don't get as exhausted as before.
This is still a 7 day week you're just broken up the weekend. I'm not sure how that results in people "not as exhausted."
I could see it have no effect at first while people appreciate the extra time off, so they work harder for four days, but if it becomes the norm that would normalize and productivity would slowly drop across that society.
No, because the argument for the four-day work week is that the extra day takes 20% more time but does not contribute anything like 20% more productivity.
People are worn out by the time they get to Friday, and so 5 people working 4 days can get more done than 4 people working 5 days, even though "man-hours" is the same.
This is one of those experiments.
Counterpoint: what makes 40 hours a week the sweet spot? Why is 40 more productive than 50?
I know we often think in the smaller system of capitalism, but the point of any economic system is to bring overall better quality of life to citizens.
A lot of people are now observing that additional work doesn't bring additional quality of life, and so the next push for improved quality of life now might come at reconsidering the 5 day work week and maybe making it 4.
Now about productivity, there's a few arguments:
1. Reducing wasted time. Lots of work is inefficient, lots of meetings going in circles, distractions, etc. If you have only 4 days, you hope that it will push companies to reduce the waste.
2. Rest/leisure and productivity have correlations. Maybe an extra day of rest can boost people's work days and actually make them more productive.
3. Most type of work where people are considering 4 day work week is creative work. Productivity often comes simply from better ideas and better decisions. An extra work day doesn't really affect the quality of your decisions and the potential of your ideas.
4. Most type of work where people are considering 4 day work week have uneven value output. Something you did in the first quarter on its own can provide enough value to justify your entire year's salary.
It was an actual service based company where more hours meant more customers served.
Now, I can buy the theory of very unproductive fridays when nothing gets done, but I think a better model would be to just work 6 hours instead of 8.
That's the problem with this whole thing. People don't have a rationale for it. They just want to work fewer hours.
If the 4-day week happens, we will see the same arguments being made for the 3-day week, because there is no actual basis for any of this: people will always want to work fewer hours than they work now.
7 days is 100%
If you'd work 7 days, there's no downtime to recover. You simply just tear into your reserves, and get less productive each week until you hit diminishing "returns" in being less productive, getting to some low productive apathy state. It's productivity rock bottom. There are people who can manage this but very few can.
6 days 86%. Now you can rest for a day. Great! But there's still little time for socializing and other stuff in life. There's no way of flourishing at all. Also, if there's trouble but not enough trouble (e.g. bad sleep), then you'll be using that day and there's no socialization at all that week. Or time to spend on your hobbies.
5 days is 71%. Now you can devote 29% of every week on free time. Literally 29% of your life is free. You can now absorb fairly big shocks that aren't covered in illness protection plans. You also have time to get into a hobby.
So why 4? The cyclical nature of the week makes it to be 57%. 43% is left to free time. I'm working this amount. If I include my vacation days with it, I work an exact 50% and am free 50%. I have sleep issues that no doctor cares to know about. My free day is on a Wednesday. If my sleep is screwed over then I can rest all day during a Wednesday or a Saturday. Sunday is always left over for free time. If I have a good week of sleep, then it can happen that I feel a bit bored. I have too much free time. It results in an iron clad focus on work.
I've worked 5 days per week. I never had an iron clad focus as I was always struggling with sleep. If my sleep was screwed over on Monday, then I'd need to suffer until Friday. Now I only need to suffer until Wednesday and sometimes I even swap days and don't have to suffer at all.
So that's a simple example of how it improves my focus. It's an example of how I'm probably more productive on 4 days than 5. Why more? Productivity drops by 50% for programmers with severe sleep deprivation.
Different sectors and situations may have different results. But I'd suggest to try and sketch out different scenarios where it does and doesn't work.
So why not 3? Well maybe 3. I can tell you why not 2, because it's extreme enough for me to see why. The context of work starts to fade. Your subconscious starts to deal with issues less to not at all (in the context of programming). It takes way longer to warm up. Why is this the case with 2? Because 2 days of work is only 29% of your week. Your identity will be formed around what you'll do in your free time. Work will become a "side thing". You will be amazingly well rested to work, provided you can manage your life well. But the extra increase in focus won't make up for it. The switch between 5 to 4 days may in certain cases may not up for it either, but in my particular case it's clear that it does.
Not a fan of the idea, he scoffed and said something like, ‘I pay you to be at your desk from 9am-5.30pm Monday-Friday. Why should I pay you the same for a day less?’
I don’t think he realised it at the time, but that answer was devastating to company productivity and morale. He’d just demonstrated to everyone that he didn’t value results and all that was important was bums on seats.
People stopped putting in extra effort, waited out their hours as that was all that was required and started brushing up their CVs. I left not long after and so did many others.
Even if he did only care about results, it's a likely scenario that 4 day weeks reduce results or at the least introduce a risk that isn't worth taking. I think the average worker actually prefers just being required to work a certain amount and as long as you aren't extremely bad at your job, you'll be fine even if you have a slow week/month. Rather than being frequently being audited for results and pressured to work longer hours to keep your output up with everyone else.
What mattkevan quoted was brutally honest, but did not go over well.
I agree. It seems like this is another new trend that's coming up because we still haven't found the solution to high-stress IT work. I don't think this is it.
I’ve heard that what we appreciate in people also tells a lot about us and when I hear my director only acknowledge the long hours, I realize that only the long hours are appreciated.
Luckily my immediate management chain knows better and understand the importance of creativity, meaningful output and WLB that I stick around.
Maybe it's survivorship bias? The kind of people who manage to become CEOs are the ones who have strong opinions but haven't suffered backlash for them. If they had experienced half their orgchart hating them, they wouldn't have made the cut?
The question from me is, did you manage to move to a company where you got paid the same or more, but for "a day less hours"?
Employers can make that claim if the job market is in their favor, i.e. if most other companies agree with them and decide that they need staff available Mo-Fr 9-5 or for less hours but also for proportionally less salary, which to my experience is most employers.
To normalize this, we need the majority of employers (>51% of them) to switch to paying market rate for less hours, putting pressure on the rest that this is the new norm, but I haven't seen that yet in my EU country, except for a notable couple of companies that made headlines, out of which one recently filed for bankruptcy. So as long as only a tiny minority of companies are doing this, the norm will not change. All businesses here think like your ex-boss: 'Why should I pay you the same for a day less?’ and the market favors their approach as they have seen no mass resignations since they all can afford to act like this.
Therefore, the only solution would be the same as the one that lead to the 8 hour workweek being normalized almost 100 years ago: mass strikes and labor movements followed by government regulations that makes the 4 day workweek the new norm for everyone.
Mass strikes are certainly quicker though.
A few years ago in Sweden one of the top businesses leaders scoffed at tax evasion and basically said that why should he pay taxes if he can afford to avoid it. The statement annoyed people, and did so much more than just the fact of tax evasion. It actually resulted in him being forced to step down from several of his position.
Employers are rarely rewarded for scoffing and treating employees like they are not worth anything.
There needs to be a better method of incentives put in place that coincides with an extra day off.
I would propose not an extra day off, but perhaps an extra day of personal development instead? Something relaxing but related to work maybe?
People are simply too distracted with all the crack social media and Netflix’s auto-play algorithm. So I’d wager that sometimes people will use that day productively, but maybe 7/10 it’ll be wasted down some rabbit hole.
In fact, you could probably argue that people are so distracted these days that they’re productivity and happiness would both go up if they were no longer wasting time online and you ADDED another work day.
1894-2002
If I had stayed at my first company, I guaranteed would be making less than 50% of what I make now. There's plenty more I would have missed out on, especially relating to career growth. And that first company was often in the top 100 places to work.
Productivity in the US is up as far as I can tell.
Who are you to decide if people use their days off "productively?" And most orgs that have a day in the office scheduled for personal development/training, inevitably end up pushing other responsibilities into those hours, eventually making them useless. If someone is in the office, it's just too easy for them to be pestered for "real work."
The idea isn't that to get more work out of people, it's to provide them with a healthy WLB; so they don't get burned out, so they're more productive when they're "nice and relaxed" from their time off.
Judge not lest ye...
If a 4-day week was more widespread, I would have more confidence in maintaining it - and on the odd occasion I have to work the extra day, I wouldn't feel so bad given the 100% pay model described here.
Have the confidence.
There were downsides (A project failed because I didn’t have time to fill in the shortcomings of a teammate, which I’d been quietly doing), but on the balance it was very positive.
My tentative plan is to get promoted first, then step down to 80% - that way the pay cut is even smaller relative to now and with a bigger tax saving.
Aside from the other concerns mentioned, I'm currently working on "what would I do with an extra day per week" - which is a deeper lifestyle question and not at all related to work, but still very important for getting the most out of this change.
Generally it worked ok but not being around one day a week did cause some annoying situations - but that's partly because I moved into a different role that had more responsibility (and that was their doing). I think I made an exception for a meeting on my day off once or twice in all that time, and that was just to make my life easier, everything else was batted back with a flat "no" which was understood after an initial period of grumbling.
Now that child is older I don't need as much flexibility and so I moved company to go full time again. Work life balance is still good thanks to it being a fully remote role.
I do more than twice as much in 40 hours as I could in 20. I do far more than 40x in 40 hours as I could in 1 hour since there’s some overhead in task shifting. But four days a week is probably okay.
And you know it’s quite easy to block your calendar don’t let FOMO hold you back.
Setup your calendar to auto-reject meeting invitations with a polite message that you no longer work Friday and if your attendance is required for the meeting then please schedule for Mon-Thurs during your working hours.
I do this with my non working hours, I book a block of 'out of office' time which auto rejects meetings and notes my normal working hours for the inviters future reference.
I would recommend you try it. It’s always going to be easy to go back to full time if it isn’t working out for you.
Something tells me you don't feel that way if you have to work the occasional Saturday today, so I doubt this would be the case after this change after a very short amount of time.
If the (overwhelming?) majority of staff in the company are at work on Friday, every Friday, and they can't ever reach you on a Friday, isn't that pretty much guaranteed to be a [potential] source of friction?
I think it's a gimmick that some businesses will use for publicity purposes and nothing more.
Anyone looking for a bit of an SEO boost for their website can feel free to jump on board...
Google "theguardian four day week" and you'll see this outlet has form on the topic.
Q: Can you work a four-day week at full pay if you're employed by Guardian Media Group?
What do you mean? The former looks like a public limited company and the latter a private limited company, both of which are forms of incorporation, as opposed to a partnership. What kind of company did you think they were?
UK workers are (with some narrow exceptions) entitled to 5.6 weeks per year of paid leave. Employers can choose to make you take some of this leave when they want it taken rather than when you want it, including the Bank Holidays (national holidays). In a tech job you are almost certainly going to get 5.6 weeks plus the Bank Holidays and maybe more.
It's calculated as 5.6 weeks because logically if I work 5 days per week, and you work 4 days per week, and our employer gives us both 20 days of leave to take whenever we like, for you that would be five weeks whereas for me it's only four weeks which isn't the same. 5.6 weeks will be 28 full days for a full time Monday-Friday office worker, but only 14 full days for their colleague who only works Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday morning in a job share.
The vacation problem was solved by providing "weeks" to everyone along with the interesting legal fiction that everyone worked ten hours so our "weeks" were implemented using "hours". So new employees got "two weeks" which on paper were implemented as 80 hours.
These are all very old issues in 24x7 operations environments including outside IT/tech/computer-stuff. The only "innovation" is when the payroll clerk starts doing 4x10s like she's a front line nurse, or the graphics artist in marketing starts doing 4x10s 3rd shift like he's a field service tech.
Some people were already on a 4 day week and they were essentially given a 25% pay rise instead
People can stretch to meet a deadline, or avert a crisis—but they need time to recover afterwards. The extra effort and productivity comes at a cost that needs to be repaid for their health and wellbeing.
The purpose of the 4 day week trials around the world has been to evaluate if there’s a measurable drop in productivity, and it seems overwhelmingly there hasn’t been.
I mean, if those scientists are successful they'll be getting a congressional medal of honor, millions of dollars in speaking fees, and probably given their choice of job in space science afterwards. Am I getting those things for pushing some HTML?
Some of the greatest ideas are conceived when away from work with just time to think on your own. We always need breaks and rest.
However, if you have a well-rested, happy and productive team that has adequate time for leisure and recreation, you can turn up the pace for those exceptional months that are really make or break.
But if you try to get people to run at that pace continuously, you'll get a lot of resignations and a few heart attacks at 50.
I think 4 days week would result in people having two jobs regularly. I wonder if the situation is simalar with basic job workers in more advanced economies.
One interesing point is that people in my IT company were willing to put 5-10% of their income in exchange for work from home. But this is IT.
I think that the right way to go is not to reduce the number of hours but just allow people to work 4 days per week with hourly rate intact. This might be a very welcomed option by many people.
Also - signing up for this in the high inflation time might work well instead of raising compensations. So this is a good time to carry such experiments.
I even expect that this would have a rather minor impact on my work (like 10% decrease). I think for jobs like writing CRUD screens for entire week the productivity drop may be more significant.
Actually this inspires me to ask my employer this January for such offer.
Disclaimer: Single person, no children or other commitments.
I do not think this is lawful. In our agreements we only prohibit doing a work for our competitors or directly competitive work. If you like your employer then do not come up with this with them, but stay informed of your rights.
Why? The company is going to use your home as an office and they should be paying that 5-10% extra. Why business paying corporate landlord for office space is okay, but when Joe Public offers his own lowly place then it's a no no? When people don't recognise their value, they are prime for being exploited.
With a pay cut we are sure people are serious about WFH and not only demanding.
How could that be if Germans already make 1/3 dollars compared to the US.
It's not a meaningful comparison without cost of living adjustment. You're not paying 3000 dollars for a one bedroom apartment either. In fact last time I visited Poland I think a place in central Warsaw was like 600 bucks. Poland is exceptionally affordable.
For those on tech wages, which have reached near parity with the west, or work remotely for western companies, yes. But not everyone in Poland earns tech wages.
I say all that to say that while I am not a subject matter expert, I have a significantly above average amount of experience working various types of rotating shift work as well as duty rotations (a duty rotation is working 24 hours every 2, 3, 4, or 5 days depending on available manpower. Yes, you read that right - for a month, I was at work 28 to 32 out of every 48 hours).
Forget 4 8 hour days, I would work 4 10 hour days right now in a heartbeat with no discussion or regrets.
1) it is invaluable to have a normal working day where you can do tasks - change your oil, get your haircut, go grocery shopping without a crowd, see a matinee, the list is endless.
2) the scope of weekend trip you can plan across 3 days instead of two is exponentially higher. So much room for activities.
3) time after the working day just isn't that useful. Drive home, eat dinner, now it's 630/7pm. Waste a couple hours, go to sleep. After a 10hour day, the time after work is precious and useful to relax, but then you get a whole other day off.
It surely isn't for everyone, but it surely is for a lot of people. The thing that blows my mind is no one is even willing to try.
I can't make productive decisions for 10 hours in a row. If you increase the amount of hours, you don't get more knowledge work done. You just get more meetings and useless fillers or procrastination.
All in all, I think dictating when employees work is stupid, exactly how it's stupid to pay a contractor per hour. You should always pay based on output, no matter when that output was achieved. On the contrary, you might even want to pay more if the desired output was achieved earlier than expected (and not pay less because he must have worked less hours).
Be ruthless on the output, don't bother about the hours.
For instance:
January (10 hr):
* Mon: 8AM - 6PM
* Tue: 8AM - 6PM
* Wed: 8AM - 6PM
* Thu: 8AM - 6PM
* Fri: off
* Sat: off
* Sun: off
* Mon: 8AM - 10PM
* Tue: off
* Wed: 8AM - 10PM
* Thu: off
* Fri: 8AM - 10PM
* Sat: off
* Sun: off
It was great.
This leaves 700-1400 for doing all the stuff I need to do, food, shopping, exercise and then an hour or so after I finish work to wind down and head to bed.
And Friday I can work normal Australian hours 8-4.30 and have the evening and weekend for going out with friends/family etc.
Wouldn't say no to the Friday off completely though.
technically 3.5 days worked per calendar week saves on petrol too.
Your sleep deprivation is getting to you. Lots of people work 4x10.
If we had high productivity, high unemployment, and low inflation, then introducing a 4 day week would be a great solution.
For capital, it never seems to be a good time to try anything that doesn’t allow for maximum extraction or any semblance of labor power or quality of life improvements. For example, US railroad workers are about to strike because they dare ask for paid sick leave. It’ll cost $2B/day to the US economy, not because of unreasonable demands (paid sick leave!), but because of unreasonable management and shareholders.
Edit: (can’t reply, HN throttling) Good luck attempting to solve for labor power with immigration. Folks who lean right (and a cohort of centrists) don’t want it, and they still have enough voting power to be somewhat relevant for the next 5-10 years (in the US, the UK, and many parts of Europe; Italy’s most recent elections showcase this), as electorate turnover takes time, not to mention declining fertility rates everywhere squeezing the young, productive cohort globally.
https://www.npr.org/2022/11/21/1137640529/railroads-freight-...
Right wing isn't really that popular in most developed/rich EU countries though. Most of them have quite left leaning population and leaders.
And many of the richer countries want immigration but not publicly admitting it, but do it under the table, due to pressure from business groups and lobbyists, who hope this will aid with the labor shortage (translation for jobs with shitty pay and downward pressure on wages) while also pushing up demand for housing/rents, and demand for consumer goods in the retail sector. All of which benefit the business and ruling elite.
Immigration to UK is at its highest year ever despite Brexit and Covid having thrown wrenches in immigration movements.
Same for continental Europe. Refugees and migrants are coming weekly by the thousands by sea and land, and there's nothing the right wing parties can do about it, as long as migrants can cross the border then claim refugee status and know how to play the refugee game, the host country can't deny them that as it's guaranteed by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), and if they do deny them that right, then the country can be sued and will lose.
So, for that to work, the right wing leaders would have to first get their country out of the ECHR, and then they can deny refugees/migrants.
I'm not sure I 100% buy that argument, but I do think many jobs have a non-linear relationship between time spent working and productivity and you end up reaching the point of diminishing returns. I also think it would be a mistake to assume that 2 days vs 3 days off per week is the optimal trade-off just because that's what we're already used to.
There is a low-level of constant burnout that occurs with 5 day weeks, but you don't notice the difference between feeling normal and that low-level burnout until the first week back from holiday (after which it starts again).
I've simulated 4-day-weeks before using annual leave one day a week spread out over a prolonged period, and those times have been some of my most productive. Every week has had that post-holiday high.
This and worker-cooperative-businesses. I've yet to hear a legitimately compelling argument against, especially when we see the results. (I mean, the arguments are typically, "They have problems, too!" and "Bob Votes to be CEO") Theory is great but how can you hold onto the theory when the experimental data is at least promising?
I would caution people to be careful what they wish for; my longest 4-day gig involved sun-wed and wed-sat shifts. 4-day doesn't necessarily mean mon-thr ever week for everyone. Another problem was our overlap day was wed thus "wednesday is non productive its for meetings and stuff" so you really only worked three days because you couldn't trust not to be interrupted on wednesday. Its probably of enormous productivity value to move all interruptions to exactly one day every week, however you don't need 4-day to do that, technically speaking.
Another oddity probably of more interest to bean counters is our overlap day was wednesday so with all hands on deck we did maint and rollouts and upgrades on wednesday, but the rest of the world did maintenance windows on the weekend at 2am so our meaningless measure of fake uptime was lower than non-4day companies. Now does your employer value rolling out better stuff faster, or do they value a "better" meaningless heavily gamed number? So 4-day might be better or worse depending on if your local management lives in reality or spreadsheet-metric-land. "Oh no how will we get fake nine nines of uptime if we roll out new SaaS on Wednesdays?"
The problem with this approach is buyers are looking for the lowest price, so it requires efforts on the national government scale (or multiple national governments, even significantly all of them) to put a floor on this lowest price.
Otherwise you will get outcompeted by someone able to obtain/perform labor for cheaper.
Who are the buyers? (Employers? People buying your product?) How does any business not get outcompeted by a race to the bottom where people are always willing to perform/obtain the labor more cheaply? Why do the costs of goods get more expensive every year?
If our system is so dysfunctional it can't give an inch towards the quality of life of the people living under it. Burn it to the ground, I say. We used to say the Divine Right of Kings was the best we could do.
as a side note; "Innovation" in my view is not a reason in and of itself to do something. Its too nebulous a term to have real meaning. Like - how much innovating are 7-11's doing or most other commercial shops? Would that money be better spent elsewhere? What percentage of 'innovations' actually fail vs those that prove worth it? etc etc.
Edit: Oh, it's started already, from the article:
> "With many businesses struggling to afford 10% inflation pay rises, we're starting to see increasing evidence that a four-day week with no loss of pay is being offered as an alternative solution."
It's worth emphasising beause many bosses still haven't got this message.
I'm currently quiet-quitting, and will actually-quit shortly, because of this attitude.
It's not about being work-shy. It's about busting your arse for a company (and self/respect) and then when the realisation dawns on everyone that flexibility is not only possible but has helped productivity (n=1 our productivity and balance sheet improved during covid), and then to have the door shut on that realisation ... you can expect employees to switch off.
Our entire team feels this way. We'll all be gone soon.
/rant
The idea that there is a population-wide 25% productivity boost just lying unnoticed on the sidewalk sounds asinine to me. Strong claims require strong evidence and I don’t see it.
That said, I have worked a 4-day week before and it was great, but I took a proportional pay cut and wasn’t expected to somehow become super-productive.
Some more charitable interpretations of why this approach might be great:
* We can afford to take the pay cut and would be happier (and perhaps a little more productive) working fewer hours;
* Companies with a 50-60 hour work week might have pervasive burnout and therefore get a substantial performance boost by decreasing their workload by 20%, with “4-day workweek” being a better coordination point than “only work 9-5”;
* Optionality will be a good perk for employees allowing the small number of companies deploying this to get better employees (this doesn’t work if 4-day is widely adopted).
When the UK went on a 3-day week during the '70s, production was 96% of normal.
The idea that people are being actually productive for 40 hours/week sounds pretty absurd to me.
> The idea that people are being actually productive for 40 hours/week sounds pretty absurd to me
The alternative is surely far more absurd. Employees could be working 3 day weeks and producing just as much, and somehow nobody noticed? There exist employee-owned co-ops, and employee-owned startups. If there was an equal-productivity yet far more enjoyable way of working, these companies would be stealing all the best workers. The absence of any evidence of these companies existence is strong evidence that no such effect exists.
Indeed the evidence points in the opposite direction; there are plenty of examples of scrappy small companies putting in crazy hours and getting loads done. I have experienced this first hand, and pick any successful startup and you’re likely to find evidence of positive marginal productivity beyond 40h/week.
The objective research I’ve seen on the subject points to net-zero marginal productivity around 55-60h/week, WAY higher than the 40 you are claiming: https://docs.iza.org/dp8129.pdf
Hire some people to do it, those who want to will apply. Some people would rather work on weekends and have days off in the week. Some people are night owls who would prefer to work overnight.
No other 24/7 company with good compensation struggles to hire for these jobs.
On a less sarcastic note off of your typo, in the US and presumably UK, the regular work week is 9-5 M-F which translates into 40 hour work weeks.
The uk has practically no employment rights when you have less than 2 years service. One of the (many) articles on the subject [0]. The employment rights in the public sector are similar, with most of the "unfireable" aspect being people who have been there long enough that it's easier to move them around than it is to get rid of them. The civil service in the UK has an unreasonably long probationary period (9 months) which if people actually cared about removing unproductive employees could be much better applied.
[0] https://www.davidsonmorris.com/dismissing-an-employee-with-l...
> “With many businesses struggling to afford 10% inflation pay rises, we’re starting to see increasing evidence that a four-day week with no loss of pay is being offered as an alternative solution.”
When compared to inflation, you'll get paid less. It says 10%, but wages have been frozen for years.
Worse still, you will still be expected to achieve the same amount in less time. The only difference is that they will expect your most productive hours without also paying for your less productive hours.
_You_ may be in a position to take a 20% pay cut, but as they mention, they want this to become the norm for everybody. As the cost of living increases less and less will be in this position.
And, in UK at least, we have more billionaires and an ever increasing wealth gap .. we've got more efficient production than ever it's just that the wealthy are taking all the benefit. That's only going to get worse; we act now or workers will have too little money to mount any sort of opposition.
This resulting in inflation and a weakening of the pound, and with a lower quality of life on average than they would have otherwise.
When people produce less, then there is obviously less to go around. Will these folks produce as much in 4 days as 5? Maybe, I guess we'll see. Maybe they'll produce MORE. But unless they do, or find something economically productive to do with their extra time, the UK will have less as a result.
Will the farmers work less? How about those in the energy sector? Or medicine? Or construction?
I'll be happy to hear from people with better information who can corroborate or refute my perception.
> When people produce less, then there is obviously less to go around. Will these folks produce as much in 4 days as 5? Maybe, I guess we'll see. Maybe they'll produce MORE. But unless they do, or find something economically productive to do with their extra time, the UK will have less as a result.
Well, these people are pretty much guaranteed to get better quality of life immediately. Will that come at a cost in production? Maybe. But piling on more work hours hasn't worked.
> Will the farmers work less? How about those in the energy sector? Or medicine? Or construction?
I sure hope so. The UK has more farmers than reasonable, working tiny farms, propped up by subsidies. Medicine loses far more to the mistakes caused by overlong working hours than it gains from those hours, and I wouldn't be surprised if energy or construction was the same.
For example, I work at a company called Forestreet (https://forestreet.com) and we already offer a 9-day fortnight.
The idea is that you condense your work week into 9 days, and take the 10th day off.
There are pros and cons to this model, but overall it's working very well.
An added "bonus": It all but eliminated meetings on Mondays and Fridays, as there were always some people out on those days. On Sundays, you don't need to worry about a meeting the next day; on Friday, you can catch up on stuff.
Firstly, I would just note that wealth can't be legislated into existence. It has to be created against entropy, with effort. If something is effortless then there is no value in it.
So in an efficient economy where all labour was being used productively at all times it's basically just physics that a 4 day work week would reduce total economic output, and as a consequence lower per-capita wealth.
However, being charitable here, I think there are some nuances in the real world because labour isn't always used productively -- especially when companies are unprofitable due to high energy bills.
> “With many businesses struggling to afford 10% inflation pay rises, we’re starting to see increasing evidence that a four-day week with no loss of pay is being offered as an alternative solution.”
I used to work on the a high street in the UK and we'd often close an hour or two early in the winter if it was quiet. Reason being it made little sense keeping the shop heated and powered for us just to be sat around doing nothing until close of business. In those few hours (late on the day in winter, often when raining) the company was briefly unprofitable to operate and therefore closing early made economic sense.
I can only assume a lot of shops and restaurants are in a similar position in the UK today. So if you can do 95% of your typical business over just 4 days then this probably makes a lot of sense. But what I don't understand is that surely in the vast majority of cases it would make far more sense to close a bit earlier instead of closing for an entire day? If you're a restaurant for example, just operating at peak times could be a good idea.
But whether this is good or bad will massively vary from business to business. Companies which don't have peak days or times will see little benefit from something like this. Perhaps some companies could neglect certain customers and clients for more profitable ones. A plumber might just focus on jobs for wealthier clients for example then perhaps they can take the Friday off.
But what I don't understand here is this idea that we can reduce the work week to 4 days without cost as a general rule. Let's take a fairly typical company which has a 5% profit margin and where 50% of costs are labour costs. Eg, for every £100 in sales, £50 goes to labour and £5 is profit. Lets now increase the hourly cost of that labour by 20% as suggested... Now for every £100 in sales, £60 goes to labour and -£5 is made in profit.
Of course, big business with better margins will probably be fine but a move like this would likely bankrupt most typical highstreet businesses. The economics just doesn't make any sense without some plan to increase productivity by 20%.
And then how would something like this work in the NHS? Can we even afford to reduce nurses hours by 20%? Are we really suggesting that would have no economic impact or would we need to increase the NHS workforce by 20%? Could we even afford that?
But if you really want to reduce your work week by 20% the correct way to do it (imo) is to find more productive uses for your labour. If you can increase your income by 20% you can spend 20% less time working at no cost to your annual income. Or you can just take a 20% hit to your annual income. Most of us here could probably afford to do that now. We just choose to work because we're greedy.
The assumption is that you inherently increase productivity, because realistically people can only produce so much in a week and they don't need 40 hours to do it. Whether that's actually true, well, we'll find out.
> And then how would something like this work in the NHS? Can we even afford to reduce nurses hours by 20%? Are we really suggesting that would have no economic impact or would we need to increase the NHS workforce by 20%? Could we even afford that?
Given how much of the NHS's workload is from fixing previous mistakes, hospital-acquired infections etc., a well-rested workforce that can avoid those could potentially "pay for" itself.
The first time I saw this, I asked my colleagues: Who would want to work one day more per week, for half what someone makes in the UK?
We were all willing to do it without hesitation (actually many of us already do this for less revenue -- side gigs are fairly ubiquitous here).
One of us added that they hope the West shifts to a three day week soon, so we can get 2 more days of work!
I know this misses the point about time vs. productivity, but thought I'd share that the attitude here is very different.
But a 4 day week can also be four 9 hour days. So long as management adjusts daily expectations to match, there's no need to expect lower productivity, or to demand a salary cut.
Overall though it's a fairly open secret that, especially in big companies, you can set a 40hr work week, but you're not getting 40hrs of actual work from them. And for some jobs this is just beyond people's fatigue limits anyway.
To hazard a guess, for in-office, the average would likely be around 25 to 30 hours. The rest goes into the ping pong table, chatting, morning coffee, reading HN etc.
So there's plenty of margin to lower scheduled hours and raise expectations during those hours. There's also plenty of room to give 3 days of rest in exchange for 4 days all-hands-on-deck.
From my tests, as long as you manage other people expectations, nobody will notice or care if you’re not there in IT.
And it’s not only 4 days of work. It’s also 3 days of rest. It’s obviously for the same reason but still… it does feel more powerful once you feel it on yourself. Distressing is amazing.
Once you try you will never want to go back.
Tbh I already work 100% remotely with flexible hours I want, and as long as I deliver nobody cares how much I work. Why anyone would? Seriously, who cares? As long as value is delivered: nobody.
At the moment, trial companies offer a rare and coveted perk. They’ll attract a large pool of candidates for their roles, and they’ll choose the best. Generally speaking, the best from a larger pool are better than the best from a smaller pool.
Trial companies will also retain their staff more easily. Four day week employers are hard to find, so no one would want to give up such a rare perk.
But the playing field levels off when all companies offer this perk.
So I’d be suspicious of the results of this trial. I don’t think four day week companies will enjoy the same success forever.
And I'm not just talking about little kids, big kids too.
For those companies that went from 5 days x 8 Hours ... to now 4 days x 10 hours (8am to 6/7pm), what happens to children during this extra time?
Our entire society is based on the assumption parents end work by 5pm.
Who's going to feed and get kids ready for bed if the parent are now arriving home 2-hours later, which might be the kids bedtime.
Maybe a roughly equal split of Mon-Thurs and Tues-Fri business will allow more freedom for consumers to consume on Mondays and Fridays.
Thus benefitting the precious GDP numbers by which everything seems to be judged.
I am very new to this subject. I am also skeptical of the claim above.
However, one assumes that if Guardian is printing the above, there is some ‘evidence’ that it might be true.
Is there any?
"3-day work week brings no loss of productivity" -employee
"2-day work week brings no loss of productivity" -employee
"1-day work week brings no loss of productivity" -employee
"0-day work week brings no loss of productivity" -employee
"Yeah, that's why we're firing you." -Boss
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/12821/making-steam-the...
Let me be clear: I later realized that this project would have been a soul-draining death march at many other places I'd worked in my career. Exhausted just a few weeks in, with management hounding the team for schedule estimates that can't possibly exist because management failed to fund maintenance for years.[2] (There were actually rational reasons for this, in this case. tl;dr the project got renewed interest and investment due to a new business case.)
To those who lament on this topic about "devs (in country X) just aren't motivated these days" or whatever, let me suggest something. If you have poor clarity of purpose, poor giving-a-fsck about humans, or a number of other culture failings then yes, you may encounter problems. Your solution is still not to tie your knowledge workers to their desks. You need to fix the root causes of your underlying productivity debt, not pave over them with an overwork-butts-in-seats mentality which just makes things worse in the long run (<--- read DeMarco).
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Slack-Getting-Burnout-Busywork-Effici...
[2]: Pro tip: "evergreen" ecosystems, especially young and rapidly changing ones like early-mid Ruby/Rails and a lot of current npm/JS-based stuff, often have a wickedly non-linear cost curve if/when maintenance and dependency updates fall off. Some of the most expensive I've encountered of this ilk is when /test infrastructure/ incurred a lot of past churn that wasn't tracked, but suddenly (cough) needs to be updated.
but the hours cost more, so ?
Jews rest on the Sabbath which typically falls on Saturdays, plus high holy days.
Christians rest on the Lord's Day, which falls on Sundays, plus holy days of obligation for Orthodox, Catholic, etc.
Up until now in the Western business world we've standardized on a five-day week which allows Jews and Christians to have their rests, and soccer moms to have their bloody soccer matches.
But with an increasing number of Muslims in the mix, there is a demand from Muslim faithful to rest and pray on Fridays.
Create a four-day work week and now you've got 3 days of rest, 1 for each type of Abrahamic faithful person to go pray.
Muslims already have won major concessions in terms of prayer times and spaces in office buildings, college campuses, etc.