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Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut in output

theguardian.com

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Re: Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut in output

#71

Post by stephen_g »

ergothus wrote: post #50

I worked at a state govt job that allowed for 4 day weeks. Being govt, and with my manager in particular, time was closely managed. It worked, but it was HARD! The difference between an 8 hour day and a 10 hour day is having to find a second wind, on demand, 4 days in a row. Every time I would say I was going to drop, and then the three day weekend hit and I had time to get personal stuff done, time to relax without…

The article is about dropping the hours to ~32 a week, not working 10 hour days to still do 40 hours in four days.

Switching to 10 hour days would be a terrible idea - that’s just asking for burnout. Anyway, I find it really hard to believe more than a small percentage of workers would be able to be actually productive for even two thirds of the day when consistently working that long.

Re: Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut in output

#72

Post by have_faith »

dalbasal wrote: post #60

"... a New Zealand financial services company, switched its 240 staff from a five-day week to a four-day week last November and maintained their pay. Productivity increased in the four days they worked so there was no drop in the total amount of work done." The result/claim makes intuitive sense to me but..... The problem trying to study this is that "productivity" of many/most white collar workers is basically impos…

If my job was easy to measure I would be paid on my outcomes instead of being paid to be at work.

If I was being paid for my outcomes I would manage my time entirely differently and would find ways of being more productive than I already am so that I could work less hours. I think this is a hard pill for people's bosses to swallow, that their employees do have the capacity to be more productive but they won't because we're being paid to be at work and so incentives are not aligned.

My boss is very happy with my productivity and I am very productive. I don't think he could conceive of me being any more productive. But I know that if I could arrange my own days and hours I would be more productive. But this would be inconvenient to him and so he would likely rather have me predictably available than fully optimised. Which is an understandable tradeoff if frustrating from a personal perspective as you feel as though you're wasting time. It's just that your wasted time is actually valuable to someone and that's hard to grasp intuitively.

Re: Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut in output

#73

Post by decebalus1 »

That's never going to happen. Regardless of what 'studies show'. If Jesus comes down from heaven and tells everyone we need to work less, it will still never happen. Was reading 'Bullshit jobs' by David Graeber and frankly I am starting to believe the conspiracy theory that there is an inherent interest of society to keep people busy as much as possible. Because if you give people more free time, don't keep them on their toes and stressed, they may start thinking about building guillotines.

Re: Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut in output

#74

Post by camelNotation »

It may be that they were simply paid less than optimal salaries before and increasing their wages per hour actually improved their productivity, incentivizing them to accomplish in 4 days what they previously accomplished in 5. It would be interesting to do a parallel test with the same groups, have a control group, have a 4 day group that keeps the same pay, and a 5 day group with a 20% pay increase.

Re: Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut in output

#75

Post by jlarocco »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #69
jlarocco wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're generalizing based on your own behavior, but not everybody behaves that way. I'm exactly opposite, and had no problem taking PTO when I worked at a company with an unlimited plan. Now that I have limited PTO again I hoard it and take less time off. I don't feel inconvenienced when others take PTO, and I don't expect my taking PTO to inconvenience them.

The problem is, if it's not codified in law, there is no consistency. One person's gloriously well managed Unlimited PTO policy (congrats!) is another person's peer pressured non-usage. "Unlimited PTO" is a marketing farce, no more, no less. If you want people to take 25 days a year off, give them 25 days of PTO and be on the hook for the liability if they leave. If you want to give them more time than that through a…

> The problem is, if it's not codified in law, there is no consistency.

A poorly codified policy is an implementation problem, and will be a problem for both limited and unlimited PTO policies.

> "Unlimited PTO" is a marketing farce, no more, no less. If you want people to take 25 days a year off, give them 25 days of PTO and be on the hook for the liability if they leave. If you want to give them more time than that through an approval process, offer it! But don't say it's unlimited, because it isn't. And if you don't want one of your business perks to be pointed out as fraudulent, don't advertise it as such.

The entire point is that the employer doesn't care how many days off people take each year. Employees can be responsible for deciding that for themselves. Some people don't want that extra responsibility, and I'd agree that they probably won't like unlimited PTO policies.

It would be ludicrous to outlaw unlimited PTO policies just because some people don't like them.

Re: Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut in output

#76

Post by saalweachter »

naasking wrote: post #39
sailingparrot wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What science got us the 40h work week? It seems to me we just went from making people work as much as humanly possible to less and less (to 40 today in the US) as workers got more power through unions. I don't think science was much involved here.

40h was first most widely implemented by Henry Ford, because of equal productivity with fewer mistakes than the 10-16 hour days that were then the norm. So there is some empirical evidence that it's better than more hours, and some empirical evidence that it's better than fewer hours in some cases, and plenty showing no change with fewer hours. The fairest characterisation is that there was considerable back and fort…

The 8-hour-workday and 5-day-workweek movements were largely independent in time, and while there was some overlap in terms of both implementation and in terms of the populations demanding them, they really came from different places.

People first started getting into the 8-hour workday at the beginning of the 19th century, and it was largely driven by workers, tradesmen, and utopian communists who wanted life to consist of more than just working from the moment they woke to the moment they collapsed into sleep. "8 hours work, 8 hours rest, 8 hours sleep" was the sort of slogan that went in to that. Working too much each day just sucks.

The 5-day workweek was at the beginning of the 20th, and was much more tied into the Great Depression, automation, and managing employment as a civilization. While people have come to enjoy the quality-of-life improvements associated with the existence of a "weekend", it wasn't really the motivation for the shift so much as limiting the work done per worker to offset the decreased labor demand associated with increased productivity. (Although, practically speaking, a lot of the actual regulations that encourage employers to only work people 8 hours a day date/40 hours a week date to this time in the US.)

Re: Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut in output

#77

Post by moate »

CedarHill wrote: post #51

Treehouse used to do 4/10s and from what I remember listening to Ryan Carson's podcast with Jason Calacanis, it didn't work out for them. So I don't think this should apply to every workplace. For more mature companies, it makes sense. For startups, I don't think so.

This isn't proposing 4/10s, it's 4/8s. Basically, you're probably just faffing about for 8 hours a week anyway, so do it at home instead of at work.

Re: Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut in output

#78

Post by dalbasal »

have_faith wrote: post #72
dalbasal wrote: post #60

"... a New Zealand financial services company, switched its 240 staff from a five-day week to a four-day week last November and maintained their pay. Productivity increased in the four days they worked so there was no drop in the total amount of work done." The result/claim makes intuitive sense to me but..... The problem trying to study this is that "productivity" of many/most white collar workers is basically impos…

If my job was easy to measure I would be paid on my outcomes instead of being paid to be at work. If I was being paid for my outcomes I would manage my time entirely differently and would find ways of being more productive than I already am so that I could work less hours. I think this is a hard pill for people's bosses to swallow, that their employees do have the capacity to be more productive but they won't because…

Yep... typical Schrodinger's product evangelist troubles.

I'd make a third distinction though. You can be paid for time, work or outcomes. Outcomes and work aren't the same thing, necessarily.

Re: Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut in output

#79

Post by data4science »

combatentropy wrote: post #25

This is not the first article about how people get the same amount of work done, even more, in four days instead of five. But another thing they have in common is that they never ask the question, what about three? Or what about two? One? Surely at zero, productivity will not match the old standard of 40 hours a week. But it seems like the next logical question to me. If employees are just as productive at 32 hours a…

Actually, Tim Ferris wrote a book called "The 4-Hour Workweek" with the goal of more people achieving the title. It is more oriented at breaking free of normal work habits than a scientific study of optimal productivity though.

Re: Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut in output

#80

Post by oarsinsync »

camelNotation wrote: post #74

It may be that they were simply paid less than optimal salaries before and increasing their wages per hour actually improved their productivity, incentivizing them to accomplish in 4 days what they previously accomplished in 5. It would be interesting to do a parallel test with the same groups, have a control group, have a 4 day group that keeps the same pay, and a 5 day group with a 20% pay increase.

It depends on the salary of the employee, and their personal goals. Personally, I find a 20% decrease in working hours is worth a lot more than a 25% increase in pay. The hourly wage remains the same, but getting a full day back per week is significantly more valuable than more money that I'm already not spending
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