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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

#121

Post by davefp »

williamdclt wrote: post #117
nemesisj wrote: post #116

We work a 4 Day, 32 hour week, and have done so since 2015. During that time, our team grew from a small office of ~20 in Edinburgh to where we are today (3 offices in Edinburgh Scotland, Bozeman USA, and Beirut Lebanon) with about 80 people. We have consistently been one of the fastest growing tech companies in Scotland (and in the UK). When we implemented the 4 day policy, we didn’t change our financial targets, or…

1. how did you start the experiment? Did you apply it to everybody from the start or did you run it on a small sample? 2. What do you mean "buy all 5 days" and "moonlight on the 5th day"? (not a native speaker)

In answer to 2:

Buying all 5 days means that they're employed and getting paid for that fifth day, but they have no work tasks. This is so that employees can't work a second job on that day, which would be 'moonlighting'.

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

#122

Post by moeamaya »

Of all industries, you would think software companies would use some of the efficiency gains and insane profit margins to work less?

This is the logic we have at Monograph (hiring engineers btw) and we've had 4 day 32-hour work weeks for over three years now. One engineer on the team likes to take Wednesdays off which we affectionately call the "mid-weekend".

If you have more interest HuffPo and Lynne from Key Values wrote a bit about or working style: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/four-day-working-week-o...

https://www.keyvalues.com/monograph

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

#123

Post by maxxxxx »

When I worked in Germany we had a union mandated 35 hour week with no option for overtime. One thing I noticed was that back then most people actually worked most of their hours at the office and decisions were made rather quickly and decisively. Now I work with no set time limit and I feel that a lot of people are wasting time with going over the same thing multiple times, hesitating in making decisions and calling huge meetings that achieve nothing.

I feel that part of it is that by working less people are fresher and think clearer. Whenever I worked 50+ hours per week for longer time I was more in a foggy state and couldn't think clearly.

Also, by limiting working hours management needs to be decisive and conscious of wasting people's times with unnecessary stuff.

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

#124

Post by mettamage »

sideshowb wrote: post #64
mettamage wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? You experiment on something for 5 years and then report. In my case of reading books: you read books and 5 years later you know what stuck and reread it in order to get the full wisdom out of it. It helped that I studied for 8 years and reflected on these kind of things every year.

Because without some shorter term studies you might struggle to get enough employers on board for a sufficiently powered long term one.

Good point. In my prior comments, I wasn't really looking at the pragmatic side of organizing studies.

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

#125

Post by maxxxxx »

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…

"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"

And soon some genius will come in and think "How about we worked a few hours more? This would give us even more output" and soon we are back to normal.

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

#126

Post by tzs »

I've been on a four day work week for quite a while, working Monday through Thursday [1]. It definitely makes the off days better.

• If it has been a rough week at work, I can spend all day Friday relaxing, and still have a full two weekend days for my interests and hobbies.

• I can do things on Friday, such as shopping, that most others have to do on the weekend, thus avoiding the weekend crowds.

• With three days to work on personal projects, I can do a day of getting things going and getting productive, a day of good in the zone work, and then a day of picking a good stopping point and reaching that and setting things up for resumption next week. With a conventional two day weekend, it's that in the zone time that loses.

• Three days is long enough that by Monday I'm ready and want to get back to my job.

I find the lower stress thing quite plausible based on the above. It's enough time to do my stuff without it feeling rushed, meaning my relaxing things can actually be relaxing. A two day weekend is more likely to result in the classic stressing out over trying to relax.

I also find the no cut in work output plausible, because of the lower stress thing. Stress should lower productivity. If your weekend is not lowering stress as much as it could, you are going to be less productive than you could be. If three days off lowers stress more, you productivity rate should be higher back at work. But a three day weekend means a shorter work week. So we have one effect trying to raise output and one trying to lower it. Given the fuzziness of productivity measures, I'm not surprised by a finding of no change in output.

[1] I started taking every other Friday as a vacation day, because I had so much accumulated vacation that I had hit my employer's accumulation limit. Later, when the big recession hit the company needed to reduce expenses to avoid layoffs, and I offered to take a 5% pay cut in exchange for every other Friday off, which when combined with the every other Friday vacation gave me a four day week.

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

#127

Post by tywheatley »

wgerard wrote: post #18
xfitm3 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your handbook says you track work daily in Asana and have two stand ups. Along with an expectation to immediately respond to pings and vacation pre-approval is required. How does that fit into “work when you want”?

I don't work there, but it seems pretty clear to me. Morning slack message (which isn't the same thing as a standup): "Hey, I'm going to do X,Y,Z today but I'm also going to run a few errands after lunch so I'll be MIA from 12-2 CET but available after until 6 CET". "Work when you want" doesn't have to mean "I have no idea when you'll be available today".

this seems only one degree removed from a 9-5.

"work when you want" to me requires more than that. multiply your simple example to 2-4x a week, xN employees, that's a lot of noise

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

#128

Post by GordonS »

I switched to a 4 day working week a couple of years ago, and took a 20% pay cut in the process.

I'm certain that I don't actually produce any less than I did when working 5 days, and my stress levels are definitely lower. All in all, the company got a pretty good deal, since I now have the same output, but get paid less!

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

#129

Post by motohagiography »

It really seems to depend on the company stage. If the answer to, "did you do everything you could?" is, "well, we could have put %20 more time and effort into it with no additional cash burn," I could see how that could be interpreted as negligence from a fiduciary perspective.

On the other hand, %20 less office time could be an honest signal that you are taking risks commensurate with the return level your investors are looking for. If as a founder or leader, you are careful and incremental, I don't think that's what investors put money into VC funds for. The number of stories I read here and elsewhere about investors saying, "I don't want this money back, I want a huge return or nothing, because I don't want to learn I put it behind someone who wasn't committed enough to fail hard."

Investors aren't paying you and your team to work, they are paying for the privilege of getting a piece of a massive outcome. You achieve the outcome they want exposure to the best way you know how, and if imposing a risk constraint like %20 less office time does it, great. In this view, you are not their employee, you are their dealer.

I could see how it would be hard to persuade investors you were working in their best interest with an attitude like that, but on the other hand, it could be one that is necessary to enable the best possible outcome. It sounds crazy, but the investors themselves are the correlation factor in their portfolio, and the point of putting money into a diversified portfolio of startups is to hedge that correlation, so the more opinionated the investor is about your office culture or other aspects of the business, it's likely the worse they are going to do.

No clear answer, but really interesting question.

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

#130

Post by wutbrodo »

znq wrote: post #4

At Mobile Jazz (7 years old now) and Bugfender (4-5 years old now) we always had the rule, that people could choose to work as much as they want and when they went. As long as the output and quality was there. Obviously to achieve high quality output you need to be there at certain times (overlap with other team members) and you need to do a certain amount of hours. The problems we had because of this are almost no-e…

I have never had a job that doesn't work like this (or rather, that I didn't treat like this) and frankly, it's a huge red flag for me to see an engineering job that doesn't. Given that engineering can require long periods of focused work, it's beyond me that a company would step in and decide the manner in which you get it done. Tangentially and less convincingly, I don't see a reason why if I'm twice as talented as someone else and want to work half as much, that shouldn't be okay, and we should be similarly compensated for having similar productivity.

It's to the point where it reminds me of jobs that force you to dress up in a certain way: I can't imagine your workplace respects you if they're enforcing how you get your work done or what you're wearing.

I should be clear that there are situations in both cases where it can actually make sense: anyone working customers doesn't get to decide that customers are irrational for judging attire, so dress codes are reasonable in that case. Similarly, if your work heavily involves constant communication, then enforcing work hours can make sense too. But there are a TON of jobs that enforce rules like work hours and dress code for no reason other than lack of trust and respect for their employees, and I just hope I continue to avoid ever being in a position like that.

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