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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

#161

Post by wool_gather »

jodrellblank wrote: post #119
wool_gather wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should still be able to recount what you did , past tense. "This morning I sketched out three different possibilities for the new client check-in service. First draft of the spec is in progress, I expect to send it over to Jen and Andy tomorrow for their feedback." "I made a dozen or so mockups for the new landing page. I have a couple more ideas I want to try out tomorrow, then I'll figure out what the best four…

That sure sounds like a day of productive work or a day of doing nothing being covered over with some made up fluff. One or the other.

Assuming that you really think that the members of your team are lying to you like this, it's easy enough to validate.

The first one says they're writing a spec. Well, three days later, where's that spec? Next one is producing some designs, so same. Sure someone saying "$TOOL/$NEW_FUNCTION/$REPLACE_FRAMEWORK just didn't work out", could be cover for "I was playing Pac-man all day", but if you ask for details, BS should become clear pretty quickly.

And again, that's starting from the position that you think your teammates are probably slackers who would rather lie than work. Which is not really a great position to hold, IMO.

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

#162

Post by matwood »

1337biz wrote: post #70
wgerard wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should really know what you're doing all day. If you can't even summarize what you were doing all day, that sounds like a bad thing. The evidence is your story about what you actually did. Here's a perfectly great update that didn't result in a quick win: "I spent all day debugging that null pointer issue like we discussed. I thought maybe it was because the API was sending nulls across, but I looked at the logs…

That's the thing - this works only when you have clearly task - solution based jobs. But when it is more creative and abstract this is not feasable.

The creative people I know generate all sorts of artifacts that may or may not be used (designs, notes, research, etc..). They rarely sit at their desk all day just thinking.

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

#163

Post by epa »

decebalus1 wrote: post #73

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 t…

Alfred Chandler Jr notes in his book "the visible hand" how government jobs, or creation of busy work to employ people, is just 'hidden' unemployment. If they pay people to do a job that is not necessarily needed, they can provide 'welfare' via work-to-pay.

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

#164

Post by matwood »

1337biz wrote: post #42
verelo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Work when you want" doesn't have to mean "I have no idea when you'll be available today". People confuse the two all the time! Flexibility and reliability have to go hand in hand, if you cannot be reliable when left unsupervised, you need to expect I cannot leave you unsupervised. On the plus side, when people are given this explanation they often self manage into a good routine.

But this is the problem. The current mindset is - as long as you are here, I trust you to do something productive. The work-when-you-want is easily leading to a - show me the evidence on why I should trust you to have done something productive today. It forces someone to just push for quick wins and avoid anything that is not leading to directly accountible results.

> as long as you are here, I trust you to do something productive.

And this is a terrible mindset.

> The work-when-you-want is easily leading to a - show me the evidence on why I should trust you to have done something productive today.

No, start from the stand point of trust.

> It forces someone to just push for quick wins and avoid anything that is not leading to directly accountible results.

It does force someone to think about results, but not necessarily quick. Even a result that takes months, has many steps along the way that can be communicated.

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

#165

Post by CalRobert »

wodenokoto wrote: post #13
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…

How do employees know when good is good enough? When things get stressful and overwhelming at work, I look to my contractual hours per week and remind myself not to overdo it.

They don't, and there's a massive cultural imbalance. Buddy of mine works for a upto company in Portland but his colleague got a talking to for gasp taking 2.5 weeks off in a year. I too work for a up to company but I ALSO have a legally guaranteed minimum 21 days off a year.

There's ALWAYS a limit. Try taking a year long holiday and see how that goes. With UPTO the limit is up to your manager.

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

#166

Post by matwood »

jlarocco wrote: post #147
corobo wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has to be a limit somewhere though. Say I booked the entirety of June off this year. Are they still cool with that? How about if I also decide I'd like July off too. That's an extreme I know but there's a limit somewhere.

I thought this was common sense, but can't you just ask? "Unlimited PTO" does not mean "do whatever you want". Your manager can deny requests when you have limited PTO, too, so I don't see what you're getting at. FWIW we did have somebody take an entire month off to visit family in China. He was responsible for tons of code and functionality, and it worked fine because management knew about it and planned around it.…

I agree with you. I've seen people take 8 weeks for a similar reason. Over that time period they checked in, fixed a few bugs related to work they had done but were generally gone.

In a strict PTO environment that would have been almost impossible for them to do.

Some people are going to respond and be upset that they want to work exactly 8 hours, get exactly 41.5 hours of PTA and get paid that way. That's fine, although I hope they are giving the company back money for browsing HN.

I on the other hand like the freedom and flexibility that unlimited PTO provides along with a flexible work schedule. Do I end up working more? Probably, but I have way less stress. I much prefer working that hour on a rainy Saturday instead of the beautifully sunny Friday.

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

#167

Post by nilkn »

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…

This is very interesting, but I'm curious how it scales to higher levels of management. Of course, if the whole company is only 20-30 people, those higher levels don't exist. In a large company, a single low- or mid-level manager may have more direct and indirect reports than an entire small 20 person company, and a high-level executive may have hundreds or thousands of indirect reports. At this level, it seems to me like it may be possible to maintain this "work when you want as long as the work gets done" style of scheduling for developers at the bottom, but it feels like it would work less and less for managers and executives who will spend more and more of their time in scheduled meetings.

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

#168

Post by williamdclt »

nemesisj wrote: post #120
williamdclt wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Good questions! 1. We started by doing some research, actually - I spent some time finding studies that supported my thesis that productivity would go up (thus making sure our output would stay the same, more or less). Then I discussed with our management team, who thought I was nuts, but was supportive. Then I presented it to our board, who was also supportive. We applied it to everyone at the start, but some teams…

Interesting!

I work in an agency so I don't think it would be easily applicable in my company (we bill by the day, not by the output), but I love hearing about experiments in companies! Most companies are so boring and afraid to do anything out of the ordinary

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

#169

Post by ghaff »

wgerard wrote: post #85
1337biz wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the thing - this works only when you have clearly task - solution based jobs. But when it is more creative and abstract this is not feasable.

I'm really struggling to think of creative and abstract jobs that meet all of the following criteria: 1) Take place in a typical corporate setting--which is the context here, nobody's asking studio musicians to do stand-ups. 2) Have 0 artifacts of progress being made. Even brand design goes through iterations. 3) Are so abstract that it's impossible to distill your thought process into a small summary each day If it'…

There are days when I'm trying to write (as in prose or a presentation) all day and the muses are not connecting, I do a lot of unrelated not-really "research," etc. And that's mostly OK. For a day. But obviously not for a week or weeks in a corporate setting. (And, if I really had a hard deadline, I'd crank out something serviceable. But I usually aim to do better than that.)

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

#170

Post by posix_compliant »

StavrosK wrote: post #46

I've been working four-day workweeks for the past 4 years or so, and love it. I can't say I have the same output (nor would I want to, since I took a 20% pay cut for it). I wouldn't trade it for anything, and I don't think I'll be able to work 5-day weeks again. I tried it a few times and I found myself very unhappy, 5 days were too long and the weekend too short. The 4/3 split is ideal, four days isn't enough to get…

> 20% more each day I think it's 25% more.

To get to 40hrs/week, one would need to work 10hrs/day instead of 8hrs/day.

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