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More bosses give four-day workweek a try

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Re: More bosses give four-day workweek a try

#7
When the 40 hour workweek was first proposed, doomsayers said it would be the end of the American economy. The opposite happened, and as injuries and illness decreased, productivity increased. [1]

Something to keep in mind, as it’s counterintuitive and the instinct is to say, “that can never happen here”, or, “it’ll never work.”

1: Robert Gordon, “The Rise and Fall is American Growth”

Re: More bosses give four-day workweek a try

#8
It seems a lot of these experiments are a success. But after a while somebody gets greedy and thinks “we get good productivity at 32 hours. I wonder how much more we could get at 40 hours?” And soon you are back at the old schedule.

Something similar happened at my company. For once a project was ahead of schedule. So instead of thinking that the system worked well and keep working in relaxed manner management decided to “pull in” the deadline and suddenly the project was a death march again.

For some people it’s hard to accept that relaxed people are productive. They want to see stress and overtime or they will think that people are underperforming.

Re: More bosses give four-day workweek a try

#9

I'd really like to do 4x10hrs versus 5x8hrs. I think that'd be a significant improvement for a lot of people.

I think stuffing 10 hours in a workday will have a diminishing rate of productivity return during the last couple of hours during the workday.
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