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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

#11

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

This is terrible if you have a long commute. During the 4 days you only commute, work and sleep. Now as a remote worker I could do this.

Re: More bosses give four-day workweek a try

#12
post #4

Wonder how hourly employees who work 4-days weeks at 32 hours would feel about this proposal.

If they increase the hourly pay by 20% then probably quite happy. Edit: 25%.

25%, I don't think there is any way around that, it seems untenable to have such big difference in rate between employees

Re: More bosses give four-day workweek a try

#13
I worked 4x10s when I worked for the Army and it was awesome. 3 day weekends take off so much pressure, and come Sunday night I was starting to feel the itch to get back into work rather than the dreadful feeling that I 'wasted' my weekend. The only work experience that was better than this was 100% flexibility to work remotely and/or flex hours.

So there's my anecdata for you :)

Re: More bosses give four-day workweek a try

#14

I did this (4x10) for about a year at a previous company, really enjoyed it. The hardest part was coming back after the 3 day weekend, it always felt like coming back from vacation.

If were an a 4 day week I would like to have Wednesday free instead of Friday.

Re: More bosses give four-day workweek a try

#15
Many of us work in spaces where servers are expected to be working and running 24/7. Yet our bosses still want every single employee to have butts in seats 9:00 am to 5 pm, 5 days a week and in the same time zone. Sometimes with a little guilt-tripping on the side for taking sick days and vacation.

Wouldn't we be better off with several shifts, 4 days a week, covering Monday through Saturday or even the entire week?

Re: More bosses give four-day workweek a try

#16

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

Why not 4x8 hours

May work for exempt workers. For hourly white collar workers who usually earn less anyway it would be less income.

Re: More bosses give four-day workweek a try

#17

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 decide…

Is it not also the responsibility of employees to ask for that benefit? Specially developers have that leverage. We have the ability of changing the whole job landscape.

Re: More bosses give four-day workweek a try

#18
I can't begin to explain how much less stress I encounter in day to day life having just one week day to stay home. Just having a day to be able to easily knock out chores between Jira issues; drop the car off at the dealer, sell something on craigslist, complete a house project, go to the dentist, meet the handyman, go to the bank, etc is so nice.

All of these things wind up on the back burner when I'm in the middle of high stress projects and forced to sit at a desk for 8-10 hours a day.

All that does is lead to more stress because now I'm falling behind on my life tasks and have to burn a weekend catching up when I should be able to spend that weekend de-stressing.

I know not everyone is as sapped for energy as I am after work, I hate that I'm this way. But after leaving work and siting in an hour of traffic my energy is just sapped from me by the time I make it home. I have enough energy to feed myself and sometimes work out to maintain my health..

Re: More bosses give four-day workweek a try

#19

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

This is terrible if you have a long commute. During the 4 days you only commute, work and sleep. Now as a remote worker I could do this.

True, but you'll spend less of your life commuting, because you spend less days at work.

Re: More bosses give four-day workweek a try

#20

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 decide…

I agree that it's hard for some people (managers) to see a relaxed, happy person and believe that they're also totally productive.

I don't blame them either; I feel like the image of overly-caffeinated, stressed-out people is embedded in our collective consciousness as representative of High Productivity and our lizard brains can't seem to be able to reconcile that with the data that is saying "relaxed people who make enough money, are treated well, and have the freedom to live satisfactory lives outside the office will most probably be more productive, focused, and effective at work."

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