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Belgium approves four-day week

euronews.com

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Re: Belgium approves four-day week

#21

Post by krickkrack »

jd115 wrote: post #7
krickkrack wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an employer there are plenty of jobs that I would be perfectly fine allowing the employee to work 20% less, as long as they cost me 20% less.

That's literally missing the entire point of it. You already have this now - always had it. There's nothing new or interesting about what you're "proposing". What IS new and interesting is getting employees who work 20% less, AND THEREFORE are 20% more productive (and presumably 20% happier), at the same cost.

Wow... So like magic? Why aren't all successful businesses already doing this if they can get more productivity for less time?

Re: Belgium approves four-day week

#22

Post by jonathonf »

bla3 wrote: post #11
harles wrote: post #6

38 hours (the estimated work week) is exactly half of the 996 week (76 hours) of some companies in China. I don’t think that’s healthy, but if I had to bet, I’d pick the 76 hour workers outcompeting their 38 hour counterparts.

Depends on the type of work, surely. If it's menial tasks and labor is plenty, you can afford your workforce continuously burning out, since it's fast to train and easy to replace. It's exploitative, but as long as it makes the market happy... For highly-educated jobs where people need 6 months of onboarding and institutional knowledge matters, it's probably more efficient to reduce churn.

> it's probably more efficient to reduce churn

That would be lovely. Unfortunately, many places would rather you move job than give you a raise. It's cheaper in their accounts, and that's what (ah) counts.

Re: Belgium approves four-day week

#23

Post by Gareth321 »

harles wrote: post #6

38 hours (the estimated work week) is exactly half of the 996 week (76 hours) of some companies in China. I don’t think that’s healthy, but if I had to bet, I’d pick the 76 hour workers outcompeting their 38 hour counterparts.

Assembling thousands of parts on an assembly line? Probably. Anything remotely requiring critical thought? Not a chance.

Re: Belgium approves four-day week

#24

Post by RamblingCTO »

wccrawford wrote: post #12
RamblingCTO wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How on earth is this related to "agile" software/product development? > I always see lots of supporting infrastructure being skimped on so a new feature can be delivered faster That's bad management and has nothing to do with agile. Reserve time for bug fixes (or have fire fighting capabilities) and refactoring, include time for tech tickets. ALWAYS. Plan workload jointly with developers, talk to them regularly. It's…

They did put "doing agile" in scare quotes to suggest it isn't really true agile development. They're claiming it, but not actually doing it right.

Yes, I got that! That's why I used "agile" as well. My first thought was that it might be true what they said because it might be harder to account for said work, but I think in the end it depends on the management style and the priorities. If management and the dev team don't have the right priorities, traditional or agile can't do anything about it. And the technology leader (i.e. a CTO/tech lead etc.) needs to protect devs from pressure and stress of stakeholders and users. You need to foster understanding that developing software takes time and things like proper testing, QA, security, refactoring, updating libs etc. saves you money and allows you to keep the momentum. That's the job of the CTO imho. Also: if you want to move faster, grow your team (and your structures) and see where time is wasted (we don't have a lot of meetings for devs that are mandatory besides demo, sprint planning, retro and standups and all have a max time) and don't cut corners all the time, they are coming back to bite you most of the time.

If anyone's interested, I can only recommend "Scrum and XP from the trenches"!

/e: sorry for the long text, tl;dr: have the right priorities to produce good software, agile is not the cause, your shitty management is

Re: Belgium approves four-day week

#25

Post by refurb »

bloqs wrote: post #9
krickkrack wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an employer there are plenty of jobs that I would be perfectly fine allowing the employee to work 20% less, as long as they cost me 20% less.

I think you have misunderstood the reason behind the move towards the 4 day workweek across Europe. It's literally more productive for less hours.

You know that workers will just piss away the extra two hours a day and then take Friday’s off.

I mean, I and most of my colleagues did that when my employer had 4 day work weeks during the summer. Instead of “summer hours” we called it “some of the hours”.

Re: Belgium approves four-day week

#26

Post by melissalobos »

harles wrote: post #6

38 hours (the estimated work week) is exactly half of the 996 week (76 hours) of some companies in China. I don’t think that’s healthy, but if I had to bet, I’d pick the 76 hour workers outcompeting their 38 hour counterparts.

Consider this, imagine someone working every single waking minute at their job. Clearly they will not be very happy and after a time not very productive. So there exists some optimum level of productivity between 0 and 18 hours of work per day. The big question is whether it is closer to the 0 or closer to the 18. Currently there is some good evidence for it being in the 3-6 hour range(I don't have the studies on hand, maybe someone else can chip in here). Now that is of actual productive work and not "work"(where you are just visible in the office or sitting at a meeting table).

Re: Belgium approves four-day week

#27

Post by ghaff »

IshKebab wrote: post #20
jd115 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's literally missing the entire point of it. You already have this now - always had it. There's nothing new or interesting about what you're "proposing". What IS new and interesting is getting employees who work 20% less, AND THEREFORE are 20% more productive (and presumably 20% happier), at the same cost.

> You already have this now - always had it. There's nothing new or interesting about what you're "proposing". That's not remotely true. There's a real stigma about part-time work and most employers would just say NEXT! if you said "please can I work 4 days a week for 80% pay?".

Well, it's not 80% pay given benefits and overhead costs associated with having an employee. Probably more like a 30%+ cut.

ADDED: Assuming it really is a 20% cut in productivity which, for office workers, probably isn't the case but would be for many others including white collar jobs like lawyers, doctors, consultants, etc.

Re: Belgium approves four-day week

#28

Post by thesuitonym »

IshKebab wrote: post #20
jd115 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's literally missing the entire point of it. You already have this now - always had it. There's nothing new or interesting about what you're "proposing". What IS new and interesting is getting employees who work 20% less, AND THEREFORE are 20% more productive (and presumably 20% happier), at the same cost.

> You already have this now - always had it. There's nothing new or interesting about what you're "proposing". That's not remotely true. There's a real stigma about part-time work and most employers would just say NEXT! if you said "please can I work 4 days a week for 80% pay?".

Yes, but the person you're replying to is talking to an employer who wishes they could hire someone to work 80% time for 80% pay, but somehow isn't able to do that (Hint: It's because they don't really want to)

Re: Belgium approves four-day week

#29

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

krickkrack wrote: post #21
jd115 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's literally missing the entire point of it. You already have this now - always had it. There's nothing new or interesting about what you're "proposing". What IS new and interesting is getting employees who work 20% less, AND THEREFORE are 20% more productive (and presumably 20% happier), at the same cost.

Wow... So like magic? Why aren't all successful businesses already doing this if they can get more productivity for less time?

In fairness - there are a lot of studies on how much people actually work in white collar jobs.

I don't know of a consensus, but I've seen many studies where >20% of people self report working ~20 hours per week.

Many studies like this: https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-aver... - say that the average white collar worker only works ~20 hours per week.

There is little reason to believe the vast majority of workers can't keep the same work load with less hours. Sure - maybe 20% or your workers get 80% of your work done - and those people actually do work the full 40 hours (or more). But who's to say they won't continue working more than "required"?

For non-white collar jobs - particularly service workers - I think this is a completely different story. You can't give the same amount of hour-long massages in 4 days as you can in 5. You can't wait on as many tables or work the cash register for as many hours and so on... The thing is - most of these people are paid hourly - so you just need to find more workers (which currently, at full employment, is hard).

If you're trying to push up wages - this seems like it obviously will. I can see why businesses would be against that. But in a world where all wages go up - there's obviously winners AND losers. Not all businesses will be hurt by higher wages. If your labor inputs are a large portion of your COGS and you don't have pricing power - that's bad (traditional restaurants, discount retail). If labor inputs are low - and you do have pricing power (digital services, luxuries) - now you have many more people with higher incomes and more time to buy your products!

To me, this seems like it is good for the biggest businesses and lower-end salary workers and bad for the most common small businesses and upper-end salary workers. But I have no clue how this will turn out. I don't think anyone does, really. But I think it's a very exciting experiment we shouldn't be too pessimistic about.

Re: Belgium approves four-day week

#30

Post by krickkrack »

refurb wrote: post #25
bloqs wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have misunderstood the reason behind the move towards the 4 day workweek across Europe. It's literally more productive for less hours.

You know that workers will just piss away the extra two hours a day and then take Friday’s off. I mean, I and most of my colleagues did that when my employer had 4 day work weeks during the summer . Instead of “summer hours” we called it “some of the hours”.

For an employer the fix is simple: Each year fire the 10,20,30% least productive employees.
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