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Belgium approves four-day week

euronews.com

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Re: Belgium approves four-day week

#61

Post by onion2k »

krickkrack wrote: post #4
philmcp wrote: post #2

"In practice this means maintaining a 38-hour working week, with an additional day off compensating for longer work days." Unfortunately it's a compressed 4 day week, instead of a "proper" 4 day work week (i.e. 4 x 8 hour days, e.g. https://4dayweek.io ) A step in the right direction however

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.

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.

The point of the 4 day week is to decouple the link between output and time. Most employers aren't paying people for 5 * 8 hours of their time. They're paying them for "however much of X work you can do in 40 hours". But, and this is the key point, if tech has moved forward to enable people to do "40 hours of X work" in 32 hours then people could work a 4 day week for the same money that they're earning now.

For a large number of jobs that absolutely is the case, and people sit around wasting 8 hours a week doing very little because they can get all their work done in less time. Rather than them wasting the time, which doesn't benefit you at all, why not just work 4 days? People get more time for themselves, so they're happier, and you benefit from happier, more motivated staff. Everyone wins.

Re: Belgium approves four-day week

#62

Post by dahfizz »

bloqs wrote: post #56
krickkrack wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If workers were more productive working less hours you wouldn't need the government to do anything - businesses acting in their own interests would do this automatically. The government doesn't know how to run businesses better than the businesses themselves.

Well many private businesses are already, take MSs pilot recently. Do you know how the 40 hour 5 day week was initially established in the US? The postwar era status quo of people travelling hours each way to their job, then to spend most of it in meetings or in an open plan office (chosen for managerial oversight, not productivity, which is a clue we will come back to) with too much noise to be productive are being…

Assuming that a person will always be productive for X hours a day, regardless of how long they are in the office, is naive.

The reality is that people spend some percentage of their time being productive. During the day they take coffee breaks, chat with coworkers, check Twitter, etc.

Assume people are productive for 20 hours now. If you reduced the work week to be 20 hours, productivity would go down. There would still be meetings, coffee breaks, etc that eat into those 20 hours. Now people are only productive for, say, 15 hours a week.

Re: Belgium approves four-day week

#63

Post by ghaff »

dahfizz wrote: post #59
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

> 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. Another way of phrasing this is that people tend to be productive for 50% of the time they spend "working". It's not self evident that p…

Right. Even if I, say, spend half the day taking a walk, vaguely mulling some task in background, doing some vaguely related reading, chatting with colleagues etc. doesn't mean I'd get as much work done if my hours were 9-1. Would I get more than 50% of my work done? Probably. But I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be 100%.

I actually think if I took every Friday off, I could probably hit pretty close to current productivity but I work a pretty flexible schedule and don't have to do a lot of coordination.

Re: Belgium approves four-day week

#64

Post by onion2k »

dahfizz wrote: post #58
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 have misunderstood the parents point. If this is free productivity, why don't companies already do this?

Companies are made up of people, and people get things wrong. A great example is working from home - prior to the pandemic many companies refused to consider it. They didn't believe it works. They refused to trust their staff. They thought the IT issues would make it unworkable. It was only being forced to try it that made them understand that it's actually really good for many people. So much so that lots of companies continued to do it, and recruited people remotely because they don't plan on stopping it.

It takes a leap of faith to make big changes like this. Sometimes the decision makers don't have the courage to try.

Re: Belgium approves four-day week

#66

Post by renewiltord »

dahfizz wrote: post #58
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 have misunderstood the parents point. If this is free productivity, why don't companies already do this?

Good question and one way to approach it, for sure. But it appears paradigms shift in waves. Running a business means focusing on the most important things for that business. It’s likely that things like these are microoptimizations.

For instance, there are many companies that have taken the pandemic as an opportunity to enable permanent remote work even post-pandemic. It would have been a massive recruiting improvement to have had that pre-pandemic. (And it was, I worked at a place that was like this). But in the end, it was better to just focus on the business itself. There’s only so many things it’s worth not standardizing on.

As someone who prefers both in-office and more than 40 hrs of work, I find this whole thing interesting

Re: Belgium approves four-day week

#67

Post by dahart »

renewiltord wrote: post #60
dahart wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article didn’t make any arguments about increased productivity, it was suggesting that better work-life balance was healthier and helps parents with children. What evidence is there for an increase in productivity when moving from 40 to 32 hours/week? I believe productivity increases have been demonstrated in some cases for hourly reductions when moving from overtime (say, 60 hours/week) down to 40. This is groun…

I think we can agree that working 100% of the time leads to poor societal outcomes and 0% of the time leads to poor societal outcomes. We probably have some shared view that it’s Laffer-curvish without being sure of the shape. It just seems unlikely to me that 40 hrs is a total system optimum since it was a historical accident. Personally I think it might be 50 hrs/week but it just seems strange that we’d believe tha…

Exactly right, I do agree; both too much and too little exist.

I would say that 40 hours/week was no accident though. That was something workers battled for hundreds of years. It was the result of a prolonged debate about what is a reasonable work/life balance, in response to widespread employer abuse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day

I’m sure you’re right about 50 for some jobs, but it really depends. There’s a big difference between blue collar and white collar work, just to point at the probably the most obvious distinction.

My own experience with long hours is in film and video game production, where in film we were on a 50 hours per week contract and it went up to usually 60-70 with overtime pay near the end of production. In video games, it was 40 hours a week with extended crunch periods of 80 or even (kill me) slightly more. At 80 hours/week sustained, all life outside of work is over, it’s barely enough time to eat & sleep and no amount of money is worth it. And my productivity went down, I’m certain. At 50 I’m compromising on my family & friends a bit, but I’m probably as productive or slightly more productive than at 40. At 30 hours/week, I feel like I’m barely working, and that meetings burn what little time I have.

When I had my own startup, when I could be flexible with hours and work from home (pre-pandemic), it was probably easier to do 60 hours/week, happily and productively, than when I was working 40 for a larger corporation.

Re: Belgium approves four-day week

#68

Post by Apocryphon »

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?

Game theory- prisoner’s dilemma.

Re: Belgium approves four-day week

#69

Post by HWR_14 »

philmcp wrote: post #2

"In practice this means maintaining a 38-hour working week, with an additional day off compensating for longer work days." Unfortunately it's a compressed 4 day week, instead of a "proper" 4 day work week (i.e. 4 x 8 hour days, e.g. https://4dayweek.io ) A step in the right direction however

Given how many people are working 10x5 right now, it seems like it is a "proper" 4 day week in your parlance.
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