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Companies ran an experiment: Pay workers their full salary to work fewer days

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Re: Companies ran an experiment: Pay workers their full salary to work fewer days

#91
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wife’s a teacher. 40-60 hours at school. 10-30 hours outside of work doing lesson plans, report card comments etc. Always responding to emails from parents. She Has collapsed before when total was getting above 80 for several weeks. They want to promote her to VP. They work even more hours then she does. I make more then triple what she does.

> 40-60 hours at school. This part doesn't make sense to me, can you please explain (I'm genuinely asking). My children are in elementary school, and the day is from 8:45-2:30. I can understand being there at 8am(i definitely have seen teachers showing up later than this though), and when I've driven by the school at 3pm nearly all the cars are gone from the teachers lot (if not all). I can understand that there's a…

My dad and ex-wife were both teachers.

My dad was up at 6 and at school for 7am. Worked 7am-3pm (8 hours). He did marking for an hour or two most evenings, and a solid chunk on the weekends. Probably 50 hour weeks. And that's after 20 years of teaching the same classes, so he had all the materials.

My ex-wife was brand new to teaching so had to develop curriculum on top of this. She worked 7am-5pm every day plus weekends.

Calling parents, dealing with kids with special needs, developing curriculum, marking, department meetings, making lesson plans, running extra-curricular activities or clubs, private lessons, doing paperwork or photocopying, etc etc, it all mounts up. There's a lot of behind the scenes work.

Now, some teachers simply don't do this. You can easily skate by, work the bare minimum 6 hour days, and not give two shits about the kids. But most teachers care about children and education (I mean, you don't become a teacher for the money).

Re: Companies ran an experiment: Pay workers their full salary to work fewer days

#92
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another fascinating thing about teacher claims of working hours is how technology apparently hasn't moved the needle at all. Lots of schools have moved to more and more online assignments that can be in large part automatically graded yet the time spend grading remains constant, or so they claim.

That's probably because IT busywork replaces manual busywork. Before: you take a stack of papers, and go through each one with a red pen. Now: you log on a system, wait, click on something, wait, click on something else, wait... the stupid tests are auto-graded, but chances are there is still something you have to grade student-by-student, and that's now slower to do. Plus, obviously, the usual annoyances (got to upd…

Also, the UX is usually awful.

I remember having to use educational software in college for a discussion board and it was terrible and sucky. I could only imagine what the teacher end of it looked like.

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For a comedic look at how this affects teaching, the new comedy show Abbott Elentary has an episode on this. It’s like Parks and Rec but at an inner city Philadelphia public school.

Re: Companies ran an experiment: Pay workers their full salary to work fewer days

#93
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 40-60 hours at school. This part doesn't make sense to me, can you please explain (I'm genuinely asking). My children are in elementary school, and the day is from 8:45-2:30. I can understand being there at 8am(i definitely have seen teachers showing up later than this though), and when I've driven by the school at 3pm nearly all the cars are gone from the teachers lot (if not all). I can understand that there's a…

Another fascinating thing about teacher claims of working hours is how technology apparently hasn't moved the needle at all. Lots of schools have moved to more and more online assignments that can be in large part automatically graded yet the time spend grading remains constant, or so they claim.

Have you ever worked with education software? I have. It's awful.

Until 2011, my local school district was using a DOS-based attendance and grading system. No GUI.

In 2011 they switched to an internet-connected system that looked like it was built on Windows 3.1. Non-resizable text fields. Inability to tab from one field to the next. A tiny non-resizable window that you had to scroll manually with the scrollbar to enter data in all the fields, so to enter attendance for a whole class you had to scroll left and right with the mouse for each child.

It crashed every morning for months. Teachers would coordinate with each other to ensure they didn't overload the system.

Re: Companies ran an experiment: Pay workers their full salary to work fewer days

#94
post #87
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will say the morale improvement on my team when we switched to 4/10s was worth it alone. We couldn't swing the reduction in hours unfortunately.

This is a bit different from a 32 hour week. But yes you will see productivity go UP with 4 10s. That's a full days worth of break and lunch interruptions that isn't there. I switched to 4 10s a couple years back and it's nice, but the days are quite long so anything else you plan to do probably isn't happening. Like gym time, which is going to cost long term.

To be fair this was heavy construction, so a baseline of physical activity was there. Out-of-town work as well, so longer days were a bonus since off-duty time would be sent sitting in your trailer or at the bar. An extra day to travel and spend with the family at home was huge for the guys.

> That's a full days worth of break and lunch interruptions that isn't there.

A constant battle I've seen between superintendents and schedulers/penny pincher types. "oh no we can't pay any over time!" without realizing the productivity gains the superintendent is chasing from the extra working time unencumbered by extra breaks.

Re: Companies ran an experiment: Pay workers their full salary to work fewer days

#95

This won't be valid for everyone, but I'm getting more and more convinced that most (a lot of?) people don't "work" work 40 hours anyway. I'm not even mentally capable of doing 40 intense hours of focussed work. Not saying I don't have other tasks besides coding/thinking in that time, but honestly not for the full slot of time. It just feels to me like some sort of secret we all share and pretend like it's fine, but…

This is why Remote is great. You have the flexibility, and as long as you get the work you say you'll get done done, who cares if you're literally sitting in a chair from 9-5?

Re: Companies ran an experiment: Pay workers their full salary to work fewer days

#96
post #50
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree we don't put in a full 40 hours. Unless someone is working a 1950's style assembly line (meatpacking plant for example) few will put in those 40 hours even in manual labor ---you're chatting, playing around, etc. for some time. White collar work, is of course, way worse. There is a lot of slack time in between tasks and meetings and so on. So during those 40 hours, let's say a person delivers 100 work units.…

> So during those 40 hours, let's say a person delivers 100 work units. If we were to say, from now on you only have to work 32 hours, some people will still deliver 100 work units, but many will deliver an approximation to 80 work units. Many people will automatically adjust. People have a "pace of work" that is like breathing. Perhaps in manual labor, but I don't think this applies to white collar work. The limitin…

White collar work in the modern era is also very unrestricted. I can slack off during most of the day if I want (and nothing urgent comes up) and my manager will neither check nor care. Because of 24/7 systems, I can completely bunk fridays while pretending to work from home and just staying online from the phone. It is totally irrelevant to my job. I hate fridays and usually work Sunday to Thursday in reality. Many people I know have this level of flexibility in many fields.

My “work hours” in my pay slip say 75.8 for every 2 weeks. I work maybe 50 hours in a busy week. It is irrelevant to my organization. So we are already there in terms of intellectual white collar work.

Re: Companies ran an experiment: Pay workers their full salary to work fewer days

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another fascinating thing about teacher claims of working hours is how technology apparently hasn't moved the needle at all. Lots of schools have moved to more and more online assignments that can be in large part automatically graded yet the time spend grading remains constant, or so they claim.

Have you ever worked with education software? I have. It's awful. Until 2011, my local school district was using a DOS-based attendance and grading system. No GUI. In 2011 they switched to an internet-connected system that looked like it was built on Windows 3.1. Non-resizable text fields. Inability to tab from one field to the next. A tiny non-resizable window that you had to scroll manually with the scrollbar to en…

If that's true, person in charge of purchasing is asleep at the wheel. With the most politically powerful union in the US, teachers could replace them if they wanted too (although the same union likely protects the jobs of the people who can't buy software).

Re: Companies ran an experiment: Pay workers their full salary to work fewer days

#98
post #19

Over 200 companies have now made the switch to a 32hr work week: https://4dayweek.io/companies The benefits for the employee are pretty obvious, but there are also many benefits for the company: - Staff are more productive (for previous pilots: output almost always hits 100%) - Job listings get (way) more applications - Staff are happier - Staff are healthier i.e. off sick less - It's better for the environment - Sta…

This is one of those situations where it's a clear documented (via study and real world experiment) benefit to both workers and employers, so you wonder why it's taking so long to spread. One problem is I genuinely believe it has to be mandated. Every company has people who will take any action purely to make themselves look attractive for the next promotion cycle. And if even just one person is actually putting in 5…

I think to some degree the people making these decisions to some extent are more likely to be those who enjoy the external approval aspects of work - the "clueless middle management" in the Gervais Principle framework, who enjoy doing more work and want to see those below them do the same.

Re: Companies ran an experiment: Pay workers their full salary to work fewer days

#99

I think I personally know many people that will simply use the extra time to work another job, thus erasing the intended benefit to the generous company. They work you less so that you will have better morale and energy and loyalty while you are there. But you use the time to collect a 2nd paycheck, and the gets the same tired employee they would have had if they just worked you fully the old way. I don't know what c…

This mentality is less prevela t in Europe so that might be a factor to keep in mind.

Re: Companies ran an experiment: Pay workers their full salary to work fewer days

#100

why would a company agree to pay the same salary for fewer hours of custody? it reminds me of the macchiavelli quote: > “How we live is so different from how we ought to live that he who studies what ought to be done rather than what is done will learn the way to his downfall rather than to his preservation.” productivity study is interesting but that's not how the real world incentives are aligned.

I get it is a strange idea. But putting a quote that doesn't really have any substance isn't really an argument nor adding value against it.

I think the idea of 4 days work week is asking to work outside the box for a moment on what benefits this could entail for different industry.

> To work all week is to surrender your will, working less is the core of motivating man

(see this quote disagrees!)

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