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Study: 61 UK firms tried a 4-day workweek and after a year, they still love it

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Re: Study: 61 UK firms tried a 4-day workweek and after a year, they still love it

#11

Post by bschne »

I have some gripes with this group and their publications:

- They don't randomize pilots, so any effect you see is likely to be confounded

- In this publication, it appears there was ~50% attrition between the initial pilot and the follow-up study — again, a huge source of potential confounding

- As another example, in another publication, they showed a plot of GDP per capita against average working hours, and insinuated from the negative relationship that less working hours somehow made workers (causally) more productive, without even hinting at the obvious alternative explanation that people work less as they get more productive because they don't have to work as much to maintain standard of living.

I like that things like this are being tried, but I wish the research conducted on it were more intellectually honest and less obviously geared towards pursuing an agenda. The level of analysis here is more like a company marketing whitepaper than anything bordering on scientific.

Don't get me wrong, personally I think companies where it's feasible should just define minimum presence where the business needs it and leave it to employees where and when to do the work within those constraints depending on preferences and their situation. I don't have an axe to grind against working less (and in my circles it seems like many people are making this decision by reducing their workload to e.g. 80%, albeit at a corresponding salary cut). But the whole thing just seems a big disingenuous.

Re: Study: 61 UK firms tried a 4-day workweek and after a year, they still love it

#12

Post by toomuchtodo »

ActionHank wrote: post #6

I can't wait for companies to use this as a way to drive down pay

Great callout for unionizing. Because corporations would extract as much from workers as they could without boundaries. Labor law modifications will help as well, but that takes longer as you wait for old political and business leaders to age out (and take their work ideas with them).

Re: Study: 61 UK firms tried a 4-day workweek and after a year, they still love it

#14

Post by FirmwareBurner »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #12
ActionHank wrote: post #6

I can't wait for companies to use this as a way to drive down pay

Great callout for unionizing. Because corporations would extract as much from workers as they could without boundaries. Labor law modifications will help as well, but that takes longer as you wait for old political and business leaders to age out (and take their work ideas with them).

Unionizing is not enough. 4/day workweek needs to be universally standardized across the OECD/world for it to stick, because whether we like it or not, countries and economies are in competition with each other. And if one factory can churn out X steel widgets and another one only X -20% because they work only 4 days per week, then all the jobs and industry will move to the former as the latter will not be competitive anymore.

The 4 day workweek seems to currently work without loosing productivity in wealthy service based economies like Amsterdam, the City of London, etc where a lot of "work" is just Blue Chip companies with theatrics and endless meetings while riding the gravy train of other peoples' productivity from across the globe who don't have access to a 4 day week doing all the heavy lifting(basically economic neo-colonialism), but this obviously can't scale across economies that actually depend on actually designing and making the stuff the wealthy economies speculate on.

Re: Study: 61 UK firms tried a 4-day workweek and after a year, they still love it

#15

Post by toomuchtodo »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #14
toomuchtodo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great callout for unionizing. Because corporations would extract as much from workers as they could without boundaries. Labor law modifications will help as well, but that takes longer as you wait for old political and business leaders to age out (and take their work ideas with them).

Unionizing is not enough. 4/day workweek needs to be universally standardized across the OECD/world for it to stick, because whether we like it or not, countries and economies are in competition with each other. And if one factory can churn out X steel widgets and another one only X -20% because they work only 4 days per week, then all the jobs and industry will move to the former as the latter will not be competitiv…

I agree! But workers can organize today while moving forward improvement with each election result (which will take time; for example, 1.8M voters over the age of 55 die every year, 4M young folks age into voting ability at 18 in the US). Luckily, the entire world is getting old fast [1] [2] [3], which means there is a shrinking population of total workers; makes it more difficult to have workers compete against each other race to the bottom style.

[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/02/ageing-global-populat...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_of_China

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8505790/

Re: Study: 61 UK firms tried a 4-day workweek and after a year, they still love it

#16

Post by FirmwareBurner »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #15
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unionizing is not enough. 4/day workweek needs to be universally standardized across the OECD/world for it to stick, because whether we like it or not, countries and economies are in competition with each other. And if one factory can churn out X steel widgets and another one only X -20% because they work only 4 days per week, then all the jobs and industry will move to the former as the latter will not be competitiv…

I agree! But workers can organize today while moving forward improvement with each election result (which will take time; for example, 1.8M voters over the age of 55 die every year, 4M young folks age into voting ability at 18 in the US). Luckily, the entire world is getting old fast [1] [2] [3], which means there is a shrinking population of total workers; makes it more difficult to have workers compete against each…

Won't less workers also mean less consumers therefore less demands for goods and sdervices?

People keep saying how the declining demographics will mean the workers have more leverage but when will that come? As currently I'm struggling to find a job and a recruiter who rejected me just told me they have huge supply of "strong candidates" and they don't need to compromise anymore on offering WFH or accepting only English speaking candidates.

Maybe by the time I retire I can see that leverage?

Re: Study: 61 UK firms tried a 4-day workweek and after a year, they still love it

#17

Post by toomuchtodo »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #16
toomuchtodo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree! But workers can organize today while moving forward improvement with each election result (which will take time; for example, 1.8M voters over the age of 55 die every year, 4M young folks age into voting ability at 18 in the US). Luckily, the entire world is getting old fast [1] [2] [3], which means there is a shrinking population of total workers; makes it more difficult to have workers compete against each…

Won't less workers also mean less consumers therefore less demands for goods and sdervices? People keep saying how the declining demographics will mean the workers have more leverage but when will that come? As currently I'm struggling to find a job and a recruiter who rejected me just told me they have huge supply of "strong candidates" and they don't need to compromise anymore on offering WFH or accepting only Engl…

> Won't less workers also mean less consumers therefore less demands for goods and sdervices?

Longer convo for another thread, but TLDR yes, "structural decline." Trajectory is a function of how fast folks age out of the working population (retire or death), because cohorts coming up behind them keep shrinking.

EDIT: Put some contact info in your profile.

Re: Study: 61 UK firms tried a 4-day workweek and after a year, they still love it

#19

Post by vidarh »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #9
figmert wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of a 4-day work week isn't to cram the 5th day into 4 days, it's completely removing the 5th day, thus working 8 hours every day for 4 days, as opposed to 10 hours for 5 days.

Question: If they removed the 5th work day and the same amount of work got done, then management can say that basically the employees were slacking off for a day a week. And if so, what's stopping them next to increase it back to 5 and chase 5 days worth of productivity out of 5 days/week instead of the previous 4 using the same efficiency gains as performance benchmarks of the 4 days/week?

They can try. They will fail. If people could maintain that higher performance without suffering at a level people aren't willing to, many would.

Re: Study: 61 UK firms tried a 4-day workweek and after a year, they still love it

#20

Post by timthorn »

bschne wrote: post #11

I have some gripes with this group and their publications: - They don't randomize pilots, so any effect you see is likely to be confounded - In this publication, it appears there was ~50% attrition between the initial pilot and the follow-up study — again, a huge source of potential confounding - As another example, in another publication, they showed a plot of GDP per capita against average working hours, and insinu…

They also count charities/non-profits as "companies" - it's unclear to me if they also include local government, but it would be helpful to see the results that for-profit organisations achieved broken out separately.
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