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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

#51

Post by me_me_me »

perfunctory wrote: post #31

I personally first tried 4-day workweek about 10 years ago and still love it. That was one of the best decisions I made in my life. Especially in software industry, it's not that hard to arrange I believe. Even easier if we do it collectively. And when more and more people do it and it becomes a norm, the income will just readjust and return to the current levels. But even today, when it's still not a norm, and I hav…

> the income will just readjust and return to the current levels.

hahaha, good to see some hopeful people around. But the MBA people will never let this happen.

They already reduce your salary based on location of your home (when remote), as if it matters if you do your work in office or whenever.

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

#52

Post by ssklash »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #39
bombcar wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be decently hard to find an argument against the 4 day workweek that would not ALSO apply to the 5 day workweek (compared to 6) - perhaps the only real one is "it's what everyone does".

But then why work 4 day/week and not 3, when 4 days/week becomes the new normal that burns people out? And then why not work 2 days instead of 3? And so on. How do we decide which model is the sustainable one?

Shouldn't the goal be to work as little as possible? Infinite growth in a finite world just makes us all work harder than necessary, and instead of using productivity and efficiency gains to benefit people/workers, they just go to pad some company's stock price.

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

#53

Post by sokoloff »

ActionHank wrote: post #6

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

That seems reasonable. Take two equivalent companies, one that has a 4-day workweek and an otherwise identical one that has a 5-day workweek.

Which one would you rather work for? Which one do you think will have a relative abundance of applicants (read: supply of labor)? Which other one do you think will have a lower supply of labor and might need to pay more to attract candidates?

It seems logical that a company offering 4-day workweek would be more attractive and, on a balance of factors, could pay less to attract the same workforce.

Flip it around. If a four-day workweek was the standard, I feel like literally everyone would agree that companies who are trying to introduce a five-day workweek would have to pay more.

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

#54

Post by FirmwareBurner »

jerf wrote: post #45
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The fact they already tried 5 days a week and it apparently didn't work. Why would anything be any different when going back? It reminds me of the way that as we improve in our ability to automate laws, we're going to need to do a better job of thinking about what laws are for rather than assuming that simply reifying the current laws exactly into computerized enforcement will do what we expect: https://news.ycombina…

>The fact they already tried 5 days a week and it apparently didn't work.

How didn't it work? Probably the devie you're typing this on was made by a person working 5 days/week, or way more if we're talking early iOS /Android devices.

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

#55

Post by FirmwareBurner »

ssklash wrote: post #52
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then why work 4 day/week and not 3, when 4 days/week becomes the new normal that burns people out? And then why not work 2 days instead of 3? And so on. How do we decide which model is the sustainable one?

Shouldn't the goal be to work as little as possible? Infinite growth in a finite world just makes us all work harder than necessary, and instead of using productivity and efficiency gains to benefit people/workers, they just go to pad some company's stock price.

>Shouldn't the goal be to work as little as possible?

It's my goal indeed, but not the goal of my country, the economy and the businesses in it who provide the jobs I work for and also lobby for the labor laws my EU country has.

Of course doing no work at all while getting paid loads would be the dream, but I wasn't talking about dreams, I was talking about reality. And the reality is way different than what you dream of.

How do we make less working days a reality for everyone, instead of just ~60 companies form the UK?

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

#57

Post by jedberg »

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…

> And if one factory can churn out X steel widgets and another one only X -20% because they work only 4 days per week,

When was the last time you saw a widget factory running 8 hours a day 5 days a week? Factories already run 24/7/365. They hire enough workers for their own economics to make sense (either enough so they all work no more than 40 a week or they just pay a bunch of overtime). If a 4 day workweek became standard it would just mean hiring more people or giving more overtime, since it's not the people that need to be optimized in that equation.

But for knowledge work it makes a ton of sense. It's been repeatedly shown that knowledge workers are equally if not more productive at 32 hours a week vs 40 hours a week.

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

#58

Post by jerf »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #54
jerf wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact they already tried 5 days a week and it apparently didn't work. Why would anything be any different when going back? It reminds me of the way that as we improve in our ability to automate laws, we're going to need to do a better job of thinking about what laws are for rather than assuming that simply reifying the current laws exactly into computerized enforcement will do what we expect: https://news.ycombina…

>The fact they already tried 5 days a week and it apparently didn't work. How didn't it work? Probably the devie you're typing this on was made by a person working 5 days/week, or way more if we're talking early iOS /Android devices.

I am speaking in the context of your own assumption in your post, that previously people were only doing 4 days of work in a 5 day week, so there's some option of getting people to work 5 days a week at the 4-day-a-week pace. Please don't equivocate on your own terminology for the purpose of hostilely misunderstanding my reply.

If you're going to roll with "actually people have in fact been productively working 5 days a week after all" than I would advise FirmwareBurner of 6 minutes ago to take the debate up with FirmwareBurner of 1 hour ago. I don't see that I'd add any value in mediating that discussion.

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

#59

Post by FirmwareBurner »

jedberg wrote: post #57
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…

> And if one factory can churn out X steel widgets and another one only X -20% because they work only 4 days per week, When was the last time you saw a widget factory running 8 hours a day 5 days a week? Factories already run 24/7/365. They hire enough workers for their own economics to make sense (either enough so they all work no more than 40 a week or they just pay a bunch of overtime). If a 4 day workweek became…

>But for knowledge work it makes a ton of sense. It's been repeatedly shown that knowledge workers are equally if not more productive at 32 hours a week vs 40 hours a week.

But then why hasn't it become the norm already and even in some cases, like in Asia, people are forced to stay in the office way more hours than 40?

If I take that research and show it to my boss saying I should work 32 hours/week instead of 40 for the same pay, he'll most likely laugh in my face and tell me to go back to work.

Clearly the vast majority of companies don't believe the same research, otherwise we'd be working 32 hours/week a long time ago.

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

#60

Post by jedberg »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #59
jedberg wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And if one factory can churn out X steel widgets and another one only X -20% because they work only 4 days per week, When was the last time you saw a widget factory running 8 hours a day 5 days a week? Factories already run 24/7/365. They hire enough workers for their own economics to make sense (either enough so they all work no more than 40 a week or they just pay a bunch of overtime). If a 4 day workweek became…

>But for knowledge work it makes a ton of sense. It's been repeatedly shown that knowledge workers are equally if not more productive at 32 hours a week vs 40 hours a week. But then why hasn't it become the norm already and even in some cases, like in Asia, people are forced to stay in the office way more hours than 40? If I take that research and show it to my boss saying I should work 32 hours/week instead of 40 fo…

For the same reason companies are forcing return to office -- control. They like to see their people working, it makes them feel like better managers.
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