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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

#111

Post by piva00 »

lzmibes wrote: post #105
piva00 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one said there wasn't, what was stated is that it wasn't common. Great for you to manage to find those gigs, it's not representative of the more general trend. It was always there, for a very few select opportunities. I only got 2 remote gigs for very early stage startups without an office before COVID (and I've been in this industry for 20 years), after it's been 70% of offers from recruiters telling me "we're re…

Wasn't hard to find. Repeatly. Coincidence perhaps... "Do I understand the difference?" Sure, the free market is favourable for some. Others stand to benefit more from collectivisation.

It wasn't hard to find for you. In the market you were looking for a job, at the time you were looking for a job, given that the vast majority of people weren't working remotely before can we agree that it wasn't common nor easy to find for a vast swath of the population?

You seem to conflate your experience with the general experience, that's an extremely harmful bias to have since it signals you are unable to see the bigger picture, nor empathise with how others have very different life experiences...

Again, great for you, it wasn't the common experience.

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

#112

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

lamontcg wrote: post #26

Newsflash: most people working 40 hour weeks aren't working the whole time and spend a lot of time surfing reddit and HN when they're not yapping about sports or their weekends with coworkers.

At a job I had a few years ago, 95% of my time was spent on reddit/HN.

There was corporate in-fighting over who would would be responsible for some work, and my team lost, so my team no longer had any work to do. My manager quit, but his manager didn't actually know what we did on a day-to-day basis so basically left us alone. He was extremely occupied with the work from another one of his teams, anyways.

It was actually kind of stressful. I was always waiting for the day that my acting manager would discover that we had no work to do and would eliminate the entire team. I ended up leaving and getting a job where I actually had important (to the company, anyways) work to do at a significantly higher salary.

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

#113

Post by kkfx »

Unpopular opinion: 4-days workweeks is used as a scam to force people in the office instead of full-remote. That's is.

Since https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/ "productivity" in not a thing really interests companies, they are much more interesting in having an effective grip on their workers, with remote workers the sole grip is fair conditions and nice work environment. They do want to keep the geographical grip and various other small potatoes grip on workers. Here the popularity of shorter workweeks, of course "if you go in the office", meaning if you live nearby.

I can work 6 days a week, no issue, but if the job can be done from remote it MUST BE done from remote.

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

#114

Post by lzmibes »

piva00 wrote: post #111
lzmibes wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't hard to find. Repeatly. Coincidence perhaps... "Do I understand the difference?" Sure, the free market is favourable for some. Others stand to benefit more from collectivisation.

It wasn't hard to find for you . In the market you were looking for a job, at the time you were looking for a job, given that the vast majority of people weren't working remotely before can we agree that it wasn't common nor easy to find for a vast swath of the population? You seem to conflate your experience with the general experience, that's an extremely harmful bias to have since it signals you are unable to see…

[flagged]

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

#115

Post by CraigJPerry »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #84
CraigJPerry wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> have already optimized for all these factors Factories and companies start and die all the time. The idea that some steady state equilibrium exists is only in these BS models. >> production loss and therefore a loss on economic competitiveness Apple is less competitive because it makes less iPhones than Samsung? >> What's the better way? Stop pretending models predict reality perfectly.

>Stop pretending models predict reality perfectly. But what it reality to you and how do you describe it if not by models?

>> But what it reality to you

Complicated. It’s rare for any interesting scenario not to be complicated.

>> how do you describe it

By aiming for honesty and accuracy but with enough humility to realise these absolutes are unachievable in most interesting cases. To make it more concrete in this particular case It means being careful to state assumptions is essential.

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

#116

Post by harikb »

zooq_ai wrote: post #69

This study is a perfect fit the HN crowd who won't question the methodology and incentive systems because it fits their narrative. Of course employee are going to report happy. What next? a study saying "Employees love more money for the same work?"

Just curios, why single-out HN crowd though???. In a typical 'HN crowd' comment, it is usually about a persona that think 'tech is great' or 'tech can solve all problems', not this particular characterization of 'worker vs management'.

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

#117

Post by FredPret »

black_puppydog wrote: post #36
FredPret wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't, which makes it difficult or maybe impossible to have hard facts about it

seems like a bad excuse to not even try to go beyond shrugging/handwaving

Nope - it's a great reason to not even start spreading more bullshit into the info-sphere.

(The same can be said for almost everything related to nutritional "science".)

If we don't have a good mechanism for knowing something is true or not, we should acknowledge that and approach the problem philosophically / aesthetically.

We need to know what we know so that we can use knowledge as our building blocks, not fake information.

You can't magic science into existence and then use it to make decisions.

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

#118

Post by jedberg »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #81
jedberg wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure your manager does. They aren't the ones demanding 40 hours and return to office. It's the C-suite that is doing it. The C-Suite got where they are because they are extroverts who excel at in person interactions. They can't use that skill unless you're there in front of them. They also came up in a world where everyone worked in an office 40 hours a week. And since they are in charge, they get to choose the r…

>and are seemingly choosing to ignore productivity studies that show their decisions don't make sense. I also don't buy this. Companies are all profit oriented and don't like leaving money on the table if research shows there is left over money on the table. They can't monetize control but they can monetize money. If research would show they would make more profits using AWS instead of Azure(example pulled out of my…

Return-to-office mandates aren't making companies more valuable and productive, study finds:

https://www.businessinsider.com/return-to-office-mandates-re...

"Any one of the three economic factors described above (real estate, retention and recruitment), by itself, could justify the alleged loss in productivity. When you consider all three, it is extremely hard to imagine any organization for which the losses resulting from a strict RTO policy would be offset by a possible increase in worker productivity. As a further consideration, a strict RTO policy will also disproportionally impact certain traditionally disadvantaged groups, leading to further decreases in organizational diversity.":

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paologaudiano/2023/08/14/here-i...

People return to offices, productivity plunges:

https://ktla.com/news/money-business/people-return-to-office...

The return to the office could be the real reason for the slump in productivity. Here’s the data to prove it:

https://fortune.com/2023/02/16/return-office-real-reason-slu...

Expecting a return to office will boost worker productivity is ‘magical thinking,’ says Meta’s former director of remote work

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/expecting-return-office-boost...

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

#119

Post by burningChrome »

jjcm wrote: post #71

There's no doubt that there's a benefit to the employee, but for corporations to adopt this there has to be a measurable benefit to the company as well. I do think there is one clear benefit as measured in the article - employee retention. It's an extremely strong incentive to stay with the current company, and domain knowledge gained over decades really is a competitive advantage if your employees commonly have it.…

In the mid aughts, I worked at a company that put ROWE (results oriented work environment) into practice. This approach basically meant you could work whenever you wanted, as long as you were meeting goals and metrics. There was a list of metrics you had to meet before being eligible for it. They kept it in place for two years and nothing really changed. Devs were still meeting their metrics and the company was still doing well, but when the old VP who put ROWE in place left, the first thing the new VP did was take it away along with some other perks we had. Myself and about seven other devs left within the next 3-4 months.

I'm currently working for a large corporation who went through several cycles of trying to get people to come back to the office after C19 slowed down. After three or four versions, they finally gave up and put an optional (hybrid) model in place. It was interesting to hear the stunned VP's glowing about the increased productivity and the company had two of its most successful quarters going into and coming out of the pandemic. I'm guess seeing those results made it easier for them to allow people to work from home more easily.

Some anecdotal evidence for your retention theory. Since my current company allowed 100% WFH, our team has had barely any turn over and at least three of the teams I worked with have also have little or no turn over as well. It would stand to reason you probably have a good point about retaining people when you allow them a little more freedom to do their jobs.

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

#120

Post by autoexecbat »

kevinventullo wrote: post #87
jjcm wrote: post #71

There's no doubt that there's a benefit to the employee, but for corporations to adopt this there has to be a measurable benefit to the company as well. I do think there is one clear benefit as measured in the article - employee retention. It's an extremely strong incentive to stay with the current company, and domain knowledge gained over decades really is a competitive advantage if your employees commonly have it.…

domain knowledge gained over decades really is a competitive advantage if your employees commonly have it I’m not so sure. On the one hand, it seems nearly tautological. Yet, so much of the comp structure and general attitude towards employees in big tech seems to incentivize job hopping every few years. I would prefer not having to do that, but my hand is forced.

It's pretty clear to me that deep knowledge of how the company works and the historical quirks of how things happened, and how the tech-debt works, is considered of only small value to a typical company. I've seen countless examples of people in such positions being discarded without a thought during layoffs.

Additionally, having deep expertise in a particular technical area can protect you somewhat during a layoff, but also makes you easier to define a replacement for if there is more that one of you.

Companies will get what they pay for. They pay for short term gain.

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