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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

#141

Post by Cheezmeister »

quaintdev wrote: post #38
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…

This is something that will never happen in India because no matter how bad you want 4 day work week theres always someone who will do full 5 days a week and do additional work over the weekend.

> theres always someone who will do full 5 days a week and do additional work over the weekend

Good for them. If the quality bar holds, they deserve to be rewarded.

Based on personal anecdata, the quality bar does not hold. Not in India, nor anywhere else.

Why employers can't see this on the balance sheet is a different discussion.

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

#142

Post by Cheezmeister »

Arrath wrote: post #126
barbazoo wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually the point is to reduce the total hours per week as well, i.e. 32h instead of 40h.

Oh yeah I totally get it, but we were hourly rather than salary so it was the best of both worlds. We were working out of town so what's a couple extra hours a day on the site getting paid when your alternative is primarily the hotel room. For us the killer benefit was driving home Thursday night (avoiding all that extra Friday traffic) for a full extra day home with our families

Like defragging your weekly rhythm. I get it.

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

#143

Post by bigfudge »

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?"

Why not point to actual flaws in the methodology then? It’s a really interesting a very hard to run piece of research. Inevitably it will be flawed because tight real world experiments in economics are hard/impossible.

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

#144

Post by gchamonlive »

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.…

4day work week won't do magic by itself. The company committing to it must also apply the necessary modifications and seek innovation to tap into this productivity well.

It's like in the Industrial revolution when kids (!!) shift were lowered from 18 hours to 12-8 hours. Adults that were assisted by kids also couldn't maintain the same 18 hours shift and for the factories to maintain productivity they had to implement innovations. And would you look at that, the average textile factory today is orders of magnitude more productive and efficient than that of the 19th century.

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

#145

Post by leoff »

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?"

> Of course employee are going to report happy

isn't this also about the firms loving it? If it's a win/win for both sides, what's the problem?

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

#146

Post by nilamo »

sandworm101 wrote: post #135
burningChrome wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm with a large organization (government, military) that also implemented a hybrid model under covid and decided to keep it going. But not a day goes by that someone doesn't scream for it to end. We have too many people "working from home" all the time and never getting done the stuff that cannot be done from home. Is the server not responding after the recent power outage? Too bad. The guy to turn it back on only c…

Your IT should always be remote. A laptop in the office is not any different from a laptop out of the office.

It definitely feels like most people complaining about wfh have no friends and work is their entire life. I honestly do not understand how anyone can pretend they get anything done, while also being constantly interrupted or having conversations about what they're doing this weekend, or such and such sports team last night etc. Like... just get the work done and move on, jeez, it's work, not a social club. Ending wfh so you can force people to hang out with you is weird.

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

#147

Post by FirmwareBurner »

red_admiral wrote: post #27
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…

We went from "six days thou shalt labour" to the 5-day week for a number of reasons. Unions were one reason, Henry Ford was another [1][2]. His original argument was that if we give workers an extra day of leisure time, there'll be more demand for leisure products to consume - like, you know, Model T cars. Then, Ford noticed that his new 5-day workers were so much more productive per hour than before, that it more th…

>Secondly, as in Ford's case, the extra productivity you get this way might be enough to more than offset the losses, and even increase your profits.

Henry Ford's revenue boost firstly came from his improvements to automation and innovative highly optimized production line assembly processes, not because le let his workers work 5 days a week instead of 6.

It was those innovations that allowed him to reduce the numbers of worker hours needed while get same productivity levels or higher, not vice versa as they didn't just magically come from working his workers less but from innovations to production lines efficiency. Workers working less was a consequence of that, not the cause.

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

#148

Post by codegeek »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #47
codegeek wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not though. If you are getting $x for 5 days, why should you not get $x * 0.8 for 4 days ?

Because you're just as productive in those 4 days. Same pay for same results. 5 days doesn't make you any more productive.

That's one hypothesis. Why not then 3 days ? 2 days ? Where do u draw the line ?

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

#149

Post by ghaff »

detourdog wrote: post #85
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.…

Also large organizations could have smaller facilities by using staggered schedules.

Now you're hoteling though which people complain about as well.

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

#150

Post by belval »

sandworm101 wrote: post #135
burningChrome wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm with a large organization (government, military) that also implemented a hybrid model under covid and decided to keep it going. But not a day goes by that someone doesn't scream for it to end. We have too many people "working from home" all the time and never getting done the stuff that cannot be done from home. Is the server not responding after the recent power outage? Too bad. The guy to turn it back on only c…

That sounds mostly dysfunctional and not really a WFH issue.

> Is the server not responding after the recent power outage? Too bad. The guy to turn it back on only comes in Monday-Tuesday.

A reasonable company would have some rotating in-office IT or at the very least an oncall that goes to wherever the server is to fix it.

> The plumbers and electricians still "work from home" half the week.

Pretty much the same thing.

As someone who is a big proponent of WFH, one thing I must still agree to is that organizational and cultural issues that existed prior to WFH at usually just worse in WFH. If your employees are so disfranchised that their install scripts to wiggle their mouse while they watch Netflix the battle is already lost.

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