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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

#171

Post by esafak »

Cheezmeister wrote: post #142
Arrath wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You've dated yourself with your magnetic hard drive :)

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

#172

Post by FirmwareBurner »

jedberg wrote: post #158
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm talking about 32 vs 40 h per week productivity, not WFH productivity. What's one have to do with the other?

You said you didn’t believe C-suites were ignoring things that could make them more money. I showed you a bunch of cases where C-suites are hurting themselves by ignoring data.

Except the money they currently make, or not make, is directly related to the stock market's performance or lack thereof due to the zero interest days being over, not to that of WFH or RTO employees.

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

#173

Post by esafak »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #147
red_admiral wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 number…

And while productivity has steadily risen since then, we still work five days/week.

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

#174

Post by gchamonlive »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #155
gchamonlive wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 implemen…

Conditions for factory workers in the US haven't improved because it turned out to be an optimal way to improve productivity. It's because of worker movements demanding it again and again. Those productivity innovations you mention would've come either way. In other countries with worse working conditions and even less labor power than the US, factory owners reap the benefits of applying such productivity innovations…

Oh sure, don't get me wrong. I am not a techno-positivist that believes innovations will save us from evil. That was only to illustrate how a change in working policy has to go alongside technical and cultural adaptations.

These worker movements are crucial to keep workers from getting both pressured to produce more AND work longer hours.

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

#175

Post by FirmwareBurner »

esafak wrote: post #173
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 number…

And while productivity has steadily risen since then, we still work five days/week.

Shareholder returns have also never been higher. Coincidence?

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

#176

Post by esafak »

brightball wrote: post #37

Counterpoint: When hiring people reasonably early out of school, they often just want the additional hours. I know of a business in my area that tried the 4 day work week and they ended up having to open on Fridays for half a day because people just wanted more hours (and money). Without it, the same people were just getting second jobs.

Give people the option to choose how much they want to work, and adjust the compensation.

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

#177

Post by Gustomaximus »

risyachka wrote: post #124
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.…

The work week went from 6 days to 5 and economy growth didn’t stall (when people were waaay less productive) My bet is literally nothing will change if we go to 4-day work week. Can’t say about others but my productivity goes way up with an extra weekend. I am way more rested and eager to do some work in Monday.

I suspect we'd see a bunch of change. A difference of when we moved 6 to 5 days is in those times most business were closed on the weekends + generally people were more tied to one company for longer term. Plus 2 days off is very different than 3 in terms of alternate work opportunity.

From that a likely issue is a steep increase in people having second jobs so they work a 4 day job and a second 2/3 day job.

I suspect the 4 day week will work well for people with good salaries and market power, but encourage working class to 'work the weekend' in alternate jobs resulting in lower downtime.

For this I'd actually like a 4 day week but with it either more restricted business opening on Sunday type thing or significant wage multiples over 3 day weekends to encourage time off vs the 24/7 economy.

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

#178

Post by zen928 »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #65
jerf wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 day…

I'm sorry, Your comment makes no sense to me.

I'll pile on since I find your "sudden" confusion on this comment chain to be a disgusting and shameful way to try and engage conversations with other people.

The top post tries to identify the results as reducing the hours of 5 days of work into 4, the response to that was highlighting that the goal wasn't to make up for missing hours but to try and measure the efficacy of needing that fifth day's 'worth' of hours. You then selectively choose how you interprete the topic to be either:

1) questioning why they couldn't use their results of 5 days VS 4 days to effectively say "if you're effective in 4, then why not 5?

then when questioned on how this doesn't make sense in the context of the article, feign confusion on the distinction and ignore the results of the article to flip flop to your other point:

2) questioning the articles results by asking others outside of the study to personally prove to you what the measure of "success" is since you see modern technology built with this framework (phones) as a reason why it shouldn't change

despite this being a nonsequitor that isn't a point anyone has shown interest in discussing. Then when asked why you went from being confused on why they couldn't use the results showing their effectiveness to try and enforce another "effective" day, to then denying the results and saying that it's already effective and to ask others to personally prove to you why it isn't effective (instead of reading the article).

Do you have any answer yet?

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