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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

#241

Post by theendisney4 »

throwaway-123b wrote: post #21
elawler24 wrote: post #10

This is what Keynes predicted might happen - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ecca.12439#... That article notes most people can't make enough money from 15 hours of work to save up for retirement. I also wonder if "leisure" has to be redefined, since work and life blend so much online. What does 15 hours of work really mean in a knowledge work job?

For me and I think in the past leisure did not mean mindlesly doing something like nothing, it meant time after misery is gone. I see it as working necessary time at work that you likely do not want to do, like at a factory assembly line or farm, hospital, etc. After that, you can stay at work, but do something else, like engineering at that factory or what else there is you would like to do. This mean less working h…

If everyone worked from 12 till 100 and the midle half of the population makes 24 hours the under and over aged would have to work 12 or so. 2x6 hours, 3x4 or 4x3 maybe 6x2.

You learn much more if you start young and keeping the expertice on the floor longer would also help.

If we reserve the younglings earnings for specific purchases productivity would increase even more.

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

#242

Post by tzakrajs »

belval wrote: post #150
sandworm101 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

[flagged]

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

#243

Post by theendisney4 »

statquontrarian wrote: post #103
Almondsetat wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm getting this wrong but... you're working 3/5 of the time, you're getting 1/2 of the money and you are earning the company > 100% than full time?

I'm working 1/2 the time (7 hours Monday & Tuesday, and 6 hours Wednesday), and, yes, it even surprised me that my total productivity is about the same as when I worked 40 hours per week. It's even possible that my total productivity is actually greater than before but we don't have sufficiently precise metrics off of which to judge that.

We do have data from sports training. It is pretty simple: If you dont rest you wont grow. You get injured.

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

#244

Post by kennywinker »

tzakrajs wrote: post #242
belval wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

[flagged]

All shame to the activity monitors. No shame to the wigglers.

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

#245

Post by wes-k »

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…

3 day work weeks are best.

Most well paid developers would gladly take a 20% reduction in income for 50% more weekend right? So 4 days it is!

Well why stop there? I’ll take another 25% reduction for 33% more weekend. So 3 days it is!

But only the rich or a fool would then take an additional 33% reduction for a measly 25% bump to your weekend.

3 day work weeks are best. QED

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

#246

Post by nilamo »

duckmysick wrote: post #183
nilamo wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I was always curious - in fully remote IT (especially one located in another state/country), who does the actual on-site visits? Say, a PC part has to be replaced or a new laptop has to be deployed. For the deployment I guess you can use something like ImmyBot or Intune, but at some point someone has to be there and connect a new machine to the internet/intranet. How does that work in practice?

How often is something like that actually needed, though? Once a month?

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

#247

Post by antihipocrat »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #190
belval wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

> If your employees are so disfranchised that their install scripts to wiggle their mouse while they watch Netflix the battle is already lost. That would be a lot of companies and workers out there, dare I say the vast majority even. Believe it or not, many workers don't actually enjoy their work, their company, their boss or their job, but they put up with it because housing in expensive and it was the least horribl…

For startups is it perhaps easier to be intrinsically motivated in the company's success because there is likely to be more financial benefits?

When large established companies complain about productivity and lack of employee commitment, the answer seems very obvious to me... Swap platitudes, certificates of recognition and motivational speeches with tangible financial incentives.

If the executive wants everyone to come into the office 5 days a week, then offer a 25%+ pay rise and watch people flood in

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

#248

Post by gnicholas »

burningChrome wrote: post #119
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…

Do you think the lack of turnover might be affected by the current macroeconomic factors? It feels like lots of people have been holding onto their jobs for the last 18 months for this reason.

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

#249

Post by therealdrag0 »

jtr1 wrote: post #231
statquontrarian wrote: post #89

I've been doing a 20-hour 3 day work week (50% of total pay) for a few years now and I love it. I'm outperforming a full-time colleague in total output. Edited to add that the 3 day work week totals 20 hours.

I did this for a few months while I was transitioning back from parental leave and was similarly insanely productive. It just made me absolutely ruthless about prioritizing. Part of it was motivation to keep up with ft colleagues while knowing I had a hard deadline when I would be back on baby duty, so not sure how replicable it is now, but it was wild to go through a few workdays with all the day trimmed out, and th…

But does ruthless prioritization mean you’re making other people do that work? You might feel more productive because you cut your day down to well defined tickets. But who is doing the dirty work to define the tickets, iterate with product, mentor and unblock other engineers, do on call, work on incident review actions etc etc.

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

#250

Post by p1esk »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #228
p1esk wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you do during sprint planning meetings if you don’t know your objectives?

But it's not like you complete your objectives and then you say "great, we're all done, let's go home." Every company I've ever worked for had a backlog a mile long, and we knew we'd probably only ever get to 20% of it or so. The whole purpose of sprint planning is to just prioritize the most important stuff to work on for the next sprint, but if the teams capacity increases you'd pull more stuff in.

No, the purpose of sprint planning is to specify (more ot less) exactly what you plan to do this sprint. Usually the best case scenario. You make your best effort to finish the things you outlined, sometimes you manage to do it, sometimes you don’t, but why would you ever try to do more than you planned to do? If you’ve done the tasks, you’re done, period, go relax, grab a beer, wait till the next sprint. You’ve literally done your job. Why in the world would you want to “pull more stuff in”?

That’s how I’ve done it, and have seen it done in the last 7 companies I worked at.

Your reasoning is so foreign to me. The only way it makes sense if you are speaking as a manager.

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