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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

#251

Post by [deleted] »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #188
lolinder wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you missed the point—your organization is completely dysfunctional at this point and hiring won't change that. Based on your description you don't have a WFH policy, you have a policy that incentivizes not working at all. What makes you think that these hypothetical new hires are going to actually work while the rest of their department doesn't? What sane person would put up with that treatment?

>I think you missed the point—your organization is completely dysfunctional at this point Would you be surprised to hear that most companies in the world are just like that? HN readers are in a bubble where they can afford to be picky on where they work choosing companies that fit in their belief system in terms of organizational efficiency and work culture, instead of just choosing the least horrible job they can fi…

[deleted]

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

#252

Post by Aloisius »

bigfudge wrote: post #143
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.

I mean... there are basically no robustness checks.They only had a pre- and post-intervention comparisons with no random comparison group for a counterfactual. They asked retrospective questions. There are multiple poorly documented interventions. The analysis of the non-positive responses is extremely limited and what does exist draws conclusions that reek of confirmation bias. Their response rate for surveys appears to be crap which brings up questions of sampling bias. There is a strong appearance of cherry-picking. The descriptive statistics are extremely lacking - no confidence intervals, standard deviation, etc. - giving an appearance of p-hacking.

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

#253

Post by suzzer99 »

wes-k wrote: post #245
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

For me 6 months on and 6 months off would be incredible. But of course by the time 6 months goes by, someone has learned how to do my job and maintain all the shit I built, and I'm no longer valuable. Also I lose my health insurance and probably seniority. But man would it be sweet if I could make it work.

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

#254

Post by RHSeeger »

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…

> Believe it or not, many workers don't actually enjoy their work, their company, their boss or their job

There are a lot of people that don't enjoy their jobs, but do the work because they're getting paid to do it. You seem to assume that anyone doing their job _only_ because they're being paid to do it will _not_ do their job if they can get away with it (even though they're still being paid to do so). Not everyone is a horrible person. Plenty of people will continue to do their job even if they could lie and not do it; because they agreed "if you pay me, I will do my job".

I've had times where I wasn't enjoying my job, but I still did the work... because that's the agreement I had with the company I worked for. And, like a lot of people, I wouldn't see it as acceptable to scam the company I work for.

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

#255

Post by ornornor »

antihipocrat wrote: post #247
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

> because there is likely to be more financial benefits?

I don’t think this is true for the vast majority of startup employees though. Maybe the founders get some crazy return 10 years down the line if they’re lucky. Most everyone else would earn the same or less if there is a successful sale as they’d have at a “normal” company. And if there is no successful sale, they’d have earned less.

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

#256

Post by yCombLinks »

m3kw9 wrote: post #110

They love it because while everyone works 5 days they work 4. Once everyone has 4 they will be back to square one just like everyone is now (5 days a week). Humans are like that, they compare what others have to see if they have it better. Where do you think we got the term, grass is always greener on the other side?

3 days off is significantly different than 2. You get a day where you didn't work yesterday and you don't work tomorrow.

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

#257

Post by gymbeaux »

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…

It’s interesting and encouraging to see this working in the real world. I think most “leaders” are concerned about having to come up with what people, especially software engineers, should be getting done in X amount of time, which I sympathize with… but clearly it’s doable. Perhaps the concern is that high-performers will produce less, and low-performers will be canned, only for the high-performers to have to pick up the slack, or there just be a net negative in total work produced in X amount of time because some engineers have been fired for performance but there’s no one to replace them and others aren’t allowed/able to work more to compensate.

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

#258

Post by Sakos »

ghaff wrote: post #208
Gustomaximus wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 suspec…

I suspect a lot of the people yearning for 4 day work weeks wouldn't actually want to return to the days when most stores and other institutions were closed on Sundays.

As somebody who lives in Germany where everything is closed on Sundays, uh, it really isn't that bad. It's fine, actually. I'll take 4 day work weeks happily.

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

#259

Post by ngc248 »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #211
bb123 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d happily take a 20% pay cut for a 4 day work week, if it was offered.

And would you work as much unpaid overtime as you would with a salaried 5 day work week job when pressured to by your boss, owner and peers?

That is what it would devolve into.

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

#260

Post by ben_w »

OJFord wrote: post #217
ben_w wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the rate things are currently changing, I won't be very surprised if non-trivial server capacity gets located in orbit thanks to some successor to Starlink. This will make remote work mandatory, even if it still can't fix all the possible issues.

Why would that make remote work any more mandatory than it is with 'the cloud' or data centres?

Going to space to fix them is very hard.

(Only due to your comment did I realise I was ambiguous, I meant remote work specifically for the IT department would be mandatory, not everyone in general).

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