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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

#291

Post by maximus-decimus »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #9
figmert wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of a 4-day work week isn't to cram the 5th day into 4 days, it's completely removing the 5th day, thus working 8 hours every day for 4 days, as opposed to 10 hours for 5 days.

Question: If they removed the 5th work day and the same amount of work got done, then management can say that basically the employees were slacking off for a day a week. And if so, what's stopping them next to increase it back to 5 and chase 5 days worth of productivity out of 5 days/week instead of the previous 4 using the same efficiency gains as performance benchmarks of the 4 days/week?

If they made you work 24 hours a day and your work output didn't triple, then management can say that basically the employees were slacking off.

And obviously people won't dying because they're sleep deprived but because they're lazy.

Management can say anything, it doesn't make it true.

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

#292

Post by gklitz »

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.…

> 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.

Thats a very Murican way to look at it. You know, workers Can also just demand it, worked for a lot og stuff in Europe. Like 5week vacation minimum. Unlimited paid sickdays, Paternity and maternity leave etc.

The idea that everything has to be a net positive for corporations is silly. We are a society of people, and corporations have to be a net positive for our society not the other way around.

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

#293

Post by throwuxiytayq »

gklitz wrote: post #292
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.…

> 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. Thats a very Murican way to look at it. You know, workers Can also just demand it, worked for a lot og stuff in Europe. Like 5week vacation minimum. Unlimited paid sickdays, Paternity and maternity leave etc. The idea that everything has to be a net positive for co…

I think it’s largely a question of whether a 4-day work week cuts your country’s GDP by 20%. People go to work because there’s work that needs to be done, you know.

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

#294

Post by xandrius »

vidarh wrote: post #138
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.

It's "sort of" what I've done, only last time I changed jobs I told recruiters it'd take 20%-30% more for me to come into the office full time, and pro-rated below that.

I just straight out reject any onsite. No money would ever bring me back.

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

#295

Post by xandrius »

IshKebab wrote: post #182
ausbah wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if productivity is the same why should i be paid less just because # of hours is lower? which isn’t even always the case as these companies will do 9-10 hour days

Because productivity is not the same.

Productivity and quality production are two different things.

If you made me bang rocks for 5 days, I'm sure I'd do an even a better job if you told me that if I finished early I could work 4 days a week.

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

#296

Post by xandrius »

codegeek wrote: post #148
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

It's about studies being done as well as being better for morale.

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

#297

Post by p1esk »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #263
p1esk wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lite…

> If you’ve done the tasks, you’re done, period, go relax, grab a beer, wait till the next sprint. Well, to each their own, but that has never been the case in any of the companies I've worked at. In fairness, over the fast 5 years or so more and more the companies I've worked at have used Kanban over sprint planning, because usually the "estimation" part of agile (i.e. the cards, the voting) has proven to be the mos…

Regardless of what you use, you should have a clear idea of what you plan to accomplish in the next n days. And you need to communicate this information to your manager. If you have done that, and the manager agrees it’s a reasonable objective then I don’t see how what you describe can ever happen. If an unplanned task comes up with a high priority then you simply tell your manager: “OK, sure, which of the planned tasks do you want to delay?”

It doesn’t matter what you use for planning, you agree to do something in advance, and you provide a reasonable estimate of how long it will take. Your manager should trust your estimates, even if they are sometimes wrong.

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

#298

Post by bschne »

nxpnsv wrote: post #24
bschne wrote: post #11

I have some gripes with this group and their publications: - They don't randomize pilots, so any effect you see is likely to be confounded - In this publication, it appears there was ~50% attrition between the initial pilot and the follow-up study — again, a huge source of potential confounding - As another example, in another publication, they showed a plot of GDP per capita against average working hours, and insinu…

How would you randomize 4 day work weeks in an unbiased way?

If you run a trial like this hoping to get an idea of what effect the thing you're doing has, you have two things to worry about (using the terms common at least in econ here). The first is internal validity: Does what you're doing give you a good estimate (i.e., not biased) of the effect you're trying to estimate. The second is external validity: Does your result tell you enough about what would happen if you did the thing you did, but outside your trial context.

If you do a trial of four-day workweeks, you're probably always going to have issues with the latter for any feasible setup. As you allude to, the companies that self-select into participating in such a trial are probably not a good representation of the wider economy, even if you randomize among them.

Now if you randomize rollout of four-day weeks at least among those willing to participate, and you didn't lose about 50% of participants between the start of your trial and the follow-up survey, you would at least get an unbiased estimate of what the policy did for those companies. But alas, they don't even do that part.

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

#299

Post by 1123581321 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #215
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 really curious as to how ROWE works in practice for software developers, because the I'm extremely dubious. In software development, there is usually an "infinite amount of work" to be done, so the important thing is to prioritize well as a lot of that work will never get done. But what does it mean to say "you've met all your objectives"? If you say "great, I finished all my objectives in 20 hours this week, see…

ROWE would essentially encode a normal software job into a mix of goals and expectations. E.g. if you're expected to average some fraction of the team's point velocity over the year, that's written down. If you're expected to jump from a finished ticket to the next, or alternate reviewing and starting new work, that's written down. (A ROWE job description can totally be written to keep you stuck at work if it has availability or response time expectations.)

If you work at a smart company, your manager doesn't spell out much of your job, and ROWE can encapsulate that if you and your manager have a shared understanding of what an effective month/quarter/year looks like. If you're that kind of senior engineer, the exercise should prompt some good discussion about reducing the number of hours you spend on more measurable, less effective tasks.

The goal is to create something that both you and your manager buy into, so they feel good if that's 'all' you do and you feel it's doable to review the list and feel good about it before the end of a typical workweek.

As you might be able to tell, it's not easy to come up with a list that achieves this. Most managers will be too timid, or won't understand themselves well enough, to put the real full expectations of a job on paper.

However, a 'certified ROWE' workplace undergoes coaching so they have a better chance of success, similarly to how some organizations do for OKRs if they want to use them as intended and not as fantasy aspirations.

In practice, if you have a boss that hates ROWE, you're going to have a tough time convincing them that you've met your objectives enough to step away from work for a bit, no differently than how any other flexible work arrangement stops being flexible the moment your boss stops trusting you.

(I'm close to a ROWE-certified organization that has been successful with it for about 15 years.)

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

#300

Post by 1123581321 »

ysofunny wrote: post #186
whycombagator wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not both?

it's from 40 hours a week, down to 32, then to 30. doing both means a 24 hour work week...

You really shouldn't be satisfied until your work days and work hours per day have an H-index of one. It's the opposite of academic publishing.
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