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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

#301

Post by nitwit005 »

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…

That tale of a policy being scrapped the moment new leadership shows up is typical though.

Leadership churn is often high these days, so workplace experiments or innovations tend to just vanish, unless they become popular across multiple companies very quickly and become the new norm.

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

#302

Post by mixmastamyk »

p1esk wrote: post #297
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ta…

I’ve worked at both types of places. The main difference was if one was a contractor or on salary.

I also believe everyone needs a mental break at the end of an accomplished iteration. The satisfaction of feeling done. You might only answer email or edit docs on that day but that’s definitely worthwhile.

Not to mention, when you have a family, weekends aren’t especially relaxing, so if you “sprint” every week for years, it leads to almost certain burnout.

In other words, we don’t run marathons at full speed for a reason.

Oh and by the way, even at the contracting place where we were given fresh tickets when done early, no one ever expected them done immediately. So in effect we’d sit on them, take a mental break, and everyone was happy with appearances—the theater of work.

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

#304

Post by janosdebugs »

fasa99 wrote: post #289
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.…

Here's the thing. If you come in with low-mid trust and say "Expectations are 9-5, 5 days a week, in office" that's what you'll get. If you come in with high-trust and say "four day workweek, flexible hours, remote" you may well get 5-6 days a week most weeks and 7 days a week in crunch times, still with high morale. People are fearful of the latter approach because if the wrong people are hired, it can absolutely be…

If the wrong people are hired, they will spend 5 days a week drinking coffee, attending meetings that generate more meetings to seem super busy, and generally slacking off.

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

#305

Post by [deleted] »

lzmibes wrote: post #90
malux85 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except most employers just do what everyone else does - and one might say “the market forces them to” but that’s total nonsense. Look at remote work, it was fairly uncommon in programming and very uncommon outside of programming. Then everyone was forced to do it with Covid and now it’s much more common because it works. Everyone was free to negotiate at any time before and after Covid, but anything that was even mil…

Did remote, partially remote, 3, 4 and 5 day weeks before COVID. It was always there. Did you ask? Do you need a union to ask for you?

[deleted]

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

#306

Post by RHSeeger »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #270
RHSeeger wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>There are a lot of people that don't enjoy their jobs, but do the work because they're getting paid to do it. How's that different from what I just said?

Because you said "the vast majority" of workers would not bother actually working, and very much sounded like you were saying that the subset of people that don't enjoy their jobs is the same subset that would watch netflix instead of doing their work. I don't think that's true at all. I think most people will attempt to fulfill the obligations they signed up for; their job.

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

#307

Post by jokethrowaway »

RHSeeger wrote: post #254
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…

> 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…

There's no expectation you're going to work 8 hours in the office.

What if you're taking a break? What about drinking a coffee? Chatting with coworkers? Playing table tennis or some arcade videogame in the break area? Various studies point at a lower bound for endurance when doing knowledge work. Some say 4h.

As long as they get something done those employees will still feel like they put in their day of work and they will still get good reviews. Could they have done it in half the time? Maybe, but who can tell?

I'm my own boss and I'm paid if I deliver results (and I think everyone should work like this, being an employee is opaque and overall sucks for earning potential if you are a good performer) but sometimes I put on a movie on a second screen while I'm working, mainly to make dull work (it's crazy how much you can charge to write the same old boring API or the same old Reaxt component for the n-th time) more tolerable. I'm definitely working slower but at least I'm getting things done without losing the will to live.

Am I stealing time from my business?

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

#308

Post by jokethrowaway »

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?

Employees go to local repair store and charge the expense to the employer. Laptop arrive straight from China from Apple.

If the delivery doesn't make sense they don't even ask to return computers, they just do a call where they superficially check you deleted company stuff.

IT just solves dumb problems on slack "I can't download acrobat reader" and owns the admin roles on all the saas we use.

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

#309

Post by Thiez »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #307
RHSeeger wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There's no expectation you're going to work 8 hours in the office. What if you're taking a break? What about drinking a coffee? Chatting with coworkers? Playing table tennis or some arcade videogame in the break area? Various studies point at a lower bound for endurance when doing knowledge work. Some say 4h. As long as they get something done those employees will still feel like they put in their day of work and the…

You're not maximizing shareholder profit, but you are maximizing shareholder happiness.

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

#310

Post by PurpleRamen »

nox101 wrote: post #204
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 have no idea how metrics would be measured unless the work is always the same and trivial. In my job, every problem seems to take a random amount of time. It might be the thing I'm assigned is trival and done in 1-2 hrs. It might be it would be trivial but it pointed out an issue elsewhere than needs to be fixed first. It might be trivial but the CI was down for 6hrs. It might be trival but requires some other libr…

> I have no idea how metrics would be measured unless the work is always the same and trivial.

Don't count the result, but the actual work itself. Meaning, you need to document every little step you do, every command, script, search you have. Write down your thoughts and conclusions, and so on. But this is very annoying, and barely anyone is well-equipped for doing this. And most people have some natural defensive for exposing themselves to this level. Though, it would also be helpful for yourself to be able to review your work. So maybe some balanced middle would be a way to go?

Maybe if tools would be designed in a non-annoying way to support this, more people would be willing doing something like this.

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