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List of 200 UK companies that moved to 4-day working week

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Re: List of 200 UK companies that moved to 4-day working week

#92
post #82

I think the UK Government should start first as trial and have 5 days working hours compressed into 4 days taking Monday off.

Well Keir Starmer famously said he would only work until 6pm on a Friday and the opposition were all over it accusing him of being a part time PM.

The govt doing this would be political suicide, especially in the UK. Although we may see it as progressive, political opposition would absolutely leap on it

Re: List of 200 UK companies that moved to 4-day working week

#93
post #51
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes so long for a woman to go through the gestation period before giving birth. But when you get 9 women you can get 9 babies in the same period. But it still takes 9 months. I think the women just aren't working at full capacity for those 9 months. It should be possible to just get the 9 women to produce 1 baby in 1/9th of the period.

This analogy doesn't work because women cannot accelerate the 9 months - mother nature has set the time period. Reducing the hours whilst retaining output is an efficiency improvement for the businesses. The 200 companies is simply a list of those who have successfully achieved this efficiency target.

The person I replied to made it sound like there's a magic switch you can press to make your workforce operate at 125% efficiency after getting rid of 20% of it and that it's idiotic to reduce the working week from 5 to 4 days.

I thought this was so absurd of a statement that I re-stated the 9 women cannot make a baby in 1 month saying to jokingly point out that it's just not how these things work.

Re: List of 200 UK companies that moved to 4-day working week

#94
I'm personally indifferent to 4-day working week. If that works for people, and if that improves their lives, I'm here to root for you. What I root for even strongly, is for WFH to be written into law: what can be done from home, MUST be done from home. Treat people like adults. Office work for the sake of office work -- fuck that.

Re: List of 200 UK companies that moved to 4-day working week

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

would you be twice as productive working 80 hours a week as you are at 40? surely there's diminishing returns, and it doesn't seem obvious that 40 is the sweet spot.

Diminishing returns doesn’t invalidate their point. Working more hours will always produce more output, even if the marginal increase in output decreases.

Actually, that isn't true. The marginal output of working more than about 40 hours per week turns negative after about 4 weeks of doing so. There's plenty of research on this.

https://ericdodds.com/research-and-the-realities-of-time-wor...

Re: List of 200 UK companies that moved to 4-day working week

#96
post #13

I guess companies were you already worked 30 hours (6 hours per day of effective work as in many "mental work" jobs). I'm not from UK, are any manufacturing companies on the list?

They're either unrecognisable (so quite small), or where they are recognisable they seem to be charities or CIC (community interest companies). That latter group of companies are structured so that profit is not the raison d'être of the organisation, so work/life balance is likely to be considered a higher priority than squeezing every last bit of utility out of an exhausted workforce.

if you don't feel exhausted from time to time it means you potential is wasted. Community interest is important so it's important that employees at such companies utilize their full potential. If decision was made because of signs of burnout it means they needed more employees.
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