31–40 of 113 posts
If they could remove some of these inefficiencies and return the time to employees it would be great.
If you're remote, and only clock-in when actually working, spending 3-4h/day working productively can easily outdo someone spending 10h/day in an office. I've worked in places where my ultimate client billable rate was obscene, and tracked to the 6min or 15min interval, but we also had "house time" for other projects. A day where you spent 3h directly working for the customer and nothing else was perfectly fine (especially if you blocked the entire day out with "need to be available for client" so no one else could interrupt you.)
Spending the downtime doing actually interesting research (not so much 20% time as 50% time) was awesome.
I'm much more productive with 10 hour work days. Get in the zone, write a shit-ton of code, and then get back to reality. Three or four 10-hour days sound a lot nicer than 5 6-hours.
A six hour workday would be 30 hours a week. Imagine that as three ten hour days instead. Wow, that would be fantastic.
Something similar seems a good idea to me, too. Example. Germany has 42 million employees and 3 million unemployeds. Reduce working hours from 40 to 37 hours per week - with reduction in salary, but probably not the full 7.5 % - and hire one new employee for every 13 employees. And there you go - no more unemployment and more leisure time for everybody. Saved unemployment benefits can be used to counter salary reduct…
There are tons of problems with these types of schemes, the primary one being that there is management overhead and people aren't substitutable. The more people doing the same task, the more work will need to be coordinated and thus overall output would probably decrease.
> It's unclear how, or if, a lunch break will factor into the scheme. It's a common misconception that eight-hour work day means 9-17 everywhere. In Sweden, the common work day is from 8-17, meaning 8 hours paid time and 1 hour non-paid lunch hour. To my understanding, it's more or less required by law. So if you look on how many hours we will be "at work", we will go from working one hour more than Americans to one…
In Germany you are required by law to take at least a 30 minute break during an eight hour work day, but that break is not paid. You have to clock out. (I suppose employers could pay employees for that time, but they don’t have to and they usually don’t.)
In fact, at my last internship the system automatically subtracted 30 minutes from the work time at the end of the day if you didn’t manually clock out for more than 30 minutes, assuming you just forgot to clock out. After all, the employer can’t pay you for eight hours of continuous work, that would be admitting to illegal wrongdoing.
Employers can also require employees to clock out for shorter breaks, though they usually don’t when you are just chatting a few minutes with your coworkers in the office kitchen while getting coffee or something like that. (General, uhm, personal maintenance like just getting something to drink in the office kitchen or going to the toilet is not considered taking a break and employers can’t force employees to clock out for that.)
I never even considered that it could work any other way … (My dad is a civil engineer and always has too much work. However, during my childhood I vividly remember him coming home every day at 1pm until about 2pm to eat lunch at home. His office is only about a seven minute drive from home. He was and is often at work until 8pm, but he hardly ever missed lunch at home. I know that’s not the norm even for Germany – most people find some place to eat around the office or bring something to eat to the office – but that may explain my perspective on this.)
Six-hour days may be more productive, but this won't prove it one way or the other because: - The people working six hour days have been told that this may improve productivity so the excitement of being part of the experiment may indeed encourage them to be more effective in the short term - They have a strong incentive to work harder because if the experiment concludes that six hour days are more effective, they wi…
Annoyingly, the article doesn't say why Kellogg's stopped their 30 hour work week. Is it unsustainable in the long term? Then it might be a good idea then if A) your business is creative and not an assembly line and B) you plan to sell your business before the strategy becomes unsustainable. They still had a small amount of departments working 30 hour weeks until 1985. When the company was handed over to new manageme…
I live & work in Stockholm, Sweden. I start work at 8:00 & leave at sharp 15:00 to pick my son from day care. And these are the most beautiful days of my life. I play with my son every day, I'm doing hobby projects, preparing for summer marathon, read HN & CS papers on cutting edge & getting full 8 hrs sleep. Now tell me how can I do that all with working like donkeys? Human side of life is much more than living in a…
But remember that especially in the scandinavian welfare states, your consumption isn't just your salary, it's a wide range of often rather expensive public services.
As is mentioned in the article, this has a flavour of political posturing, and it's not given that it will treated perfectly scientifically. But, of course, if it turns out that the employees are actually more efficient at the same cost, you can have your cake and eat it too.
How about four 8-hour days per week? Could they schedule this as the next experiment the following year?
The California state government has been running this experiment for a while (sort of). They require all their workers to take a day off out of each 10 work days (so a 5 day week and then a 4 day). However, they don't get to choose the day. It is assigned to them. The state is doing it to cut down on traffic and commuting, as well as facilities costs. However, so far they say they haven't lost any productivity by doi…
No, they haven't.
> They require all their workers to take a day off out of each 10 work days (so a 5 day week and then a 4 day).
No, they don't. Some California state workers have the option to take a "9/8/80" schedule (an 80-hour, two-week schedule with 8 nine-hour workdays and 1 eight-hour workday, and 1 weekday off) or a "4/10/40" schedule (a 40-hour, one-week schedule with 4 ten-hour workdays and one weekday off). [1] But these, like the baseline 5-days @ 8 hours/day schedule, are all 40-hour/week (averaged over each two-week period, in the case of 9/8/80) schedules, not reduced schedules like a 4-day, 8-hour/day schedule.
Additionally, most permanent full-time state workers have the option of an additional leave day per month with a 5-percent reduction in pay. [2]
And, recently, there were several years where most employees experienced furloughs varying between 1 to 3 days per month with accompanying pay reductions as part of a cost 'cutting' (large, cost deferring) measure. [3]
[1] http://www.calhr.ca.gov/employees/pages/alternate-work-week-...
[2] https://www.calhr.ca.gov/employees/Pages/leave-benefits.aspx...
[3] see, e.g., http://articles.latimes.com/2013/mar/14/local/la-me-state-pa...
I live & work in Stockholm, Sweden. I start work at 8:00 & leave at sharp 15:00 to pick my son from day care. And these are the most beautiful days of my life. I play with my son every day, I'm doing hobby projects, preparing for summer marathon, read HN & CS papers on cutting edge & getting full 8 hrs sleep. Now tell me how can I do that all with working like donkeys? Human side of life is much more than living in a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are tons of problems with these types of schemes, the primary one being that there is management overhead and people aren't substitutable. The more people doing the same task, the more work will need to be coordinated and thus overall output would probably decrease.
This is called the lump of labor fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy