141–150 of 236 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That schedule is called a 4-10 - 4, 10 hour work days, and every Friday off. 9/80 is that you work 9 hours a day, and every other Friday is off. They're both popular in defense and aerospace.
So decreasing productivity even further, even though you could achieve the same amount of finished work with 4 8h days. Why?
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How do employees know when good is good enough? When things get stressful and overwhelming at work, I look to my contractual hours per week and remind myself not to overdo it.
This is actually the downside of these "you decide" plans and why I absolutely hate "unlimited PTO" policies. Whenever it's up to me I end up taking less vacation than if I just had an allotted amount. People shortchange themselves because they don't want to inconvenience their team. And as an added insult, the company gets out of paying you for unused vacation when you finally burn out.
Current place I work has unlimited PTO, and I really like it. You do need to be careful not to fall into the trap of not using it, though.
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> The problem is, if it's not codified in law, there is no consistency. A poorly codified policy is an implementation problem, and will be a problem for both limited and unlimited PTO policies. > "Unlimited PTO" is a marketing farce, no more, no less. If you want people to take 25 days a year off, give them 25 days of PTO and be on the hook for the liability if they leave. If you want to give them more time than that…
The entire point is that the employer doesn't care how many days off people take each year. Of course they do. Just they call it "abusing the policy" or "not getting your work done" and don't tell you what the lines you shouldn't cross are.
I don't know how many times I need to repeat this, but if your company doesn't communicate expectation it's a problem with the company, not with unlimited PTO policies in general.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do employees know when good is good enough? When things get stressful and overwhelming at work, I look to my contractual hours per week and remind myself not to overdo it.
This is actually the downside of these "you decide" plans and why I absolutely hate "unlimited PTO" policies. Whenever it's up to me I end up taking less vacation than if I just had an allotted amount. People shortchange themselves because they don't want to inconvenience their team. And as an added insult, the company gets out of paying you for unused vacation when you finally burn out.
When I worked in Germany we had a union mandated 35 hour week with no option for overtime. One thing I noticed was that back then most people actually worked most of their hours at the office and decisions were made rather quickly and decisively. Now I work with no set time limit and I feel that a lot of people are wasting time with going over the same thing multiple times, hesitating in making decisions and calling…
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>When I worked a Geckoboard they had a great system where you had unlimited paid time off, but you had to take at least 25 days off each year. Thats doing it right. Or pay people for the vacation time they don't use.
I would expect that paying people for unused vacation would incentivize employees overworking themselves leading to reduced quality of output. In a sense, I expect that it would magnify the existing issues with unlimited PTO. It seems like this would be neither good for employee or employer.
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> The problem is, if it's not codified in law, there is no consistency. A poorly codified policy is an implementation problem, and will be a problem for both limited and unlimited PTO policies. > "Unlimited PTO" is a marketing farce, no more, no less. If you want people to take 25 days a year off, give them 25 days of PTO and be on the hook for the liability if they leave. If you want to give them more time than that…
There has to be a limit somewhere though. Say I booked the entirety of June off this year. Are they still cool with that? How about if I also decide I'd like July off too. That's an extreme I know but there's a limit somewhere.
FWIW we did have somebody take an entire month off to visit family in China. He was responsible for tons of code and functionality, and it worked fine because management knew about it and planned around it.
If you can't handle the responsibility, don't ruin it for everybody, just go work somewhere else.
Not to mention that the definition of what work, productivity or deliverables is varies vastly from company to company or industry to industry.
Not working for an entire day per week or having sporadic / limited hours of operation could also end up being a huge pain for a client or anyone not in your company you may be working with.
I'm definitely a proponent of the sentiment of this article, however, I can confirm that working with a remote team in another country where nobody seemed to work more than 25hrs per week on their technical team was annoying as hell. Not only did this make solving problems harder, they also had notably lower productivity and output of meaningful contributions...
"... a New Zealand financial services company, switched its 240 staff from a five-day week to a four-day week last November and maintained their pay. Productivity increased in the four days they worked so there was no drop in the total amount of work done." The result/claim makes intuitive sense to me but..... The problem trying to study this is that "productivity" of many/most white collar workers is basically impos…
"a New Zealand financial services company, switched its 240 staff from a five-day week to a four-day week last November and maintained their pay. Productivity increased in the four days they worked so there was no drop in the total amount of work done" And soon some genius will come in and think "How about we worked a few hours more? This would give us even more output" and soon we are back to normal.
If the productivity gain really was about improved focus and energy, they'll be wrong and waste everyone's time. But there are some hints in the article that it wasn't just that; other companies have seen productivity rise than fall back, while Perpetual Guardian implemented performance improvements to offset the change.
I assume diminished hours directly improved productivity some. But if half the gain was from process improvements or increased motivation, then some clever wag is going to come along and notice that they can use those gains to cut staff instead of hours.
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1. how did you start the experiment? Did you apply it to everybody from the start or did you run it on a small sample? 2. What do you mean "buy all 5 days" and "moonlight on the 5th day"? (not a native speaker)
Good questions! 1. We started by doing some research, actually - I spent some time finding studies that supported my thesis that productivity would go up (thus making sure our output would stay the same, more or less). Then I discussed with our management team, who thought I was nuts, but was supportive. Then I presented it to our board, who was also supportive. We applied it to everyone at the start, but some teams…
Are the research notes you put together to support your thesis publicly available?