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We're moving to a four-day work week at Beacon

beaconcrm.org

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Re: We're moving to a four-day work week at Beacon

#141

Post by sktrdie »

fleddr wrote: post #130

I've been working 4 day workweeks for well over a decade now, took the pay cut myself. As for the goal to maintain 100% productivity whilst cutting back on hours, I'm confident that they will succeed. In fact, they'll succeed in this without requiring some kind of brilliant plan, as this recalibration happens automatically. When you start working one day less, nobody will reduce your workload by 20%. You'll have the…

This makes sense and understand what you're saying. But the idea of having a full extra day where I don't have to open the laptop and can instead concentrate totally on myself is much more important than a decompression day at work.

Re: We're moving to a four-day work week at Beacon

#142

Post by jacquesm »

paulcole wrote: post #132
jacquesm wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's up to the employer to decide for how long they contract someone, whether they are more or less efficient is something that is their problem, not the employees' problem, they are reserved for more time so they should get paid more. Lots of jobs are paid by the hour, and that is the sort of job that I believe we were discussing. The variables then are: your hourly rate, how many hours you are contracted for. I've…

I’m dense, so I’m not following this at all. Let’s say there are 2 people at a company doing similar jobs. Person A gets their work done in 40 hours a week. Person B gets the equivalent of Person A’s work done (plus a little extra) in 32 hours a week. Do you think that Person A should earn more money?

Your question presumes that my opinion on this matters but that's not how employment works. Employment is governed by contract law/labor law. To reduce your example to absurdity: Person 'A' gets their work done in 40 hours a week and person B in one minute, do you think person 'A' should get more money?

Clearly, the answer is yes because the claim on the life of person 'A' is a much higher one than the claim on the life of person 'B'. And you could argue the opposite just as easily: Person 'B' should get more money because they've figured out a way to be much more productive that might scale to others, and besides, sometimes getting something done in one minute has immense value and getting the same thing done in a week has none. But in practice neither of these things will happen. There isn't really a free market when it comes to jobs, employers hold most of the power and the differences between employees for most jobs do not exceed the normal bandwidth available for compensation, almost nobody except a lucky few contractors get paid by the value they create for the company.

So what will happen instead is that employers will set a certain hourly rate for a certain kind of job with some leeway to incentivize people to come and work for them or stay and hopefully a career path so they can migrate into better positions if they perform well. This arrangement will be formalized using an employment contract which together with applicable law will govern the relationship. This is not without problems but in the end it is what we have as a solution. Whether your colleague (who gets their job done in 32 hours) and you (who work 40 hours) have different pay depends on who is in control of the relationship: if the employees have control then they might be able to get paid by the value they contribute but this is extremely rare for salaried employees. The alternative, an hourly wage is much more common.

And one of the fundamental reasons for that is that we (1) all recognize the value of our time and (2) have tried very hard to get away from labor that was paid 'by the piece', which was very common in the early industrial revolution days (and which is now returning through a backdoor as the 'gig economy').

Re: We're moving to a four-day work week at Beacon

#143

Post by ghaff »

brycewray wrote: post #126
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's always weird to watch Office Space and see the guys all wearing ties. I can't imagine having to do that for a typical software job I believe this changed in the early 2000s. The dot-com crash reset Silicon Valley. And the Enron scandal reduced corporate America's pull on it. (Steve Jobs wasn't an icon when business casual began taking its hold.) [1] https://high-tech-guide.com/article/how-did-steve-jobs-help-.…

In my case, it ended in 1994. The company where I worked at the time already had casual Fridays. Business casual, mind you; it was quite some years later before I got to see the whole jeans-and-sneakers casual Friday thing. During the summer of 1994, they went to business-casual-every-day. Then, as a morale booster (probably, as I look at it now, because the execs knew a 40% layoff was months away), the management de…

When I joined an east coast computer company in the mid-80s, ties all the time were already gone for a lot of engineering positions (though more senior engineers and managers still tended to wear them). Suits were pretty standard for marketing for marketing and other business roles.

Around the time you say, casual Fridays came in. The funny thing is the CEO got annoyed at one point because a lot of the engineers felt they need to underdress relative to the business people who were now dressing business casual on Fridays and increasingly most days.

I'd say that over the next couple decades, things got more and more casual to the point where ties, much less suits, are pretty uncommon in settings where not wearing one would have seemed out of place 25 years or so ago.

At trade shows, as I recall, at some point in the 90s, IBM booth staff showed up at one big show wearing branded polo shirts rather than suits. At which point, most everyone else went: If IBM isn't wearing suits, I guess we don't need to.

Re: We're moving to a four-day work week at Beacon

#144

Post by rootusrootus »

fleddr wrote: post #130

I've been working 4 day workweeks for well over a decade now, took the pay cut myself. As for the goal to maintain 100% productivity whilst cutting back on hours, I'm confident that they will succeed. In fact, they'll succeed in this without requiring some kind of brilliant plan, as this recalibration happens automatically. When you start working one day less, nobody will reduce your workload by 20%. You'll have the…

I'm starting to get more militant about zoom calls. Trying to avoid angering people explicitly, but still pushing back as best I can to protect to the team from incessant zoom calls to have conversations that would be faster on slack, and better documented in email. Zoom calls just invite conversation that has to repeated again because 80% of everyone on the call forgot some amount of detail.

Re: We're moving to a four-day work week at Beacon

#145

Post by yrgulation »

matsemann wrote: post #137
yrgulation wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal observation is that most pro office folks are seeking to substitute gaps in their personal lives with onsite work. A drain on their coworkers to be frank. Lack of friends, proper housing, lack of exercise you name it. A tiring hindrance on those whom understand that most of these issues are caused by being farmed in offices 8 hours a day and clustered in crowded, poorly planned cities. Of course there are…

Wow, what an uncharitable view you have on people with a different opinion than your own. Quite stunning, actually.

Quite the contrary. My aim is at those opinions that tell _me_ what to do, essentially not respecting my own opinion. I am more than happy for people to return to the office if that's _their_ wish but I am not returning to an office to be someone’s substitute for a normal life. To each his own, basically. As i said, there are valid reasons but not at my own freedom’s expense.

Re: We're moving to a four-day work week at Beacon

#146

Post by formvoltron »

The 4 day workweek. This is life just laughing at me for having the gall to try & start my own company. 30 years on I'm still trying. Everybody else who just went & got a job are now millionaires & retired. I wrote a news publishing system 2 years before Elon sold them. I wrote the first Taxi app on iPhone. On my todo list for 2 years before Instagram was "twitter with photos".

Re: We're moving to a four-day work week at Beacon

#147

Post by heretogetout »

fleddr wrote: post #130

I've been working 4 day workweeks for well over a decade now, took the pay cut myself. As for the goal to maintain 100% productivity whilst cutting back on hours, I'm confident that they will succeed. In fact, they'll succeed in this without requiring some kind of brilliant plan, as this recalibration happens automatically. When you start working one day less, nobody will reduce your workload by 20%. You'll have the…

> Let's say you do need to attend a meeting. It's a 1 hour meeting. You're needed in the meeting. Go in and say you only have 20 mins.

Every time I've tried this or seen it tried the meeting gets rescheduled and everyone's time is wasted. I wish it worked this way.

Re: We're moving to a four-day work week at Beacon

#148

Post by kqr »

snowAbstraction wrote: post #103
kqr wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Sweden and have never hard of any company doing a four day week. The closest I get is one of my first jobs which had a 37.5 hour week (rather than the customary 40 hours) but again, spread out over five days. That said, some of the last few weeks at the time of writing have in practise turned out to be four day weeks due to public holidays. Could this be what causes the confusion?

In Sweden, a significant number of parents with young children who work 80% so maybe that has caused the confusion.

That describes also myself -- yet I didn't think about that possibility!

Re: We're moving to a four-day work week at Beacon

#149

Post by galangalalgol »

isodev wrote: post #140
belter wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Which country and city governments have a four-day work week?": https://buildremote.co/four-day-week/4-day-work-week-countri... I am surprised the lack of mention of Denmark, Sweden or the Netherlands. Most business persons I contact, normally only work 4 days a week.

Belgium is missing as well, by law you are allowed to choose a 4d work-week and many, many people do it, including myself :-).

If you can choose to work %20 fewer hours dor the same pay, who doesn't choose to do so?

Re: We're moving to a four-day work week at Beacon

#150

Post by suction »

formvoltron wrote: post #146

The 4 day workweek. This is life just laughing at me for having the gall to try & start my own company. 30 years on I'm still trying. Everybody else who just went & got a job are now millionaires & retired. I wrote a news publishing system 2 years before Elon sold them. I wrote the first Taxi app on iPhone. On my todo list for 2 years before Instagram was "twitter with photos".

Seems like you're always two years too early for the market?
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