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Sweden’s proposed six-hour workday

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Sweden’s proposed six-hour workday

#181

Post by VLM »

dragonwriter wrote: post #172
amirmc wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet people complain about the pointlessness of meetings despite not doing anything to make them more efficient (cf start and end on time, avoid chit-chat, stick to the agenda, send actions quickly afterwards etc). It only takes a small about of self-discipline to get there but everyone has to exercise it. I'm lucky to have learned from some excellent meeting-chairs but have only been able to reproduce the efficie…

The #1 thing to make meetings more efficient is not to have them . Very many meetings, IME, are held for purposes for which a face-to-face meeting is not an efficient tool, and for which decentralized, asynchronous mechanisms like email would serve better.

Most meetings are primate dominance rituals.

That means they're unproductive. On the other hand, if you force a venue change, you're just going to get hyper aggressive git commit messages or something equally stupid to show "who's boss". The only solution I'm aware of is to select employees for hire based on likelihood of not being "into" primate dominance rituals, at least not at work. This is pretty hard to figure out at the interview stage and once a company is eventually infected, its plague dynamics time, and much like a bad flu season, work grinds to a halt.

Re: Sweden’s proposed six-hour workday

#182

Post by karmajunkie »

iamtew wrote: post #21
skrause wrote: post #7

If someone gave me the chance of a 30-hour work week, I would rather work 4 days of 7,5 hours than 5 days of 6 hours. Just the hassle of getting up early, dressing up for work, commuting etc. isn't really worth it when I'm only going to work 6 hours anyway. I'd rather take an extra day off.

This is a fairly common thing here in the Netherlands actually, four day work week. Most of my colleagues I know who does this to have some extra time with their family/kids. Usually it's a split in the middle of the week or something, for example my manager doesn't work tuesday's, it's his "papadag" as he then spends time with his kids and don't have to send them off to day-care or get a nanny. Another colleague of…

> obviously these arrangements will affect your salary

I don't really find this obvious or self-evident. One of my very biggest complaints about the economic climate today is that all of the productivity gains go to the owners, and very little to workers. If I as a worker am producing more, it follows that I should be working less, or paid more (which amounts to the same thing.) to do otherwise eliminates jobs that would otherwise need to be done, and takes advantage of workers.

Re: Sweden’s proposed six-hour workday

#183

Post by collyw »

valdiorn wrote: post #138
wobbleblob wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general, the poor work both 'harder' (physically) and longer hours than the rich. It's just the way it is. Time off is a luxury. The supposedly lazy Greeks and Italians work far more hours per year than the supposedly industrious Germans and Dutch, but not as much as sweatshop workers in Bangladesh.

In most (all?) Scandinavian countries, time off is not a luxury. It is a right, awarded to every working man and woman, guarded by law and regulations.

Why does the rest of the world end up with such crap politics? What are you doing right in Scandinavia?

Re: Sweden’s proposed six-hour workday

#184

Post by up_and_up »

paulhauggis wrote: post #176
comrade1 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the same experience in Switzerland. I moved from the u.s. (s.f., boston, dc, socal) and despite working less we get a lot more done than in the u.s. We have an 8.5 hour workday in Switzerland which we strictly stick to - we get comp time if you work over. In the u.s. we were pretty regularly working 10 hour days and 12 wasn't unusual, but we were wasting so much time. A good example is meetings - most people g…

This reminds me of my last remote job. Every day, we would have. Standup meeting. These are supposed to be 15 minutes, but typically would last well over an hour. On top of this, we would have: planning (4 hour meeting), review (3 hour), retrospective (3 or 4 hours), and the boss decided we weren't having enough meetings..so he added a soical meeting every Friday for an hour. We were all remote and this was a way for…

Haha thats hilarious.

I currently work for a fully remote company and it's completely the opposite. We do one weekly status meeting which is usually 20-30 mins. Then project planning/troubleshooting/teambuilding meetings as needed usually around 2-4 hours per MONTH.

EVERYTHING else is discussed/solved very efficiently via IM.

I hope to never work for a company with meetingitus again, big waste of time and resources.

Re: Sweden’s proposed six-hour workday

#185

Post by SoftwareMaven »

furyg3 wrote: post #56

I moved from the US (high on the list) to the Netherlands (bottom of the list) a while ago. Different jobs and sectors vary, but the theme I can confirm is that the Dutch feel more productive, generally (I work in software development). In very broad terms, the Dutch are more likely to plan and stick to those plans. Personal time and time off are valued, so you need to be efficient in your working hours. You can't re…

Is planning and taking vacation really a problem for most people? In nearly 20 years, I've never had to delay a vacation, much less cancel one. Perhaps it's not a function of the company, but rather the worker, valuing work more than rest? The ability to forget work and recharge is critical for creative workers, something companies should be more aware of.

Re: Sweden’s proposed six-hour workday

#186

Post by terranstyler »

mbrock wrote: post #111
terranstyler wrote: post #109

It is not the duty of the lawmaker but of the contracting parties (= employer and employee) to define the amount of work hours per day. There are many variables in the process: - Demand for money of the employee (poor father of five vs. rich single) - Demand for work of the employer (company needs a helping hand vs company needs to recruit a new team) - Scale effect of product (does one additional hour or man lead to…

There are pretty severe network effects in place, though, as well as obvious imbalance of power (the wage worker is, almost by definition, relatively poor, indebted, etc). Working hours have always been a big part of labor politics. The individual contractual perspective is not the whole story.

I don't know what network effects you mean.

But I agree with the imbalance of power, at least in the common case. However, the more specific and difficult your job is, the more the power leans towards the employee.

Still, I believe any kind of power inequality will manifest itself somewhere whether you fix working hours or not.

Re: Sweden’s proposed six-hour workday

#187

Post by VLM »

crazy1van wrote: post #135
codehotter wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to know a lot about this and it's something I've always been interested in: When laws were passed to mandate 8 hour work days, what % of companies had 8 hour work days already? 10%? 20%? 80%? Nowadays we know that total productivity is higher if you have 8 hour work days, even though you work less total hours, because your productivity per hour is much higher. Was something like this known at the time? Or wa…

"Nowadays we know that total productivity is higher if you have 8 hour work days," We know ? Surely on a planet with 7 billion people, some of them can maintain their work efficiency for more than 8 hours. What about the Steve Jobs and John Carmack's of the world? I don't see them being 9-5 people.

That seems to have a peculiar and unlikely assumption that they would have produced less by working fewer hours, while almost all human experiences show those at the top of their profession rarely if ever got there by merely punching a timeclock more than the next tier down.

I will never be a world class ballet dancer or world class basketball player simply by putting in a little more time than the next guy.

Re: Sweden’s proposed six-hour workday

#188

Post by gagege »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #185
furyg3 wrote: post #56

I moved from the US (high on the list) to the Netherlands (bottom of the list) a while ago. Different jobs and sectors vary, but the theme I can confirm is that the Dutch feel more productive, generally (I work in software development). In very broad terms, the Dutch are more likely to plan and stick to those plans. Personal time and time off are valued, so you need to be efficient in your working hours. You can't re…

Is planning and taking vacation really a problem for most people? In nearly 20 years, I've never had to delay a vacation, much less cancel one. Perhaps it's not a function of the company, but rather the worker, valuing work more than rest? The ability to forget work and recharge is critical for creative workers, something companies should be more aware of.

Same experience. I'm in the US and every employer I've worked for has allowed me to take my 2+ weeks off, no questions asked, no calls, no expectation to respond to emails (I don't have work email on my phone).

Re: Sweden’s proposed six-hour workday

#189

Post by dragonwriter »

anonymousDan wrote: post #180
dragonwriter wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The #1 thing to make meetings more efficient is not to have them . Very many meetings, IME, are held for purposes for which a face-to-face meeting is not an efficient tool, and for which decentralized, asynchronous mechanisms like email would serve better.

So what would be your rules of thumb for when meetings are worthwhile?

The simple two-part question to identify when a meeting is worthwhile and what the scope of the meeting should be (and what should be in other channels): Is simultaneous, interactive, many-to-many communication necessary, and why, specifically, is it necessary? (A followup, to make sure that people are ready to have the meeting -- another common problem that makes meetings a waste of time and results in inappropriate things being done in the meeting venue -- is to ask: "what needs to happen first so that people are ready to engage in that many-to-many interaction"?)

Lots of meetings, IME, are held by one person to gather information from many people or to distribute information from one person to many people -- these kind of one-to-many or many-to-one scenarios are the easiest thing to see doesn't require a meeting (many-to-one being the more inefficient.) There's even some cases of many-to-many communication where there isn't any real need for interactivity. And plenty of cases where a meeting that is held for a many-to-many interactive purpose spends much of its time doing top-down, one-to-many communication for much of the meeting because something that ought to have been distributed to be reviewed by participants to be ready for a productive meeting was instead distributed for the first time in the meeting, wasting most of the meeting time.

Re: Sweden’s proposed six-hour workday

#190

Post by Roboprog »

paulhauggis wrote: post #176
comrade1 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the same experience in Switzerland. I moved from the u.s. (s.f., boston, dc, socal) and despite working less we get a lot more done than in the u.s. We have an 8.5 hour workday in Switzerland which we strictly stick to - we get comp time if you work over. In the u.s. we were pretty regularly working 10 hour days and 12 wasn't unusual, but we were wasting so much time. A good example is meetings - most people g…

This reminds me of my last remote job. Every day, we would have. Standup meeting. These are supposed to be 15 minutes, but typically would last well over an hour. On top of this, we would have: planning (4 hour meeting), review (3 hour), retrospective (3 or 4 hours), and the boss decided we weren't having enough meetings..so he added a soical meeting every Friday for an hour. We were all remote and this was a way for…

OMG, that sounds like where I work.

It's acceptable to skip a few of the meetings after things inevitably turn into a cluster bomb and somebody has to start writing the actual code.

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