The part I don't get is they tried this experiment, claim phenomenal results and then just went back to doing the usual? If it worked so well wouldn't you keep doing it?
Microsoft 4-day week boosts productivity and sales
211–220 of 255 posts
Re: Microsoft 4-day week boosts productivity and sales
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting. In some European countries time tracking for employee working hours(punching in) is mandatory by law for positions with flexible working hours for insurance purposes. IE: Did you sprain your ankle/fall off your bike during work hours or private time? If it was during work time then it's a working accident and you get all necessary treatment and long term recovery paid by the insurance. If it's during pri…
Salaried ones? or low level office jobs like a clerk.
All of them.
Re: Microsoft 4-day week boosts productivity and sales
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing that has always came true throughout my life is a phrase: "If you don't know why, its money." Why there is no national healthcare - money, someone makes a ton of it by preventing nationalization of healthcare system. Everything that doesn't make sense, has better alternatives (somehow not adopted) always boils down to money :(
I am not saying the general idea is wrong, and probably it is true in the US. But. You could equivalently say "why is there national healthcare almost everywhere in Europe" and answer "money", reversing your point.
Not necessarily, because the amount of money the health industries get in every other country is tiny compared to the USA
Re: Microsoft 4-day week boosts productivity and sales
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing that has always came true throughout my life is a phrase: "If you don't know why, its money." Why there is no national healthcare - money, someone makes a ton of it by preventing nationalization of healthcare system. Everything that doesn't make sense, has better alternatives (somehow not adopted) always boils down to money :(
I am not saying the general idea is wrong, and probably it is true in the US. But. You could equivalently say "why is there national healthcare almost everywhere in Europe" and answer "money", reversing your point.
The answer is about money not the money itself. It all depends on who controls the money and why. In Europe the state controls it and most citizens are happy with that (not perfectly of course) whereas it is a complete non-starter in the US because 'everyone' has an adversarial relationship with the state.
Re: Microsoft 4-day week boosts productivity and sales
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
“The Democrats have decided that the rich must pay for it. Republicans have decided that it's too costly” When you look back at the last few decades you will see that republicans have decided that rich people should pay an ever decreasing share. the Democrat proposals i have seen don’t even try to roll back to tax rates during or before the Reagan years.
>tax rates during or before the Reagan years The tax rates people quote are not usually effective rates; they're marginal rates, and no one really paid them. The Reagan tax cuts were revenue neutral - they cut the top marginal rates and removed loopholes. During one of them the effective rate on the rich increased slightly. >When you look back at the last few decades you will see that republicans have decided that ri…
If you compare the share of taxes different groups are paying you also should compare the share of income they are receiving. You should also compare income growth of these groups over the last decades. It’s hard not to come to the conclusion that upper incomes did much better over that period compared to other groups.
Re: Microsoft 4-day week boosts productivity and sales
#216(This is a duplicate of a story posted this past weekend. I want to copy my comment from it for greater visibility.) Fuck everything about 5 day work weeks. I'll gladly switch to any job that offers a 4 day work week. It's one of the best perks. As someone with ADHD, work days are entirely spent getting work done. There isn't any extra slack or allotment for personal tasks. They're 100% owned by the employer. Weekend…
We do 4-day (32 hour) work weeks at Monograph, and we've been doing it for 3 years now. I believe we're one of the only companies in SF that are advocates for working less, but more productively. Similar to Microsoft, we only have one 45-min meeting each week and then everything else is heads down work. To maintain efficiency, we also have strict Slack protocols in place to keep everyone in deep work throughout the d…
Will you consider people from London who would need a H1B?
Re: Microsoft 4-day week boosts productivity and sales
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I don't want to spend most of my life working. I feel like a slave, and now my youth is almost gone. That's a first-world problem if I ever saw one. You're going to work most of your life because if you don't somebody else will have to support you. Very few people can provide for their lifestyle without working (it can be done, but it can be very hard and would require a sacrifice of some of the comforts of modern-d…
You missed the AHDH bit, I can't speak for everyone with ADHD but I understand what op is is saying. With ADHD you've got to constantly force yourself to remain focused on whatever task you're meant to be doing while your mind really just wants to wander off. Sometimes you fall into "flow" on whatever you're working on and everything's great until that task is finished then you've got to mentally whip yourself to mov…
>You missed the AHDH bit
I didn't miss it. Every single person is going to have something they need to work through that others don't. ADHD is a cross that OP needs to bear and he has to learn to deal with it the same as a single mother of 2 has to juggle raising her children and providing for them, or a recent immigrant may have to work through language and cultural barriers while working their job and sending money back home for their family.
>Op wants a break from that mental process of forcing his concentration
We all want it to be a little easier, but sometimes life doesn't give you that option. And OP didn't make it easy to empathize with him when he shifted the blame on the world and likening himself to a slave because he has to work 5 days a week (leaving not enough time to do 'chores' and 'still have fun') until retirement.
Re: Microsoft 4-day week boosts productivity and sales
#218If this was viable for the bottom line, all businesses will be doing it. Idk what the point of these feel-good posts are every year.
In my experience most companies don't even measure worker performance metrics so how can they even make a rational decision to improve their bottom line? Many companies can tell you how much money they saved by implementing an open office plan and squishing more people into a smaller area, but very few can tell you the cost of having more disruptions, more noise, more context switches, and less privacy. Companies are very good at optimizing their costs (open office, hiring temp contractors, curing budgets), but many companies do a poor job optimizing for worker performance.
Re: Microsoft 4-day week boosts productivity and sales
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really, you can't understand it? You've never had to work long hours at an unfulfilling, repetitive job you hate just to pay the bills and survive without being able to save anything? You're lucky, a lot of people in the US are not so lucky.
>Really, you can't understand it? You've never had to work long hours at an unfulfilling, I've literally dug graves for a living. I've thrown trucks for a living in 90F heat in 80%+ humidity. I've worked 40 hours for a company and 40-50 hours a week for myself trying to get ahead some. I've been working since I was 12 years old just to help make ends meet. Sitting at a desk doing 'unfulfilling, repetitive' work is th…
Have you ever dug two or more graves for one dead person, then filled in the ones that didn't actually get used for the interment?
Probably not. You wouldn't want to waste time on back-breaking labor that has no productive purpose, would you?
But the white-collar desk job does that every time it says "work 8 hours every day" while the worker consensus is that the 7th and 8th hour is mostly useless, and subsequent hours in the same day are often counterproductive.
If you spend 8 hours digging a grave by hand with a shovel, your muscles get tired. But if you do it long enough, the muscles get stronger, and you can dig graves for longer before getting fatigued. If you spend 8 hours a day thinking about difficult problems, your brain gets tired. If you do it long enough, you get smarter, but also burn yourself out, go slightly insane, and lose the ability do the job at all any more.
They're different kinds of cells. They have different physiological processes for maintenance and repair. Muscles don't sleep and flush with CSF; brains don't bulk up and add additional nuclei.
Re: Microsoft 4-day week boosts productivity and sales
#220We tried a three day week in the UK, 1974, during the oil crisis. I vaguely remember seeing articles, that I now cannot find, that claimed that the forty percent reduction in days worked resulted in much less than a forty percent reduction in production.
There was a decent BBC documentary about this fairly recently. From memory the 40% reduction in working hours caused low single digit drop in productivity. Wouldn't be surprised to find if it were repeated without all the personal impacts that the three day week brought to find productivity rise markedly.
Here's a government pdf on productivity. The three day week doesn't stand out on any of the graphs, it's just lost in the regular variation.
https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN06...