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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

#251

Post by iso1631 »

michaelcampbell wrote: post #164
Loughla wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“After your boss has taken away your door, your walls, and your storage areas, there aren't many options left for the next revolution in office design. One of the following things is likely to go next: the floor; the ceiling; your happiness." Scott Adams was blasting open concept offices before it was cool to blast them.

Hot-take, it was never NOT cool to blast open offices. Unless you're in middle management.

blast as in criticize I assume

When I entered the workplace in 2003 I was lucky to get a peg for my coat, had to hot-desk during the day - there were 6 people on shift but only 4 computers. You'd go out to fix a printer or something and when you came back to base someone's taken your place

The Dilbert world of the time had cubicles, it was glorious. 3 years later the IT crowd had an entire room with just 2 people in, with their own phones, computers, desks etc.

Now of course I'm in a far more senior position and no longer deal with printers (literally have a high-viz saying "We don't do printers"). If I went into the office I'd still have to hot desk, although only on a per-day basis.

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

#252

Post by corrral »

basisword wrote: post #76
natly wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that comic really makes me question how much of todays complaning about work and life struggles has been a multi decade persistent thing - not just hardships facing this particular generation. (As someone who was 5 in 1996 and didn't see this first hand.)

I think work is just like everything else in this regard. Providing you have standard white collar job, as things continue to improve and get better, we just find new things to complain about. e.g. parent poster complaining about 'business casual' when it wasn't that long ago business casual was a nice step down from having to wear a suit. The workplace continuously adjusts but so do our expectations.

A lot of what people complain about in white-collar offices have been problems people've complained about effectively since such offices started to become common (the 1950s). Including how little actual work is required for most companies to function, and how much of "working" is just presenteeism.

And actually, some things have gotten worse. I think requirements for natural light used to be much stricter in older buildings (that's where you get all those u-shaped ones) so you were more likely to be near a window, for instance.

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

#253

Post by greedo »

MockObject wrote: post #223
michaelcampbell wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked in a Wall St. firm in the 90's and wore suit and tie every day, even though my job was neither customer facing nor even in New York. I quickly realized I didn't mind it at all once I found correctly fitting shirts. If you consider a tie to be too constricting, you have the wrong shirt. Even as borderline OCD (self diagnosed, so likely wrong), I never found particular clothes to be a hinderance to me typing (…

Agreed. For someone whose experience of suits is the ill-fitting obligation for the occasional wedding or funeral, it will be shocking and unbelievable to read that a custom cut dress shirt is more comfortable than a t-shirt, and suit pants, soft and silk lined, more comfortable than jeans.

It might be shocking to realize that not all body types fit well into a suit, regardless of how well tailored it is. I used to be tall and lanky, great for a suit. Then age happened, and now I'm much more round that beanpole. Nothing fits well, and I've tried custom shirts etc. I just look like a well dressed, round person. I'm not more comfortable at all, in fact the opposite.

Plop me in a pair of shorts with a t-shirt or better, a hoodie and I feel great.

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

#254

Post by lolinder »

giorgioz wrote: post #219
reneherse wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll probably do better once you can retain people who reject employer surveillance.

No-one ever quit from our company so that's not it.

How many got wind of your surveillance policies and never bothered to apply? How many sensed your attitude towards your employees in the interview and took a different offer? How many spoke to one of your employees after the interview and then ghosted you?

You can't measure the potentially wide-ranging negative impacts of your attitude and policies.

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

#255

Post by greedo »

ghaff wrote: post #143
brycewray wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A company in my town still requires suit and tie for men, dresses or long skirts for women. If you leave your chair, you need to put your suit jacket on. You can take it off when sitting.

The amount of money it would take for me to put up with such ancient, sexist and conformist bullshit is hard to imagine.

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

#256

Post by mattgreenrocks »

ag56 wrote: post #242

So if this becomes the new ‘standard’ work week, which day becomes part of the weekend? Friday? I see these stories all the time. I’m pro the idea. But it’s not going to work if one industry works Tue-Fri and another Mon-Thu and their customers are taking off Wednesday. That standard work week being _standard_ is a feature.

Negotiating schedules is already an issue in most workplaces, as everyone is essentially close to overbooked. And the outcome of almost every meeting is the same whether it happens on a Friday or a Monday.

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

#257

Post by chaostheory »

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…

Yes, there’s only so much work that you can get done in one day. A lot of time is also spent on things like social interaction. What a 4 day work week offers is more flexibility. ie it’ll allow for either more quiet days of work or allow people to compress their work week and have more time to relax

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

#258

Post by corrral »

janeerie wrote: post #206
hansworst wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s really about the clothes being uncomfortable, but just the idea of being forced to wear certain kinds of clothes

Plus the expense of maintaining two different wardrobes.

The trad thing is that your old clothes become your casual clothes, mostly. Except athletic clothes—but half those are dress or business-casual now, anyway, like OCBDs and polos—most of our modern athletic clothes counted as underwear, before, if they existed at all. And it doesn't really work for full-on formal wear like dinner jackets or morning dress.

A bunch of suiting trends come from this. Suit jacket with ruined pants? Now it's a blazer, so, casual wear. Handmedown worn 3-button suit that you're wearing casually at college, with the top button pretty much permanently unbuttoned? You've just invented the 2-roll-3 jacket style. And so on.

We've replaced this behavior with simply having all our clothes be disposable-cheap. Mending a hole and adding patches to keep wearing something's not really worth it when it cost $20 to begin with.

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

#259

Post by weakfish »

pc86 wrote: post #214

They say it's 100% of the full-time salary, but the one open position they have is a full-stack JS engineer for the equivalent of about $66k USD. Is the market really that bad in the UK? That's not even a good new grad offer in the US.

That’s fairly normal outside SF/Silicon Valley - my friends and I all fell around the 60-80 range fresh out of school with CS degrees, working in the southeast (Raleigh, NC)
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