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

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

#91
post #49
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually WANT to go to the office, especially when it's nice out. My body is craving the walking and the activity, and the positive stress of being in a different environment is actually helping my mood significantly. I've become puffy, lazy, and slow. But not 5 days a week, no.

I've never understood this. If you work from home you can also just... go walking outside? In fact you could even go walking for longer, since nobody is checking for your presence and you haven't wasted time commuting. I'd rather walk to the lake and go for a swim during the afternoon, than walk to a train to walk to an office.

>> I'd rather walk to the lake and go for a swim during the afternoon, than walk to a train to walk to an office.

This requires some degree of motivation. When you had to go to the office you were forced to get dressed, get outside and travel etc. When you are WFH it is so tempting to get up late, get online, and stay comfortable. This is true even when you know what you are doing is unhealthy. It's similar to people eating a poor diet. They know they're doing it, they know it's bad, but it's hard to do the right thing (even when the right thing is relatively easy to do).

I say this as someone who loves WFH but also has fallen into a lot of bad habits that have definitely impacted my physical/mental health.

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

#92

Strange how many orgs discover that working less hours or remote increases productivity for most people. It’s almost as if unstressed “workers” produce better quality work. There was an experiment whereby cows were shown to give more milk if not stressed. Certainly the same applies to humans. When will companies learn that milking their “workforce” of their energy doesnt yield the expected results but quite the oppos…

It was the fatal shift from "personnel" to "human resources".

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

#93

I really can't wrap my head around this four-day week trend. If the organization is focused on KPI's so why does it matter if people work one day or four-days? If the organization is focused on time spend no work (either in office or remotely) how can work be done in 80% of the time? Really don't understand how it works in day-to-day. It resembles the unlimited vacation days policy which was later found out to be unh…

We work 4 days of 10 hours each. It's a good trade-off and I love the schedule.

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

#94
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.

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.

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

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a fair, argument, but... People seem to put forth the argument that "people will work more efficiently if they work less hours" to counter the argument "if less time is being worked, then less work is being done, then costs/prices go up". And, while it may be (and probably is) true that efficiency will go up, it's almost certainly true that overall work will go down (because efficiency will not go up enough t…

> it's almost certainly true that overall work will go down (because efficiency will not go up enough to compensate for the loss of work time) That might be true, or it might not. It depends on how much efficiency goes up and how much buffer time people has, right? In many jobs people spene a non-trivial amount of time reading news, or in FB/Twitter/etc, so it def can be true that removing one hour of news+twitter yi…

I've seen no compelling evidence to suggest that working fewer hours will raise efficiency enough to result in the same amount of work being done in those fewer hours. It _can_ be true, but it seems unlikely enough (to my intuition) that I'll assume it would not be the case unless someone can put forth a convincing argument/evidence.

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

#96

Strange how many orgs discover that working less hours or remote increases productivity for most people. It’s almost as if unstressed “workers” produce better quality work. There was an experiment whereby cows were shown to give more milk if not stressed. Certainly the same applies to humans. When will companies learn that milking their “workforce” of their energy doesnt yield the expected results but quite the oppos…

We're still working like (eg.) coal miners, inherited from the first industrial revolution.

More people, more hours: more coal extracted.

Interestingly, farmers in the middle ages are a much more balanced model (catastrophes aside): the land they had was mostly manageable by a small group of people, and there's only only so much you can optimize, given the patch of land that you have. So you do what you have to do and when you're done, well, you're done.

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

#97
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not common to be paid 100% (aka for 40 hrs), though.

But you won't be paid 100% for 40 hours, you will be paid 100% for 32 hours. And people that work 40 hours should get more than those that work 32 hours. By the way, it is common to be paid far less for 40 hours than you should receive as well, and plenty of people work unpaid overtime who would be happy just to work the 40 hours they get paid for. Salary negotiations are always tricky, especially if you don't know y…

That's not what the trial is; workers will be paid 100% of their salary for 80% of their usual time. That's what makes it different from a 'flexible hours' pilot.

Overtime is extremely uncommon even in Europe and has to be agreed upon in contract, and even then most employers just provide extra time off instead of money for full-time workers.

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

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> And people that work 40 hours should get more than those that work 32 hours. This is not how it works currently. You get paid your salary and are expected to do a minimum number of hours + any more reasonably required. You don't get extra for those extra hours in a salaried job so I don't see why you would if they reduced the hours required.

> You get paid your salary and are expected to do a minimum number of hours + any more reasonably required. This is a geographically limited factoid, and even then lots of companies do pay overtime. But in those cases where they do not: I always wonder how those companies would respond if I treated them the way they treat their employees. > You don't get extra for those extra hours in a salaried job so I don't see wh…

>> This is a geographically limited factoid

Possibly but it's widely true for UK based tech companies and that's what this article was about.

Whether it's fair or not and treatment of employees is a whole other discussion.

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

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> 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-...

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

#100

Strange how many orgs discover that working less hours or remote increases productivity for most people. It’s almost as if unstressed “workers” produce better quality work. There was an experiment whereby cows were shown to give more milk if not stressed. Certainly the same applies to humans. When will companies learn that milking their “workforce” of their energy doesnt yield the expected results but quite the oppos…

It was the fatal shift from "personnel" to "human resources".

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