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Microsoft Japan’s 3-day weekend boosts worker productivity

557 points by nefitty 7y ago

dstaley 7y ago
> Due to its success this year, Microsoft is planning on repeating it again next summer or perhaps at other times as well. If the results were truly as remarkable as the article is making them out to be, why not implement it all year?
- x3ro 7y ago
  I'm guessing here, but it's usually hard to convince the right people.. I've been through this for me personally, so obviously anecdotal, but even if you take an equivalent pay cut people are often reluctant to let you work less because "how will you get anything done", even though there's plenty of evidence to the contrary. But admittedly it's quite counterintuitive too, saying I'll work less but I'll be more productive..
- thrower123 7y ago
  We've done this the last few years at my company, so that we have every other Friday during the summer off, staggered for coverage. It's nice. Nobody ever does anything on Friday anyway, and a three-day weekend lets you actually go somewhere or get a project done. Moreover, when you have a weekday off regularly, you can actually go to the post office or the bank or all the other places that are only open when working people are working and can't go.
  - ekianjo 7y ago
    The most people get used to it, the more I would expect "Thursday" to become the new Friday and you should expect to quickly end up losing the benefit of that additional day off as laziness takes over.
    - skinnymuch 7y ago
      Wouldn’t people be comparing to their peers outside of work? Most people don’t get any Friday’s off. It would be pretty wild to start wanting Thursday off so much when no one else is getting Friday off.
    - Whirl 7y ago
      My company implements an optional every other Friday off. Somewhat surprisingly, Thursday hasn’t really become the new Friday. In fact, the people who choose to work the full 5 days tend to get more work done on Fridays, since fewer people are around to interrupt them. The people who take those Fridays off are generally happier and still pretty productive on Thursdays.
    - wongarsu 7y ago
      If people didn't want to work at all this might be true (at least if Friday off was widely implemented). But generally that doesn't seem to be the case. Unemployment seems to stress people, and most people seem to prefer vacations that are 2-3 weeks at a time, even if they could take more. So if you offered people to come in whenever they want they might be there more often than you expect.
    - joejerryronnie 7y ago
      I’m not sure lazy people care which day of the week it is.
  - skinnymuch 7y ago
    So the same question for your company. Why is the only during the summer? A staggered every other Friday off has always been something I’ve hoped would become mainstream year round. It isn’t that progressive of a thing to enact since its staggered/every other.
    - thrower123 7y ago
      Generally, we work from home all Fridays, so you have to handle your meetings and email, but there's still flexibility. The summer fridays are nice because you are completely off, no expectation of availability. It's a little silly to only do in the summer, but it's still a nice perk.
- ekianjo 7y ago
  Because it's PR fluff since no metric was actually shown here?
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  There was a story I read about the Carnegie steelworks end of the 1800s. Usual working hours was six days a week. Then the plant manager introduced a 40 hour week. Productivity went up and less accidents happened. This went for a while until the manager got killed in an accident. Soon after, despite the good numbers, the plant went back to the old schedule. I think it’s hard to shake the belief that the more hours you work the more you get done.
- vidarh 7y ago
  Most likely because they are not yet sure whether or not it was a fluke and/or whether or not it would have unforeseen long term impacts and/or they identified other issues they need to address. E.g. the article pointed out that a lot of the increase seemed to be down to fewer meetings. Which presumably raises the question of 1) whether that's sustainable (were those meetings really meetings that could just be cut?) and 2) if it is sustainable, maybe they think they can achieve a bigger productivity increase by slashing meetings and not cutting working hours. It also seems like one of those things that are near impossible to reverse if you make them the norm and things goes sideways, so I can understand they want to be cautious.
- zerkten 7y ago
  It's unlikely someone in the know will post answers here, but this is Japan - and it has totally different work culture. The idea of an employee leaving before their boss is still unthinkable in many cases. Many people are employed in what are bureaucratic "paper pushing" jobs, even if their title suggests otherwise. You can see a little bit of this if you visit because you'll experience endless paperwork for everything, but this is only one layer of a very complex onion. I wouldn't say this is all bad, but it has problems.
spydum 7y ago
I definitely want to believe, but they implemented this for one month. So literally four days off, and declared success? Couldn’t many of those measurements be just standard deviations? Curious how productivity gain was measured and whether or not this is just a honeymoon period and at some point it settles back to baseline..
- ekianjo 7y ago
  Yeah, the elephant in the room here is that they have no explanation how productivity is measured, and if they shouldn't create a lag model because you don't expect every single employee's performance to be directly & immediately related to the day the day sales of the group.
  - zimbatm 7y ago
    It also doesn't take into account the habituation process that all humans are subjected to. Employees might work harder when the 4 days workweek is introduced. And might return back to a lower normal once they get used to it. And if that happens, how can you convince people that they should be working 5 days a week again?
    - mymythisisthis 7y ago
      Probably what happened. Why not just give everyone an extra random day off a year. At the beginning of the year there is a draw to pick the next random day off from the work calendar. Make it into a public holiday. Random Day!
- jasode 7y ago
  >and whether or not this is just a honeymoon period and at some point it settles back to baseline. I think some label that temporary boost in reaction to novelty as the "Hawthorne Effect": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
- Barrin92 7y ago
  There's also the issue that Japan is quite notorious for a work culture that prohibits people from leaving to early and staying at office for a long time sometimes doing very little work. So the opportunity to increase productivity (or just not getting less work done) is probably bigger because there's a lot of slack to cut out. In Germany we have a very different culture. You come at eight or nine and leave at four or five, you have your break but otherwise you're basically supposed to work. I have a hard time believing that cutting an entire day out is going to increase productivity a lot.
HHalvi 7y ago
In a country like Japan, anything you do to improve work-life balance(also the way its looked at) is going to add to productivity.
janesvilleseo 7y ago
My employer, a F500 non FAANG company, has been doing something similar for a long time. During the summer they have what they call summer hours. It’s usually from June through August. Friday’s are mostly off. That is if your work is complete then you can leave early. We have a large remote workforce so I assume quite a few of those remote workers don’t work at all on Fridays. It is a nice perk and I do hope it continues. It does not seem to impact our ability to hit our targets in any negative way. No idea if they ran any numbers to see if it impacted them positively, but we all like it and we have been hitting our numbers for the most part across the company.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  We have every other Friday afternoon off during the summer. It’s a nice perk and as far as i can tell no productivity is lost. People seem happier though.
- dharmab 7y ago
  My sister used to work a 9/9 shift in biotech (9 9 hour shifts, every other Friday off). It meant she had plenty of time for all-day experiments and could have a day for errands and shopping during normal business hours.
- chapium 7y ago
  >We have a large remote workforce so I assume quite a few of those remote workers don’t work at all on Fridays. Funny that this is the assumption. I think they would be more likely to work since they are not bothering with the daily commute to work.
  - janesvilleseo 7y ago
    Right, I am remote and I actually work most Friday’s. This because I partner with our sales force and they work every day since they are 98% commission based. But on the rare occasions I try to get ahold of people who are strictly salary on these Friday’s can be a challenge. But it’s usually not a huge issue either. In an emergency we can get ahold of someone who can help.
  - 7y ago
HenryKissinger 7y ago
"For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!" - John Maynard Keynes
valley-green 7y ago
If they worked in a factory, they would have lost a full day of productivity. If you make your own performance metrics, you can create the results you wanted. What a load of bullshit.
ekianjo 7y ago
How is productivity measured by Microsoft in Japan where they have huge market dominance and therefore could actually fire most most of their workforce and still generate as much business, resulting in gazillions % of productivity improvement?
artur_makly 7y ago
finally..they get a break.
MatekCopatek 7y ago
Entirely anecdotal, but my personal experience confirms this. I switched to 4-day weeks nearly four years ago and it feels very beneficial. Claiming I get the same amount of work done in less time would be an overstatement, but I'm definitely more productive in the four days when I'm working. Can't remember the last time I suffered any work-related stress and my motivations for taking time off are almost purely external now (spending time with friends and family), never the feeling of needing a break.
perfunctory 7y ago
This is not the first experiment of its kind. Here is a New Zealand firm, trusts manager, experimented with 4-day workweek with very satisfactory results https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/world/asia/four-day-workweek-new-zealand.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/world/asia/four-day-workw... Here is an article about how working less is a solution to just about everything https://thecorrespondent.com/4373/the-solution-to-just-about-everything-working-less/168119985-db3d3c10 https://thecorrespondent.com/4373/the-solution-to-just-about... I personally have been working 4 days a week or less for more than a decade already. Loving it. Does it improve my productivity? Why the heck should I care! It improves my life.
- pault 7y ago
  Are you self employed or is this something you have been able to negotiate with your employers?
kull 7y ago
How do you implement such amazing perk for customer support team in a bootstrap startup where cash and people is a limited resource, but your customers need support at least during the office hours? I guess I should not dream about it now , as such experiments work only for companies with a lot of money or departments which do not need their work to be done in a specific time during a day?
- ChuckNorris89 7y ago
  Well, like you said, only top companies can afford such perks and so competition to work there will be fierce.
- Youden 7y ago
  You can stagger the weekend so that everybody gets the extra day but not always the same day.
- geofft 7y ago
  In any support organization I've worked in (including software teams with support responsibilities, software teams with escalation responsibilities, etc.), a given customer question doesn't necessarily get a good answer on the same day. The SME might be out sick, there might be an incident distracting everyone, the problem might be genuinely hard and require research/experimentation, etc. Even if you have a 24h SLA it's usually 24h to a response saying "We're looking into it but check out the FAQ", not to a resolution. And this gets more likely the smaller your team is. So invest in better FAQs and diagnosis tools and in procedures to reduce incidents, instead of trying to throw more bodies at the problem, because you don't have more bodies. Customers will be happier about getting actual answers sooner than they otherwise would. This isn't a perk, any more than weekends or healthcare or market compensation is a "perk." It's an investment in getting better results for your business and for your customers, through making sure you have healthy and productive employees.
- aries1980 7y ago
  > customers need support at least during the office No, they don't. You are bootstrapping. Your customer doesn't even rely their business on your solution. Even large companies doesn't do support. Who do you call if your Windows is crashing? What if there is a power outage, do you call your provider asap? Exactly. Customers are used to what you let them to use to. They need to be sure you are aware of the outage before they notice it. You know you are doing a good job if they don't have to contact you.
rb808 7y ago
This is great, why not move to 4 or 5 day weekends?
bArray 7y ago
I would also like to add that whilst this may (or may not) work for companies such as Microsoft, rolling out something like this nationwide is still a bad idea. There are many roles where this will have little effect on productivity, likely less office-based roles. Another reason not to roll this out nationwide is simply that lower paid roles may also see even lower pay. That said, given the opportunity, I believe I would much prefer to work four days a week if the pay was adequate to support myself comfortably. I much prefer the idea of having a job to support my lifestyle and hobbies, rather than my life being by job. I've always liked the idea of having a day-ff mid-week, we used to do this as school children and it made the week a less of a drag (you were always looking forward to the "weekend" being at most one more day away).
- blotter_paper 7y ago
  > There are many roles where this will have little effect on productivity, likely less office-based roles. Another reason not to roll this out nationwide is simply that lower paid roles may also see even lower pay. What kind of roles are you talking about? The food service workers gotta keep flipping burgers all week while you eat out on your midweek weekend? You sure that won't affect productivity/caring-about-health-code-standards? As somebody who has seen the actions of disgruntled line-cooks behind the scenes, I'd pay extra to have my food prepared by a relatively content worker -- even for selfish reasons. > That said, given the opportunity, I believe I would much prefer to work four days a week if the pay was adequate to support myself comfortably. Of course you would, you're a human.
  - bArray 7y ago
    > I'd pay extra to have my food prepared by a relatively > content worker -- even for selfish reasons. Of course, but where productivity doesn't increase significantly from having additional time spent not working, there will simply be less work done - i.e. people will be paid less. I don't know whether your burger flipper will be more disgruntled from working more hours a week or getting paid less and working less. I highly suspect that such trade-offs are privileges of those who get paid more, hence have enough excess income that they can take a day off without significant detriment or their companies are in a position to swallow those costs. And it's not even that simple in the second case, one of my old employers made several billion dollars profit every year, but were still making engineers redundant in order to reduce engineering costs and increase investor gains. Microsoft seems to be in a position where they can just swallow such costs and not worry investors, even if productivity didn't increase significantly. Even it's ability to do such experiments is owing to it's size. > Of course you would, you're a human. It's not quite that simple - I personally have life-long goals that I would like to work more on. After speaking to people from a wide walk of life, I don't believe everybody has such passions for their side projects, or their goals simply benefit from more cash (i.e. holidays, family, expenses, etc). For some people their work is their goal. I'm also willing to take a 1/5th cut, as long as I can still make the rent. Not everybody would be willing to say that, especially if you find yourself closer to the breadline. The audience here on HN is likely to be middle class and above... My point is that before protesting nationwide for a day to be cut from the working week, we should also consider our lesser paid equals. Everybody's case and reasoning will be different.
TrackerFF 7y ago
The 5-day workweek was implemented what, 100 years ago? Are we to believe that a 100 year old bizops practice is the optimal solution? I honestly think that the main reason it's (nearly) impossible to implement something new, is because the old practice and mentality is so ingrained and etched in management, they'll feel cheated if the need to pay the same for less days (even though hours may be the same). They'd rather have people around for as long as possible, doing 70%, than having them less but delivering 90%. The same type of management that values facetime and butts in seats over nearly anything else.
- pault 7y ago
  Sure, but if you give them a four day work week, next thing you know they'll be asking for three days! /s
  - anticensor 7y ago
    Then they would work for two employers, again getting a 6-days-a-week schedule.
- tomxor 7y ago
  > Are we to believe that a 100 year old bizops practice is the optimal solution? Over the past 100 years a tiny minority were doing any kind of knowledge work. Do you want to stick with an optimization for manual labor at your tech company? 9-5/5 is less bad for this kind of work than the Chinese 9-9/6... but it's still bad.
  - Scapeghost 7y ago
    > 9-5/5 is less bad for this kind of work than the Chinese 9-9/6... but it's still bad. It's the same in the Middle East, often worse (12+ hours for 6 days, maybe a few less on Fridays).
    - bjornjaja 7y ago
      I’m curious why they working so much? Is it because there isn’t much of a talent pool for the jobs? Also curious, what if they weren’t paid salary but paid hourly in this study? Would they be okay with more time off and less money? Digital stuff is weird because the traditional paradigm of work is: someone goes in coal mine and mines C clumps of coal then gets paid for that because the coal had some tangible value. Technology is hard to conceptualise because a lot of it is not tangible or perhaps even wasteful.
124909 7y ago
This year I was forced to change to a 3 day work schedule (4 day weekend), by some recent boneheaded changes in Italian tax law for self-employed workers: if I were to make more before tax, I would make less after tax. That means that the average tax rate has a discontinuity and the marginal tax rate diverges at one point. Even if this change was to be reversed by the new government I don't think I would go back to working full time: not only I'm less stressed and more productive (per hour worked), but a more interesting change is that you stop defining yourself by your profession. You are not a programmer, you code to pay the rent and are all the other things you do in the four days you have left. (I'm using a throwaway, because it doesn't take long to figure out what the limit income is and derive roughly how much I make per hour)
- bitcoinmoney 7y ago
  So how much do you make per hour? Since you’re using a throwaway why not just tell everyone to spread the love?
  - stefano 7y ago
    The limit is 65k. You pay 25% to the mandatory pension fund. Of the remaining, they assume 22% of expenses and tax you 15% on what's left. So you take home ~42k net after taxes. If he were to earn 65.001 euros, he'd take home ~32k net after taxes. You need to earn at least ~80k to break even. So if you earn between 65k and 80k, you're screwed. Needless to say, that 65k becomes a ceiling because if you get a raise, you start earning several thousands of euros less. So either you're stuck at 65k, or you bite the bullet and take the hit until you reach 80k, at which point you can start increasing your take home again. So a 1 euro increase gives you a -10k "raise", while a 15k increase gives you a 0 euros "raise". It's probably the most stupid tax system in the developed world.
    - Hendrikto 7y ago
      > It's probably the most stupid tax system in the developed world. In Germany you can end up in a similar situation, though I think the gap is smaller.
bonoboTP 7y ago
A single month trial says nothing. A rational employee would surely work a lot during this trial period, because if the experiment is successful, they get a lot more free time in the future. Nobody works at 100% productivity all the time, but if it only about a month with a big incentive, they can tap into their reserves and improve productivity for the prospect of more free time. Social experiments are very difficult because the observed subjects know about the experiment.
- nevode 7y ago
  +1 (BTW I'm not implying the 4-day week doesn't work)
nickjj 7y ago
Posts like this remind me why I really enjoy working for myself. You have the option of being able to decouple your hours worked from your accomplishments. You get to choose whether or not you take the day off because you crushed it yesterday, or you can continue grinding it out hardcore for months just so you can take a few extended breaks in the near future. You are in control of the dial that dictates when you work.
gamesbrainiac 7y ago
There are a lot of comments here that are espousing the value of getting more time to do the work - this is fine. Some businesses need to be open 5 days a week. However, if your work does not really require you to be in the office, then I see no issue with people working even two days from home. What I feel is that in order to get to the office, a lot of work needs to be done before you can get there, and it is an expense (in terms of time as well as money) that the employee bears. I think we need to realize that we are in the 21st century, and that most things can be resolved by video-conferencing and email. We have so many tools for remote communication, and they are really very good. It is high time, we took full advantage of them, and give people less stress in their lives, and more time to spend with their families and developing themselves.
protomyth 7y ago
My favorite version of this is the M-H then T-F weeks. That way you get a 4 day weekend every two weeks and the office has 5 day a week coverage if you put people on alternating weeks.
- anticensor 7y ago
  As parent replied that H stands for Thursday, I should add to that three-shift staggering pattern would be more useful: mo-th, we-sa, fr-tu
  - protomyth 7y ago
    Thursday
  - protomyth 7y ago
    Why would I want to work the weekend?
    - anticensor 7y ago
      This results in an overall 7-days-a-week schedule, with a desirable property: two shifts working at a time on weekdays and one shift at a time working on weekends. Fr-Tu was intended to be Fr,Su-Tu.
      - protomyth 7y ago
        I can work M-H, have a 4 day weekend, work T-F, have a 2 day weekend, and repeat. I am not sure how I would do that with your schedule. Plus, I don't want to work weekends.
        anticensor 7y ago
        mo-th twice, then 6 days off we-sa twice, then 5 days off fr-tu once, then 6 days off
BurningFrog 7y ago
A reminder that most scientific studies that report sensational results enough to "go viral" are wrong. And this doesn't even claim to be scientific, AFAICT. But it does report that we don't have to make hard choices. We can pay less and get more. You can see why this message travels fast.
Scapeghost 7y ago
In the Middle East and Southeast Asia even a 2-day weekend is rare! People CHOOSE to work ALL week, only closing for a few hours just for Friday prayers because of social norms. Expat workers in the Middle East get only a couple consecutive weeks off per year to go visit their families. In developed societies, I think even keeping it a 2-day weekend and allowing employees to have at least one day of their choice to work from home would be great.
- colsw 7y ago
  work from home is very industry/role dependent, IT can easily work from home but the same can't be said for Hardware Ops or finance, who often rely on paper even in "modern" companies. if there's going to be a "new default" I think the 3 day weekend makes the most sense, or a Wednesday off scheme where you work 2 sets of 2 days.
taurath 7y ago
Japan’s work culture is crazy. Everyone works too many hours and is NOT productive. It seems like the easiest problem in the world to solve for them, give people back some time in their day, enjoy life more, and get more productivity. That said, Keynes predicted we’d have a 20 hour work week by now in the US, and when exactly does that happen.
- WilliamEdward 7y ago
  When you become conscious of the fact that your employers are not going to graciously give a 20 hour work week to you and you need to take it for yourself.
- zeroonetwothree 7y ago
  To be fair, if you wanted the standard of living of the 1930s you can achieve that with 20 hours/week of minimum wage. Average income was around $8-9k at that time.
  - api 7y ago
    True if you add that you won't likely be able to live in certain cities or expensive towns. But that leaves most of the country. There are some really beautiful places you can live that are not expensive. Check out the Appalachians if you like to live in a misty postcard, and the stereotypes are largely false. Your neighbors are more likely to be artists or organic farmers than the characters from Deliverance. (I used to live in Asheville which is moderately expensive but you don't have to go far from town and it gets cheap.)
  - jotm 7y ago
    If you work remotely and/or live in some small village. Otherwise, that's not enough to pay electricity, rent, food and transportation. Minimum wage is far behind the costs of even basic living (in most of the developed world, anyway).
- TrackerFF 7y ago
  Japan suffers from a cultural problem, mainly that you're judged by how much you work. It's like the Puritan work ethic, where idleness and not working was seen as sin. The penalization or reward curve seems to be highly asymmetric. If you work hard, you're barely getting rewarded - it's what is expected. But if you slack even a bit, you'll get penalized harshly. This leads to fear-driven management, where employees will put up with all kinds of bullshit, as well as just looking like they're working, in fear of getting sacked or limiting their career opportunities.
quotemstr 7y ago
Go ahead: implement a four day work week. I'll keep working five or six days per week like I do now, and consequently, I'll look more productive and impactful compared to the do-as-you're-told types. You can't actually stop people in a creative profession from working, and tech generally evaluates people on their impact. What do you think will happen?
- nefitty 7y ago
  It is good to be a hard worker. It is also good to spend time on activities that help us achieve our own goals, instead of the goals of an organization. That's great that you're proud of how much you work. Along with their work, some other people are proud of their parenting, their hobbies, their friendships, etc.
  - quotemstr 7y ago
    > other people are proud of their parenting, their hobbies, their friendships, etc. People can choose to work more or less. But if someone chooses to work less, he forfeits the right to complain about being paid less and being promoted slower compared to people who work more. The proposed four day work week would increase this disparity between hard workers and "default workers" who work as much as they're told to work, then do other things, some of which you just mentioned. Many people already find vaguely unjust, though it isn't.
    - WilliamEdward 7y ago
      Consider that work-hours are not necessarily the only measure of productivity. If i work 100% and do it in 4 days and you work 100% and do it in 6 days, you're the loser in this scenario.
ThomPete 7y ago
One month is not enough to check whether this works. Furthermore it's important to check for the Hawthorn Effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
basugasubaku 7y ago
It looks like this was a sales department. The metric of productivity was sales per employee according to the tweeted image and the Nikkei article. The sources also mention better use of meeting time via an increase in shorter meetings and teleconferences.
opencl 7y ago
I wonder how many hours per day these people are working. With Japanese corporate culture a 4 day workweek could still easily be 50+ hours.
crca 7y ago
I work for a non-FAANG Fortune 100 company that just implemented a 4/10 schedule after being 9/80 for a number of years. These are the perfect kinds of symbiotic moves where everyone benefits - employees get more time for their lives, employers save operating costs, and the environment saves a day of commuting from thousands of people.
- imafish 7y ago
  Can you elaborate on what 4/10 and 9/80 means?
  - bpodgursky 7y ago
    Work 10 hours a day M-Thu but get Friday off, or get every other Friday off, respectively.
colanderman 7y ago
Does anyone know whether this is 40% daily or weekly productivity? If it's daily, that's only a 12% weekly boost (still good! but less breathtaking). If it's weekly, that's an amazing 75% daily boost!
baxtr 7y ago
I honestly wonder what most people would do with the extra time? Side projects? Hobbies? Family?
- david-gpu 7y ago
  I've worked 4-days/week for a year and on Fridays I do the same sort of things as Saturday and Sunday. Initially I thought it would be a special "hobby day" but the reality of being a parent took over.
sabujp 7y ago
apparently from comments below this was a sales metric and had nothing to do with software engineering. However many colleagues have so much vacation time built up that if they don't take one three day weekend a month they stop accruing vacation
ISL 7y ago
The 23 percent change in electricity use could largely be explained by the 20 percent reduction in the time people were in the office.
_hn_throw_away 7y ago
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. Weekends offer barely enough time to catch up with chores. There isn't enough time both to catch up and still have fun. I use vacation time to catch up on chores, so that's spent too. I don't want to spend most of my life working. I feel like a slave, and now my youth is almost gone. I don't care if it's a 10hr/4day schedule or a 9hr/4day 8hr/4day with less pay, I want an extra day for myself. I'm an excellent engineer aside from my ADHD quirks, and I'll go anywhere that offers this where I live. My own startup (I almost have the capital for a long runway) will be 9hr/4day. Fuck everything about 5 day work weeks.
- lukaszkups 7y ago
  I really relate to this comment - at some point when I have a family I really doesn't rest on the weekend at all - catching up chores and spending minimal time with kids takes all the energy left - any tips to successfully recharge batteries each week?
  - Doxin 7y ago
    I've left a comment to the comment you're replying to[0]. I'll briefly restate it here: seriously look into medication, it has been a life changer for me so far. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21441054 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21441054
- Doxin 7y ago
  As someone with ADD (essentially ADHD with only the "attention deficit" bit, no hyperactivity) I recognise the feeling. I'm lucky to be in a position where I can work 4 days a week, but I'd still barely have energy left for fun activities. I've now been on methylphenidate (also known as ritalin) for about a month and good god that has made a difference for me. When I get home I can get right into hobby projects or chores instead of just deflating on the couch until bedtime. I guess what I'm trying to say is, have you tried looking into medication? I know a lot of people are vehemently against medicating ADHD issues, I was pretty much one of them. The thing is you can totally try it out and if it doesn't work for you or has side-effects you'd rather not deal with you can stop easily enough. I've heard plenty of ritalin horror stories, but a lot of those start making sense once you read the list of side effects. You need to be somewhat lucky to not be too affected by them. If you are there's other medication that can be tried. I guess my point in a nutshell is don't suffer if you don't have to. I've spent 25 years suffering with my inability to choose what to focus on, and a simple pill has let me trade that for cold hands and a restless leg. I'd take that deal any day. Speak to your GP and ask what your options are. Worst case you're no worse off than you are now.
hurrdurr2 7y ago
Meanwhile, at my company, our HR has decided to cut sick leave to the CA state mandated 3 days minimum. So now we have people coughing their heads off at work and spreading flu everywhere. How efficient can you be I wonder when you are sick? Yet people seem to take pride in the fact that they are still working while battling an illness. I'm honestly surprised they tried this in Japan which has a super rigid work structure.
someonehere 7y ago
Interviewed at Dolby Labs once. They told me depending on your start date, you get every other Friday off. Someone else may start on a different cycle so they have the opposite Friday off from you. They said Fridays are pretty much a day with no meetings and time to finish projects or tasks. If the following Monday of your Friday off is a holiday, you essentially get a four day weekend.
h1d 7y ago
I work alone in Japan for my own company but boy people work too much I think. Some people reply to my message after midnight and that is someone who is employed and not someone running a company. And some other people message me on Saturday morning and again, that is an employee but the good part is that for the people I know, they don't look unhappy or maybe they're just used to that work hours... I don't think I'll want to work like that if I'm an employee. When I was an employee for the one year in my entire life, I asked for overtime (I was the only person getting it in a company of about a dozen people) and usually worked 9-10 hours for 5 days.
benibela 7y ago
Would you still get a productivity boost, when the workers spent the weekend working on their open source projects?
tai_hn 7y ago
This is a bold statement. I don't think I can get more things done when I take one more day off. Can you? They don't show how they measured their productivity exactly. I also don't think a month trial is good enough to derive the conclusion. Furthermore, there is a chance that other variables affected the result. It's difficult to come to the conclusion through this kind of uncontrollable experiment where you cannot control the variables and constants.

557 points by nefitty 7y ago

> Due to its success this year, Microsoft is planning on repeating it again next summer or perhaps at other times as well. If the results were truly as remarkable as the article is making them out to be, why not implement it all year?

x3ro 7y ago
I'm guessing here, but it's usually hard to convince the right people.. I've been through this for me personally, so obviously anecdotal, but even if you take an equivalent pay cut people are often reluctant to let you work less because "how will you get anything done", even though there's plenty of evidence to the contrary. But admittedly it's quite counterintuitive too, saying I'll work less but I'll be more productive..
thrower123 7y ago
We've done this the last few years at my company, so that we have every other Friday during the summer off, staggered for coverage. It's nice. Nobody ever does anything on Friday anyway, and a three-day weekend lets you actually go somewhere or get a project done. Moreover, when you have a weekday off regularly, you can actually go to the post office or the bank or all the other places that are only open when working people are working and can't go.
- ekianjo 7y ago
  The most people get used to it, the more I would expect "Thursday" to become the new Friday and you should expect to quickly end up losing the benefit of that additional day off as laziness takes over.
  - skinnymuch 7y ago
    Wouldn’t people be comparing to their peers outside of work? Most people don’t get any Friday’s off. It would be pretty wild to start wanting Thursday off so much when no one else is getting Friday off.
  - Whirl 7y ago
    My company implements an optional every other Friday off. Somewhat surprisingly, Thursday hasn’t really become the new Friday. In fact, the people who choose to work the full 5 days tend to get more work done on Fridays, since fewer people are around to interrupt them. The people who take those Fridays off are generally happier and still pretty productive on Thursdays.
  - wongarsu 7y ago
    If people didn't want to work at all this might be true (at least if Friday off was widely implemented). But generally that doesn't seem to be the case. Unemployment seems to stress people, and most people seem to prefer vacations that are 2-3 weeks at a time, even if they could take more. So if you offered people to come in whenever they want they might be there more often than you expect.
  - joejerryronnie 7y ago
    I’m not sure lazy people care which day of the week it is.
- skinnymuch 7y ago
  So the same question for your company. Why is the only during the summer? A staggered every other Friday off has always been something I’ve hoped would become mainstream year round. It isn’t that progressive of a thing to enact since its staggered/every other.
  - thrower123 7y ago
    Generally, we work from home all Fridays, so you have to handle your meetings and email, but there's still flexibility. The summer fridays are nice because you are completely off, no expectation of availability. It's a little silly to only do in the summer, but it's still a nice perk.
ekianjo 7y ago
Because it's PR fluff since no metric was actually shown here?
Ididntdothis 7y ago
There was a story I read about the Carnegie steelworks end of the 1800s. Usual working hours was six days a week. Then the plant manager introduced a 40 hour week. Productivity went up and less accidents happened. This went for a while until the manager got killed in an accident. Soon after, despite the good numbers, the plant went back to the old schedule. I think it’s hard to shake the belief that the more hours you work the more you get done.
vidarh 7y ago
Most likely because they are not yet sure whether or not it was a fluke and/or whether or not it would have unforeseen long term impacts and/or they identified other issues they need to address. E.g. the article pointed out that a lot of the increase seemed to be down to fewer meetings. Which presumably raises the question of 1) whether that's sustainable (were those meetings really meetings that could just be cut?) and 2) if it is sustainable, maybe they think they can achieve a bigger productivity increase by slashing meetings and not cutting working hours. It also seems like one of those things that are near impossible to reverse if you make them the norm and things goes sideways, so I can understand they want to be cautious.
zerkten 7y ago
It's unlikely someone in the know will post answers here, but this is Japan - and it has totally different work culture. The idea of an employee leaving before their boss is still unthinkable in many cases. Many people are employed in what are bureaucratic "paper pushing" jobs, even if their title suggests otherwise. You can see a little bit of this if you visit because you'll experience endless paperwork for everything, but this is only one layer of a very complex onion. I wouldn't say this is all bad, but it has problems.

spydum 7y ago

I definitely want to believe, but they implemented this for one month. So literally four days off, and declared success? Couldn’t many of those measurements be just standard deviations? Curious how productivity gain was measured and whether or not this is just a honeymoon period and at some point it settles back to baseline..

ekianjo 7y ago
Yeah, the elephant in the room here is that they have no explanation how productivity is measured, and if they shouldn't create a lag model because you don't expect every single employee's performance to be directly & immediately related to the day the day sales of the group.
- zimbatm 7y ago
  It also doesn't take into account the habituation process that all humans are subjected to. Employees might work harder when the 4 days workweek is introduced. And might return back to a lower normal once they get used to it. And if that happens, how can you convince people that they should be working 5 days a week again?
  - mymythisisthis 7y ago
    Probably what happened. Why not just give everyone an extra random day off a year. At the beginning of the year there is a draw to pick the next random day off from the work calendar. Make it into a public holiday. Random Day!
jasode 7y ago
>and whether or not this is just a honeymoon period and at some point it settles back to baseline. I think some label that temporary boost in reaction to novelty as the "Hawthorne Effect": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
Barrin92 7y ago
There's also the issue that Japan is quite notorious for a work culture that prohibits people from leaving to early and staying at office for a long time sometimes doing very little work. So the opportunity to increase productivity (or just not getting less work done) is probably bigger because there's a lot of slack to cut out. In Germany we have a very different culture. You come at eight or nine and leave at four or five, you have your break but otherwise you're basically supposed to work. I have a hard time believing that cutting an entire day out is going to increase productivity a lot.

HHalvi 7y ago

In a country like Japan, anything you do to improve work-life balance(also the way its looked at) is going to add to productivity.

janesvilleseo 7y ago

My employer, a F500 non FAANG company, has been doing something similar for a long time. During the summer they have what they call summer hours. It’s usually from June through August. Friday’s are mostly off. That is if your work is complete then you can leave early. We have a large remote workforce so I assume quite a few of those remote workers don’t work at all on Fridays. It is a nice perk and I do hope it continues. It does not seem to impact our ability to hit our targets in any negative way. No idea if they ran any numbers to see if it impacted them positively, but we all like it and we have been hitting our numbers for the most part across the company.

Ididntdothis 7y ago
We have every other Friday afternoon off during the summer. It’s a nice perk and as far as i can tell no productivity is lost. People seem happier though.
dharmab 7y ago
My sister used to work a 9/9 shift in biotech (9 9 hour shifts, every other Friday off). It meant she had plenty of time for all-day experiments and could have a day for errands and shopping during normal business hours.
chapium 7y ago
>We have a large remote workforce so I assume quite a few of those remote workers don’t work at all on Fridays. Funny that this is the assumption. I think they would be more likely to work since they are not bothering with the daily commute to work.
- janesvilleseo 7y ago
  Right, I am remote and I actually work most Friday’s. This because I partner with our sales force and they work every day since they are 98% commission based. But on the rare occasions I try to get ahold of people who are strictly salary on these Friday’s can be a challenge. But it’s usually not a huge issue either. In an emergency we can get ahold of someone who can help.
- 7y ago

HenryKissinger 7y ago

"For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!" - John Maynard Keynes

valley-green 7y ago

If they worked in a factory, they would have lost a full day of productivity. If you make your own performance metrics, you can create the results you wanted. What a load of bullshit.

ekianjo 7y ago

How is productivity measured by Microsoft in Japan where they have huge market dominance and therefore could actually fire most most of their workforce and still generate as much business, resulting in gazillions % of productivity improvement?

artur_makly 7y ago

finally..they get a break.

MatekCopatek 7y ago

Entirely anecdotal, but my personal experience confirms this. I switched to 4-day weeks nearly four years ago and it feels very beneficial. Claiming I get the same amount of work done in less time would be an overstatement, but I'm definitely more productive in the four days when I'm working. Can't remember the last time I suffered any work-related stress and my motivations for taking time off are almost purely external now (spending time with friends and family), never the feeling of needing a break.

perfunctory 7y ago

This is not the first experiment of its kind. Here is a New Zealand firm, trusts manager, experimented with 4-day workweek with very satisfactory results https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/world/asia/four-day-workweek-new-zealand.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/world/asia/four-day-workw... Here is an article about how working less is a solution to just about everything https://thecorrespondent.com/4373/the-solution-to-just-about-everything-working-less/168119985-db3d3c10 https://thecorrespondent.com/4373/the-solution-to-just-about... I personally have been working 4 days a week or less for more than a decade already. Loving it. Does it improve my productivity? Why the heck should I care! It improves my life.

pault 7y ago
Are you self employed or is this something you have been able to negotiate with your employers?

kull 7y ago

How do you implement such amazing perk for customer support team in a bootstrap startup where cash and people is a limited resource, but your customers need support at least during the office hours? I guess I should not dream about it now , as such experiments work only for companies with a lot of money or departments which do not need their work to be done in a specific time during a day?

ChuckNorris89 7y ago
Well, like you said, only top companies can afford such perks and so competition to work there will be fierce.
Youden 7y ago
You can stagger the weekend so that everybody gets the extra day but not always the same day.
geofft 7y ago
In any support organization I've worked in (including software teams with support responsibilities, software teams with escalation responsibilities, etc.), a given customer question doesn't necessarily get a good answer on the same day. The SME might be out sick, there might be an incident distracting everyone, the problem might be genuinely hard and require research/experimentation, etc. Even if you have a 24h SLA it's usually 24h to a response saying "We're looking into it but check out the FAQ", not to a resolution. And this gets more likely the smaller your team is. So invest in better FAQs and diagnosis tools and in procedures to reduce incidents, instead of trying to throw more bodies at the problem, because you don't have more bodies. Customers will be happier about getting actual answers sooner than they otherwise would. This isn't a perk, any more than weekends or healthcare or market compensation is a "perk." It's an investment in getting better results for your business and for your customers, through making sure you have healthy and productive employees.
aries1980 7y ago
> customers need support at least during the office No, they don't. You are bootstrapping. Your customer doesn't even rely their business on your solution. Even large companies doesn't do support. Who do you call if your Windows is crashing? What if there is a power outage, do you call your provider asap? Exactly. Customers are used to what you let them to use to. They need to be sure you are aware of the outage before they notice it. You know you are doing a good job if they don't have to contact you.

rb808 7y ago

This is great, why not move to 4 or 5 day weekends?

bArray 7y ago

I would also like to add that whilst this may (or may not) work for companies such as Microsoft, rolling out something like this nationwide is still a bad idea. There are many roles where this will have little effect on productivity, likely less office-based roles. Another reason not to roll this out nationwide is simply that lower paid roles may also see even lower pay. That said, given the opportunity, I believe I would much prefer to work four days a week if the pay was adequate to support myself comfortably. I much prefer the idea of having a job to support my lifestyle and hobbies, rather than my life being by job. I've always liked the idea of having a day-ff mid-week, we used to do this as school children and it made the week a less of a drag (you were always looking forward to the "weekend" being at most one more day away).

blotter_paper 7y ago
> There are many roles where this will have little effect on productivity, likely less office-based roles. Another reason not to roll this out nationwide is simply that lower paid roles may also see even lower pay. What kind of roles are you talking about? The food service workers gotta keep flipping burgers all week while you eat out on your midweek weekend? You sure that won't affect productivity/caring-about-health-code-standards? As somebody who has seen the actions of disgruntled line-cooks behind the scenes, I'd pay extra to have my food prepared by a relatively content worker -- even for selfish reasons. > That said, given the opportunity, I believe I would much prefer to work four days a week if the pay was adequate to support myself comfortably. Of course you would, you're a human.
- bArray 7y ago
  > I'd pay extra to have my food prepared by a relatively > content worker -- even for selfish reasons. Of course, but where productivity doesn't increase significantly from having additional time spent not working, there will simply be less work done - i.e. people will be paid less. I don't know whether your burger flipper will be more disgruntled from working more hours a week or getting paid less and working less. I highly suspect that such trade-offs are privileges of those who get paid more, hence have enough excess income that they can take a day off without significant detriment or their companies are in a position to swallow those costs. And it's not even that simple in the second case, one of my old employers made several billion dollars profit every year, but were still making engineers redundant in order to reduce engineering costs and increase investor gains. Microsoft seems to be in a position where they can just swallow such costs and not worry investors, even if productivity didn't increase significantly. Even it's ability to do such experiments is owing to it's size. > Of course you would, you're a human. It's not quite that simple - I personally have life-long goals that I would like to work more on. After speaking to people from a wide walk of life, I don't believe everybody has such passions for their side projects, or their goals simply benefit from more cash (i.e. holidays, family, expenses, etc). For some people their work is their goal. I'm also willing to take a 1/5th cut, as long as I can still make the rent. Not everybody would be willing to say that, especially if you find yourself closer to the breadline. The audience here on HN is likely to be middle class and above... My point is that before protesting nationwide for a day to be cut from the working week, we should also consider our lesser paid equals. Everybody's case and reasoning will be different.

TrackerFF 7y ago

The 5-day workweek was implemented what, 100 years ago? Are we to believe that a 100 year old bizops practice is the optimal solution? I honestly think that the main reason it's (nearly) impossible to implement something new, is because the old practice and mentality is so ingrained and etched in management, they'll feel cheated if the need to pay the same for less days (even though hours may be the same). They'd rather have people around for as long as possible, doing 70%, than having them less but delivering 90%. The same type of management that values facetime and butts in seats over nearly anything else.

pault 7y ago
Sure, but if you give them a four day work week, next thing you know they'll be asking for three days! /s
- anticensor 7y ago
  Then they would work for two employers, again getting a 6-days-a-week schedule.
tomxor 7y ago
> Are we to believe that a 100 year old bizops practice is the optimal solution? Over the past 100 years a tiny minority were doing any kind of knowledge work. Do you want to stick with an optimization for manual labor at your tech company? 9-5/5 is less bad for this kind of work than the Chinese 9-9/6... but it's still bad.
- Scapeghost 7y ago
  > 9-5/5 is less bad for this kind of work than the Chinese 9-9/6... but it's still bad. It's the same in the Middle East, often worse (12+ hours for 6 days, maybe a few less on Fridays).
  - bjornjaja 7y ago
    I’m curious why they working so much? Is it because there isn’t much of a talent pool for the jobs? Also curious, what if they weren’t paid salary but paid hourly in this study? Would they be okay with more time off and less money? Digital stuff is weird because the traditional paradigm of work is: someone goes in coal mine and mines C clumps of coal then gets paid for that because the coal had some tangible value. Technology is hard to conceptualise because a lot of it is not tangible or perhaps even wasteful.

124909 7y ago

This year I was forced to change to a 3 day work schedule (4 day weekend), by some recent boneheaded changes in Italian tax law for self-employed workers: if I were to make more before tax, I would make less after tax. That means that the average tax rate has a discontinuity and the marginal tax rate diverges at one point. Even if this change was to be reversed by the new government I don't think I would go back to working full time: not only I'm less stressed and more productive (per hour worked), but a more interesting change is that you stop defining yourself by your profession. You are not a programmer, you code to pay the rent and are all the other things you do in the four days you have left. (I'm using a throwaway, because it doesn't take long to figure out what the limit income is and derive roughly how much I make per hour)

bitcoinmoney 7y ago
So how much do you make per hour? Since you’re using a throwaway why not just tell everyone to spread the love?
- stefano 7y ago
  The limit is 65k. You pay 25% to the mandatory pension fund. Of the remaining, they assume 22% of expenses and tax you 15% on what's left. So you take home ~42k net after taxes. If he were to earn 65.001 euros, he'd take home ~32k net after taxes. You need to earn at least ~80k to break even. So if you earn between 65k and 80k, you're screwed. Needless to say, that 65k becomes a ceiling because if you get a raise, you start earning several thousands of euros less. So either you're stuck at 65k, or you bite the bullet and take the hit until you reach 80k, at which point you can start increasing your take home again. So a 1 euro increase gives you a -10k "raise", while a 15k increase gives you a 0 euros "raise". It's probably the most stupid tax system in the developed world.
  - Hendrikto 7y ago
    > It's probably the most stupid tax system in the developed world. In Germany you can end up in a similar situation, though I think the gap is smaller.

bonoboTP 7y ago

A single month trial says nothing. A rational employee would surely work a lot during this trial period, because if the experiment is successful, they get a lot more free time in the future. Nobody works at 100% productivity all the time, but if it only about a month with a big incentive, they can tap into their reserves and improve productivity for the prospect of more free time. Social experiments are very difficult because the observed subjects know about the experiment.

nevode 7y ago
+1 (BTW I'm not implying the 4-day week doesn't work)

nickjj 7y ago

Posts like this remind me why I really enjoy working for myself. You have the option of being able to decouple your hours worked from your accomplishments. You get to choose whether or not you take the day off because you crushed it yesterday, or you can continue grinding it out hardcore for months just so you can take a few extended breaks in the near future. You are in control of the dial that dictates when you work.

gamesbrainiac 7y ago

There are a lot of comments here that are espousing the value of getting more time to do the work - this is fine. Some businesses need to be open 5 days a week. However, if your work does not really require you to be in the office, then I see no issue with people working even two days from home. What I feel is that in order to get to the office, a lot of work needs to be done before you can get there, and it is an expense (in terms of time as well as money) that the employee bears. I think we need to realize that we are in the 21st century, and that most things can be resolved by video-conferencing and email. We have so many tools for remote communication, and they are really very good. It is high time, we took full advantage of them, and give people less stress in their lives, and more time to spend with their families and developing themselves.

protomyth 7y ago

My favorite version of this is the M-H then T-F weeks. That way you get a 4 day weekend every two weeks and the office has 5 day a week coverage if you put people on alternating weeks.

anticensor 7y ago
As parent replied that H stands for Thursday, I should add to that three-shift staggering pattern would be more useful: mo-th, we-sa, fr-tu
- protomyth 7y ago
  Thursday
- protomyth 7y ago
  Why would I want to work the weekend?
  - anticensor 7y ago
    This results in an overall 7-days-a-week schedule, with a desirable property: two shifts working at a time on weekdays and one shift at a time working on weekends. Fr-Tu was intended to be Fr,Su-Tu.
    - protomyth 7y ago
      I can work M-H, have a 4 day weekend, work T-F, have a 2 day weekend, and repeat. I am not sure how I would do that with your schedule. Plus, I don't want to work weekends.
      - anticensor 7y ago
        mo-th twice, then 6 days off we-sa twice, then 5 days off fr-tu once, then 6 days off

BurningFrog 7y ago

A reminder that most scientific studies that report sensational results enough to "go viral" are wrong. And this doesn't even claim to be scientific, AFAICT. But it does report that we don't have to make hard choices. We can pay less and get more. You can see why this message travels fast.

Scapeghost 7y ago

In the Middle East and Southeast Asia even a 2-day weekend is rare! People CHOOSE to work ALL week, only closing for a few hours just for Friday prayers because of social norms. Expat workers in the Middle East get only a couple consecutive weeks off per year to go visit their families. In developed societies, I think even keeping it a 2-day weekend and allowing employees to have at least one day of their choice to work from home would be great.

colsw 7y ago
work from home is very industry/role dependent, IT can easily work from home but the same can't be said for Hardware Ops or finance, who often rely on paper even in "modern" companies. if there's going to be a "new default" I think the 3 day weekend makes the most sense, or a Wednesday off scheme where you work 2 sets of 2 days.

taurath 7y ago

Japan’s work culture is crazy. Everyone works too many hours and is NOT productive. It seems like the easiest problem in the world to solve for them, give people back some time in their day, enjoy life more, and get more productivity. That said, Keynes predicted we’d have a 20 hour work week by now in the US, and when exactly does that happen.

WilliamEdward 7y ago
When you become conscious of the fact that your employers are not going to graciously give a 20 hour work week to you and you need to take it for yourself.
zeroonetwothree 7y ago
To be fair, if you wanted the standard of living of the 1930s you can achieve that with 20 hours/week of minimum wage. Average income was around $8-9k at that time.
- api 7y ago
  True if you add that you won't likely be able to live in certain cities or expensive towns. But that leaves most of the country. There are some really beautiful places you can live that are not expensive. Check out the Appalachians if you like to live in a misty postcard, and the stereotypes are largely false. Your neighbors are more likely to be artists or organic farmers than the characters from Deliverance. (I used to live in Asheville which is moderately expensive but you don't have to go far from town and it gets cheap.)
- jotm 7y ago
  If you work remotely and/or live in some small village. Otherwise, that's not enough to pay electricity, rent, food and transportation. Minimum wage is far behind the costs of even basic living (in most of the developed world, anyway).
TrackerFF 7y ago
Japan suffers from a cultural problem, mainly that you're judged by how much you work. It's like the Puritan work ethic, where idleness and not working was seen as sin. The penalization or reward curve seems to be highly asymmetric. If you work hard, you're barely getting rewarded - it's what is expected. But if you slack even a bit, you'll get penalized harshly. This leads to fear-driven management, where employees will put up with all kinds of bullshit, as well as just looking like they're working, in fear of getting sacked or limiting their career opportunities.

quotemstr 7y ago

Go ahead: implement a four day work week. I'll keep working five or six days per week like I do now, and consequently, I'll look more productive and impactful compared to the do-as-you're-told types. You can't actually stop people in a creative profession from working, and tech generally evaluates people on their impact. What do you think will happen?

nefitty 7y ago
It is good to be a hard worker. It is also good to spend time on activities that help us achieve our own goals, instead of the goals of an organization. That's great that you're proud of how much you work. Along with their work, some other people are proud of their parenting, their hobbies, their friendships, etc.
- quotemstr 7y ago
  > other people are proud of their parenting, their hobbies, their friendships, etc. People can choose to work more or less. But if someone chooses to work less, he forfeits the right to complain about being paid less and being promoted slower compared to people who work more. The proposed four day work week would increase this disparity between hard workers and "default workers" who work as much as they're told to work, then do other things, some of which you just mentioned. Many people already find vaguely unjust, though it isn't.
  - WilliamEdward 7y ago
    Consider that work-hours are not necessarily the only measure of productivity. If i work 100% and do it in 4 days and you work 100% and do it in 6 days, you're the loser in this scenario.

ThomPete 7y ago

One month is not enough to check whether this works. Furthermore it's important to check for the Hawthorn Effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect

basugasubaku 7y ago

It looks like this was a sales department. The metric of productivity was sales per employee according to the tweeted image and the Nikkei article. The sources also mention better use of meeting time via an increase in shorter meetings and teleconferences.

opencl 7y ago

I wonder how many hours per day these people are working. With Japanese corporate culture a 4 day workweek could still easily be 50+ hours.

crca 7y ago

I work for a non-FAANG Fortune 100 company that just implemented a 4/10 schedule after being 9/80 for a number of years. These are the perfect kinds of symbiotic moves where everyone benefits - employees get more time for their lives, employers save operating costs, and the environment saves a day of commuting from thousands of people.

imafish 7y ago
Can you elaborate on what 4/10 and 9/80 means?
- bpodgursky 7y ago
  Work 10 hours a day M-Thu but get Friday off, or get every other Friday off, respectively.

colanderman 7y ago

Does anyone know whether this is 40% daily or weekly productivity? If it's daily, that's only a 12% weekly boost (still good! but less breathtaking). If it's weekly, that's an amazing 75% daily boost!

baxtr 7y ago

I honestly wonder what most people would do with the extra time? Side projects? Hobbies? Family?

david-gpu 7y ago
I've worked 4-days/week for a year and on Fridays I do the same sort of things as Saturday and Sunday. Initially I thought it would be a special "hobby day" but the reality of being a parent took over.

sabujp 7y ago

apparently from comments below this was a sales metric and had nothing to do with software engineering. However many colleagues have so much vacation time built up that if they don't take one three day weekend a month they stop accruing vacation

ISL 7y ago

The 23 percent change in electricity use could largely be explained by the 20 percent reduction in the time people were in the office.

_hn_throw_away 7y ago

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. Weekends offer barely enough time to catch up with chores. There isn't enough time both to catch up and still have fun. I use vacation time to catch up on chores, so that's spent too. I don't want to spend most of my life working. I feel like a slave, and now my youth is almost gone. I don't care if it's a 10hr/4day schedule or a 9hr/4day 8hr/4day with less pay, I want an extra day for myself. I'm an excellent engineer aside from my ADHD quirks, and I'll go anywhere that offers this where I live. My own startup (I almost have the capital for a long runway) will be 9hr/4day. Fuck everything about 5 day work weeks.

lukaszkups 7y ago
I really relate to this comment - at some point when I have a family I really doesn't rest on the weekend at all - catching up chores and spending minimal time with kids takes all the energy left - any tips to successfully recharge batteries each week?
- Doxin 7y ago
  I've left a comment to the comment you're replying to[0]. I'll briefly restate it here: seriously look into medication, it has been a life changer for me so far. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21441054 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21441054
Doxin 7y ago
As someone with ADD (essentially ADHD with only the "attention deficit" bit, no hyperactivity) I recognise the feeling. I'm lucky to be in a position where I can work 4 days a week, but I'd still barely have energy left for fun activities. I've now been on methylphenidate (also known as ritalin) for about a month and good god that has made a difference for me. When I get home I can get right into hobby projects or chores instead of just deflating on the couch until bedtime. I guess what I'm trying to say is, have you tried looking into medication? I know a lot of people are vehemently against medicating ADHD issues, I was pretty much one of them. The thing is you can totally try it out and if it doesn't work for you or has side-effects you'd rather not deal with you can stop easily enough. I've heard plenty of ritalin horror stories, but a lot of those start making sense once you read the list of side effects. You need to be somewhat lucky to not be too affected by them. If you are there's other medication that can be tried. I guess my point in a nutshell is don't suffer if you don't have to. I've spent 25 years suffering with my inability to choose what to focus on, and a simple pill has let me trade that for cold hands and a restless leg. I'd take that deal any day. Speak to your GP and ask what your options are. Worst case you're no worse off than you are now.

hurrdurr2 7y ago

Meanwhile, at my company, our HR has decided to cut sick leave to the CA state mandated 3 days minimum. So now we have people coughing their heads off at work and spreading flu everywhere. How efficient can you be I wonder when you are sick? Yet people seem to take pride in the fact that they are still working while battling an illness. I'm honestly surprised they tried this in Japan which has a super rigid work structure.

someonehere 7y ago

Interviewed at Dolby Labs once. They told me depending on your start date, you get every other Friday off. Someone else may start on a different cycle so they have the opposite Friday off from you. They said Fridays are pretty much a day with no meetings and time to finish projects or tasks. If the following Monday of your Friday off is a holiday, you essentially get a four day weekend.

h1d 7y ago

I work alone in Japan for my own company but boy people work too much I think. Some people reply to my message after midnight and that is someone who is employed and not someone running a company. And some other people message me on Saturday morning and again, that is an employee but the good part is that for the people I know, they don't look unhappy or maybe they're just used to that work hours... I don't think I'll want to work like that if I'm an employee. When I was an employee for the one year in my entire life, I asked for overtime (I was the only person getting it in a company of about a dozen people) and usually worked 9-10 hours for 5 days.

benibela 7y ago

Would you still get a productivity boost, when the workers spent the weekend working on their open source projects?

tai_hn 7y ago

This is a bold statement. I don't think I can get more things done when I take one more day off. Can you? They don't show how they measured their productivity exactly. I also don't think a month trial is good enough to derive the conclusion. Furthermore, there is a chance that other variables affected the result. It's difficult to come to the conclusion through this kind of uncontrollable experiment where you cannot control the variables and constants.