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Unilever to try out four-day working week in New Zealand
- cyrrus 6y agoThey should do four work days and then a whole day of pointless zoom calls. Oh wait that’s basically the normal arrangement isn’t it
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kypro 6y agoI'm always sceptical of these proposals. There are no free lunches in economics. Less production will result in less revenue. Companies are only going compensate employees for value of their labour, so less labour will eventually mean less compensation. Perhaps for some reason that I don't quite understand people get more (or an almost equalivent) amount of work done in four days as they do in five, but if not, this is just going to result in lower wages.
- saberience 6y agoI would take a lower wage for four days of work per week.
- 0_____0 6y agoI would happily take 3/5ths of my salary to only work 3 days a week. Yes, I know that productivity doesn't scale down cleanly like that. Just sayin'.
- croon 6y agoYeah, you're probably leaving money on the table at that point. You'll likely be >60% effective.
- iso1631 6y agoThe problem with the "knowledge economy" is nobody knows how to measure it. If you sit there making 600 dohickys in a 40 hour week, and reduce hours to 32 hours, and you make more than 480, your productivity has increased. If you make 300, it's gone down. If you work a 6 hour day or 10 hour day instead of an 8 hour day, do you have more or less output as a developer? If you're a sysadmin, what's more productive, the admin who automates everything and sits there on call in case something breaks, but otherwise watching TV or riding a bike, or the person who spends weeks doing repetitive work which looks busy but leads to a far worse outcome?
- thrawn0r 6y agothat's called part-time and where I live (Germany) it's your right as an employee to do it. I currently work 34h/week at Microsoft, fridays off. Instead of 40h/week 5day week. I threw in 2 extra hours per week because you end up checking your mails, going on a late night call w/ PST colleagues regularly anyways. Worst thing is to tell yourself you work 30h/week and get payed for it and then end up working 35-38 hours.
- lnsru 6y agoThere is no right for sure, just Microsoft is big enough and friendly to allow such model. Big Corp I work for was extremely hostile towards my intention to reduce work hours to 32 weekly. After European HQ intervention it happened, I made some enemies during the process. And when third of the group left this company I was forced to do 40 hours again.
- dtech 6y agoWork doesn't scale linearly. If you'd work 7 days a week for 14 hours for a year you'd not get 3 times as much done as someone working a standard 40-hour week for a year.
- saiya-jin 6y agoDepends on line of work - ie in software development, definitely not. In factory working on some conveyor belt, definitely. You will probably collapse from overwork at some point though
- Jedd 6y ago> I'm always sceptical of these proposals. At the risk of sounding trite, I suspect a hundred years ago some people were wary of the 5 day week too, and yet here we are, for the most part, enjoying <sic> the arrangement of two days off per week. > Less production will result in less revenue. I gather the intent is that there won't be 'less production', and consequently won't be less revenue. And/or perhaps the reduction in production won't be linearly correlated with the reduction in revenue. > Companies are only going compensate employees for value of their labour, so less labour will eventually mean less compensation. As with any large multi-national organisation, examining the remuneration of the exec layer may reveal some disparities with how profit is shared, and there may be some interesting options to explore there. > Perhaps for some reason that I don't quite understand people get more (or an almost equalivent) amount of work done in four days as they do in five, but if not, this is just going to result in lower wages. Consider that Unilever, a company valued at around $150b, likely has people that have already thought out the implications and risks of this plan.
- perfunctory 6y ago> I'm always sceptical of these proposals. Don't be. Working time has been declining for a century (especially in Europe) while GDP grew. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time
- throwawayay02 6y agoThat does not imply there is an inverse causal relationship between working time and GDP, perhaps if the working hours had kept the same the GDP would have increased even further.
- nicoburns 6y agoPerhaps, but I'd certainly take increased leisure time over increased GDP, and I'm sure I'm far from the only one.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago>Working time has been declining for a century (especially in Europe) while GDP grew. Depends if you're talking per individual or per household.
- NeutronStar 6y agoSource?
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoMuch has been written about the productivity gains of industrialization being erased at the household level when women started working in large numbers. The gist of it is we went from ~40hr a week of work outside the home at the household level to ~80 (obviously those numbers aren't exact because not all households are a married couple and the are people who are self employed, etc, etc). But obviously the home stuff is still getting done so the net amount of work being done is increased (less productivity gains from technology). Just google "women in the workforce macroeconomic impact" or something like that. Whether this is a net positive or net negative is basically boils down to whether you think people are better served working outside the home or better served doing household things. Also, all your comments are dead by default. You might want to make a new account.
- jrockway 6y agoDo you think that people are spending all 40 hours of their workweek working on the most important task to increase revenue? My theory, at least with software engineering, is that we all struggle with burnout. You can spend 40 hours "in the office" per week, but as you get burned out, the amount of value you add in those hours decreases. If you take a day where you don't open Slack or think about work, then you reset some of that burnout, and your next 32 hours will be significantly more productive than 40 would have been. (You can probably measure it sometime. Look at the 40 hours before someone goes on a two week vacation, and look at the 40 hours immediately after that vacation.) This isn't data, but my team has one person taking every Friday off. We do Thursday-Thursday oncall shifts, and outgoing oncall takes Friday off. I haven't noticed any change in productivity from myself or our team since we've implemented this policy. One person-day per week doesn't matter much; there is probably some tiny and low priority task that doesn't get done as a result. But the important stuff keeps happening, and the team is in a better mental state the rest of the time. I don't think that 32 hours of software engineering per week would look a lot different than 40 hours of software engineering per week, averaged on the scale of months or years. 40 is an arbitrary number that has nothing to do with the mechanics of thinking about software, or even the typing-in of software. It's probably worth another look. (I have no idea how it translates to other fields.)
- dbbk 6y agoHumans cannot sustain focus and productivity for extended periods of time. At 40 hours you're in diminishing returns.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago>Less production will result in less revenue. If you visit any Unilever factory you will find they are heavily automated. They really don't need many staff to run. The value creation in these sort of businesses has been shifting to knowledge workers for some time now. It would be foolish if Unilever and similar companies didn't start questioning all their traditional working practices.
- bawolff 6y ago> There are no free lunches in economics. Less production will result in less revenue. Ironically, the free lunch, is an actual example of a free lunch in economics that does exist (The free lunch was in olden days, where bars would provide a free lunch. This endeared it to its customer base driving traffic back for evening drinks. The cost of the free lunch was much less than the profit from the extra alcohol sales, resulting in $$$ for the bar) As far as a 4 day work week goes, there are tons of factors. Maybe the worker is happier with lower wages and more time off (i could make more money if i worked 80 hours a week, but i don't because the cost to me is more than the value of the extra mo ney). Maybe people have similar levels of production for 4 day work weeks. Maybe there's not enough work to employ everyone for 5 days but is enough for 4 and they think that is a better trade-off than laying peolle off. Maybe 4 day work week is non-monentary compensation that allows the employer to attract better talent. Etc.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoHa! "Compensate for the value of their labor"! Ha! If Americans were compensated for the value of their labor, the minimum wage would be around $28/hr. Labor is paid the 'going rate'. Whatever the employer can get away with. That's all. Btw the work week in America used to be 6 days, 12 hours a day. Went to 5x8 - didn't change pay much.
- sjg007 6y agoAnyone live in NZ? I want to move there. How does it compare vs the US or UK?
- dustinmoris 6y agoCompare in which terms? The country consists of two islands, the North and South. The North is warmer and the South colder, especially when you go to the South of the South island. New Zealand is extremely diverse in nature, you have everything from tropical jungles, to sand dunes, volcanoes, glaciers and amazing mountains. The North island is more populated than the South, but in comparison to the US or UK the whole of New Zealand is very sparsely populated. The country has more sheep than human and is geographically extremely isolated when you think that the closest neighbour is Australia which is a 4 hour flight and even Australia is extremely isolated when you compare it to an international melting pot like the UK. Like with everything in life this has pros and cons. Overall it's a beautiful place to be, stable and good economy, great work/life balance, amazing outdoor opportunities and a friendly culture. If New Zealand wasn't so far away from everyone else then I'd consider moving there myself, but not being able to quickly jump on a two hour flight to see old friends and family is a huge problem, especially when people get older they seem to value their relationship to friends and family increasingly more.
- nopzor 6y agoI agree with you on the melting pot comment, but (pre covid) jet age travel makes the whole 'isolation' point somewhat moot in my mind. you can be on a direct flight from Aukland to eg. San Fran that takes ~12 hours. is that really that much different than the ~9 hours it takes to go from eg. London to San Fran? Maybe I just like travel (and airplanes) ;-)
- telesilla 6y agoWhen you have a 2-week mandatory quarantine in Australia and NZ it makes the concept of easy travel a bit stretched. It's really shown how isolated they are.
- codecamper 6y agoI mean what does anyone do at Unilever? Maybe consider a 1 day work week?
- perfunctory 6y agoHack, according to Keynes we are supposed to be working 15-hour weeks by now. Four-day week is well overdue. http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
- runawaybottle 6y agoI feel like the blue collar economy is still dictating the reality of the white collar economy. They work service hours where you have to literally be somewhere for a shift. That is what is defining the standard for other types of work in a misguided fashion. It took a global pandemic to have companies come to their senses (by sheer force) to make remote work a first class citizen. Change is too slow because we’re tied to antiquated concepts. Why are some professions doing a shift? Does your software open at 8am and then close up for the night at 5pm? If so, then yeah you need shift workers. If not, then please, just stop it.
- benibela 6y agoMany libraries (the book kind) turn their webpage catalogue off for the night and turn it back on in the morning
- tokai 6y agoNever heard of this. Could you give an example of a library that does this?
- benibela 6y agoThis one in Germany: https://webopac.stadtbibliothek-aachen.de/libero/WebOpac.cls/ https://webopac.stadtbibliothek-aachen.de/libero/WebOpac.cls... And probably all that use such a webopac system
- tokai 6y agoah interesting. Up here in DK its been the opposite the last decade. With patrons being able to access the physical library out of hours.
- blisterpeanuts 6y agoThis is hardly a significant trial. Unilever said all 81 staff members at its offices across New Zealand will be able to participate in the trial... Only 81 possible candidates, and not all of them might choose to participate. I'd be curious to see the results of a trial involving thousands of employees. Some subset of 81, though... almost meaningless. There's a tremendous inertia when it comes to work weeks. The five-day is locked in pretty firmly in the developed world, and a company that tries to change that risks getting out of synch with suppliers, subcontractors, and partners. "Today's Thursday. Our office is closed on Fridays, so we'll have to schedule that call for Tuesday, because one of our suppliers is closed on Mondays." I mean, they can try it, and employees might like the extra time off, but it might well slow things down and ultimately result in commensurately lower salaries and bonuses.
- Jedd 6y ago> I'd be curious to see the results of a trial involving thousands of employees. Perhaps you could run one at your company? Absent that experiment, this is the one that Unilever is running for everyone in their offices within one country for a full year. Consider the wonderful Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics [1] and how it applies to any kind of experiment or well-intentioned initiative, when presented to 'people that know better'. > The five-day is locked in pretty firmly in the developed world, and a company that tries to change that risks getting out of synch with suppliers, subcontractors, and partners. "Today's Thursday. Our office is closed on Fridays, so we'll have to schedule that call for Tuesday, because one of our suppliers is closed on Mondays." Well, a) just because it's common doesn't mean it's good, or that it's still relevant, or that it's healthy, or that it's ineluctable. b) there's no suggestion with ANY of these trials, or any organisation already offering part-time work for their staff, that they shutdown entirely for one or two days per week - rather, their workforce is spread over the (for now, common in the west) five weekdays, with varying personnel engaged. If you think organisations that are looking to reduce working hours for their staff are assuming the company is going to operate on a 4-day week, then you may have misunderstood the intent. [1] https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/ https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...
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- perfunctory 6y agoJust to remind everyone of another, apparently successful, four-day week experiment, also in New Zealand https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/02/no-downside-new-zealand-firm-adopts-four-day-week-after-successful-trial https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/02/no-downside-ne... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-day_week https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-day_week
- stronglikedan 6y ago> “If we end up in a situation where the team is working four extended days then we miss the point of this,” he said. I believe this is lip service. They will still ultimately expect 40 hours of work to be done in 4 days, regardless of what they say now. I'd rather stick to 5-8s, so I have some personal time in the evenings.
- asah 6y agoThis seems counter to the longer trend of knowledge workers coordinating asynchronously and working when focused & inspired. Speaking personally, over the years I probably wasted 10,000 hours... sitting in an office in the late afternoon, waiting for silicon valley traffic to clear enough to go home.
- lallysingh 6y agoIsn't that what HN is for?
- asah 6y agoNo, HN is for compile times and waiting in line at the COVID testing center, 30 minute meetings where the first 29 minutes are spent getting the newbies up the speed and ...
- nomercy400 6y agoI'm surprised this is news. Here in europe you can work 32 hours if you wanted to, but you make 20% less money. Would you work one day less for 20% of your base salary? In terms of reward, this is like a 25% raise. Imagine getting a raise of 25%. I'm interested how much the raises the past ten years were. Is this a big thing, or is this an overdue raise for the past ten years. Will they compensate the lost labor with new hires? If not, you could also see it as Unilever firing 20% of its workforce, and it could indicate something has gone wrong with their business (I know, corona is probably the cause, but what if it is something else). Initiatives to work smarter sound promotional. It sure sounds better than 'our sales people have nothing to do during corona'. Overall, I would be happy to have more free time.
- xupybd 6y agoUnilever if you need a software dev on NZ I'm keen.