10 ms·

Belgium approves four-day week

165 points by achow 5y ago

philmcp 5y ago
"In practice this means maintaining a 38-hour working week, with an additional day off compensating for longer work days." Unfortunately it's a compressed 4 day week, instead of a "proper" 4 day work week (i.e. 4 x 8 hour days, e.g. https://4dayweek.io https://4dayweek.io) A step in the right direction however
- krickkrack 5y ago
  As an employer there are plenty of jobs that I would be perfectly fine allowing the employee to work 20% less, as long as they cost me 20% less.
  - jd115 5y ago
    That's literally missing the entire point of it. You already have this now - always had it. There's nothing new or interesting about what you're "proposing". What IS new and interesting is getting employees who work 20% less, AND THEREFORE are 20% more productive (and presumably 20% happier), at the same cost.
    - IshKebab 5y ago
      > You already have this now - always had it. There's nothing new or interesting about what you're "proposing". That's not remotely true. There's a real stigma about part-time work and most employers would just say NEXT! if you said "please can I work 4 days a week for 80% pay?".
      - ghaff 5y ago
        Well, it's not 80% pay given benefits and overhead costs associated with having an employee. Probably more like a 30%+ cut. ADDED: Assuming it really is a 20% cut in productivity which, for office workers, probably isn't the case but would be for many others including white collar jobs like lawyers, doctors, consultants, etc.
        IshKebab 5y ago
        Yeah mean a 15% cut right, because the fixed overheads stay the same? Yeah that's probably why most employers aren't keen on it.
      - thesuitonym 5y ago
        Yes, but the person you're replying to is talking to an employer who wishes they could hire someone to work 80% time for 80% pay, but somehow isn't able to do that (Hint: It's because they don't really want to)
        krickkrack 5y ago
        Employees can and do work part-time. What a silly 'diss' lol.
        hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
        Not as much as they would like to. I'd love to exchange a day for 20% cut, but it's not an option. Nobody will agree to that. Same with my colleagues. We don't need that 20% money but nobody cares. Even now when we're working from home at least a few days a week. It's simply not an option. But thanks to global changes, country by country, this mentality will slowly be changed and finally 4-day week won't be some strange option but a norm.
        thesuitonym 5y ago
        You sure can, and you can enjoy not having health insurance, vacation time, retirement contributions, or anything else that makes working less unbearable.
      - mettamage 5y ago
        It is possible, you need to be at a company where work is viewed as work and the rest of your life as the rest of your life. Not all companies are like this, some companies think that your work is your life. With those companies they'd probably next you. Then again, I'm just n=1.
        IshKebab 5y ago
        Yeah I mean, I've done it for about a year. But we're definitely the lucky ones.
    - krickkrack 5y ago
      Wow... So like magic? Why aren't all successful businesses already doing this if they can get more productivity for less time?
      - onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
        In fairness - there are a lot of studies on how much people actually work in white collar jobs. I don't know of a consensus, but I've seen many studies where >20% of people self report working ~20 hours per week. Many studies like this: https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-average-worker-is-productive-for-this-many-hours.html https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-aver... - say that the average white collar worker only works ~20 hours per week. There is little reason to believe the vast majority of workers can't keep the same work load with less hours. Sure - maybe 20% or your workers get 80% of your work done - and those people actually do work the full 40 hours (or more). But who's to say they won't continue working more than "required"? For non-white collar jobs - particularly service workers - I think this is a completely different story. You can't give the same amount of hour-long massages in 4 days as you can in 5. You can't wait on as many tables or work the cash register for as many hours and so on... The thing is - most of these people are paid hourly - so you just need to find more workers (which currently, at full employment, is hard). If you're trying to push up wages - this seems like it obviously will. I can see why businesses would be against that. But in a world where all wages go up - there's obviously winners AND losers. Not all businesses will be hurt by higher wages. If your labor inputs are a large portion of your COGS and you don't have pricing power - that's bad (traditional restaurants, discount retail). If labor inputs are low - and you do have pricing power (digital services, luxuries) - now you have many more people with higher incomes and more time to buy your products! To me, this seems like it is good for the biggest businesses and lower-end salary workers and bad for the most common small businesses and upper-end salary workers. But I have no clue how this will turn out. I don't think anyone does, really. But I think it's a very exciting experiment we shouldn't be too pessimistic about.
        dahfizz 5y ago
        > I don't know of a consensus, but I've seen many studies where >20% of people self report working ~20 hours per week. > Many studies like this: https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-aver https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-aver... - say that the average white collar worker only works ~20 hours per week. Another way of phrasing this is that people tend to be productive for 50% of the time they spend "working". It's not self evident that people will still be productive for those 20 hours if the work day was shortened. It could just as easily be the case that people will still goof off for 50% of the shortened work day.
    - dahart 5y ago
      The article didn’t make any arguments about increased productivity, it was suggesting that better work-life balance was healthier and helps parents with children. What evidence is there for an increase in productivity when moving from 40 to 32 hours/week? I believe productivity increases have been demonstrated in some cases for hourly reductions when moving from overtime (say, 60 hours/week) down to 40. This is grounded in two parts - the diminishing returns of working more than 40 hours/week, and the fact that above 50 or 60 people start getting too tired and too focused on narrow tasks to make good long-term judgements. But I haven’t seen studies showing what you’re suggesting, which is a complete 100% reversal of productivity from 32 to 40 hours/week. The logical extension, of course, doesn’t work. It’s not possible to work 100% less and therefore be 100% more productive or happier. (I mean, maybe happier, but not more productive, right? ;)) And we already know the delta change in productivity for a given delta change in hours depends heavily on how many absolute hours we’re starting with, and also depends heavily on the job at hand. So is the question about what number of hours gives people peak productivity for a given job? Or peak happiness? Or is this just about making sure employment has reasonable limits, and not even trying to optimize productivity? * Edit: I googled it, and found the story about Microsoft Japan and it’s 4 day work week. I totally remember reading about this a few years ago. Lots of commentary on HN. The claim is a 40% increase when going to a 4 day week. It was measured for only 1 month, and they changed many other aspects (notably, they capped meeting times). Many people pointing out this is likely Hawthorne Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect). Personally, 40% seems completely implausible, which is why I wrote it off and forgot about it. It seems obvious that if that’s true, it means something was going terribly wrong with their 5 day week. Or that this effect isn’t measuring the change in hours at all.
      - renewiltord 5y ago
        I think we can agree that working 100% of the time leads to poor societal outcomes and 0% of the time leads to poor societal outcomes. We probably have some shared view that it’s Laffer-curvish without being sure of the shape. It just seems unlikely to me that 40 hrs is a total system optimum since it was a historical accident. Personally I think it might be 50 hrs/week but it just seems strange that we’d believe that 40 is the peak of this curve.
    - parasense 5y ago
      > You already have this now - always had it. There's nothing new or interesting about what you're "proposing". Where are these rainbow unicorns who produce 20% more value in 80% of the time?
  - bloqs 5y ago
    I think you have misunderstood the reason behind the move towards the 4 day workweek across Europe. It's literally more productive for less hours.
    - krickkrack 5y ago
      If workers were more productive working less hours you wouldn't need the government to do anything - businesses acting in their own interests would do this automatically. The government doesn't know how to run businesses better than the businesses themselves.
      - brthsim 5y ago
      - bloqs 5y ago
        Well many private businesses are already, take MSs pilot recently. Do you know how the 40 hour 5 day week was initially established in the US? The postwar era status quo of people travelling hours each way to their job, then to spend most of it in meetings or in an open plan office (chosen for managerial oversight, not productivity, which is a clue we will come back to) with too much noise to be productive are being challenged (cv19) The research is clear, most white collar workers report much less productive work time compared to their work hours. Reporting and data collection in this ever increasing era of cognitively demanding work is becoming far more accurate. In previous times, people's fear of redundancy has caused false overreach of business hours, and competitive presenteeism. Between this, and micromanagerial institutions like the open plan office, there is plenty of activity that doesn't accurately report productivity up to the business. Assuming the business has perfect information here is the fault. There are forces shaping these standards that are beyond the reach of produtivity, cultural normalisation of unhealthiness is rife. Look at China.
        dahfizz 5y ago
        Assuming that a person will always be productive for X hours a day, regardless of how long they are in the office, is naive. The reality is that people spend some percentage of their time being productive. During the day they take coffee breaks, chat with coworkers, check Twitter, etc. Assume people are productive for 20 hours now. If you reduced the work week to be 20 hours, productivity would go down. There would still be meetings, coffee breaks, etc that eat into those 20 hours. Now people are only productive for, say, 15 hours a week.
  - ThalesX 5y ago
    Is it really a good use of an agile employer's time to come up with linear compensation schemas for the workers? I would be perfectly fine allowing the employee to use the bathroom given it costs me a couple percentage points less...
  - onion2k 5y ago
    As an employer there are plenty of jobs that I would be perfectly fine allowing the employee to work 20% less, as long as they cost me 20% less. The point of the 4 day week is to decouple the link between output and time. Most employers aren't paying people for 5 * 8 hours of their time. They're paying them for "however much of X work you can do in 40 hours". But, and this is the key point, if tech has moved forward to enable people to do "40 hours of X work" in 32 hours then people could work a 4 day week for the same money that they're earning now. For a large number of jobs that absolutely is the case, and people sit around wasting 8 hours a week doing very little because they can get all their work done in less time. Rather than them wasting the time, which doesn't benefit you at all, why not just work 4 days? People get more time for themselves, so they're happier, and you benefit from happier, more motivated staff. Everyone wins.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  Given how many people are working 10x5 right now, it seems like it is a "proper" 4 day week in your parlance.
- marlowe221 5y ago
  Yeah... compressed 4 day weeks do nothing for you if you're a parent. My kids get out of school/daycare at 3:30 pm. That's hard enough to deal with working 8x5 days, especially post-COVID when after school care of any kind is basically unobtainium a this point. I literally cannot work 9 or 10 hour days.
  - sam_lowry_ 5y ago
    You probably have a partner and can arrange for shifts. Part of the deal is about flexible working hours. But yes, it is nowhere as bold as the French 35-hour work week.
    - pipodeclown 5y ago
      In the Netherlands, 36 hour workweeks (many workers doing the 4x9 set up), is becoming more normal. I'm in the financial sector and all of the large banks have a 36 hour workweek.
hatchnyc 5y ago
It seems that with these types of changes, I mean with more and more of the workforce working on schedules that don’t overlap, it is going to become more and more important for business software to run autonomously without anyone there to babysit it, but it seems to me we have been moving in precisely the opposite direction for some time now. Specifically “doing agile” seems to encourage this, I always see lots of supporting infrastructure being skimped on so a new feature can be delivered faster, with some hand wavy plans to fix it in some future sprint.
- RamblingCTO 5y ago
  How on earth is this related to "agile" software/product development? > I always see lots of supporting infrastructure being skimped on so a new feature can be delivered faster That's bad management and has nothing to do with agile. Reserve time for bug fixes (or have fire fighting capabilities) and refactoring, include time for tech tickets. ALWAYS. Plan workload jointly with developers, talk to them regularly. It's that easy.
  - wccrawford 5y ago
    They did put "doing agile" in scare quotes to suggest it isn't really true agile development. They're claiming it, but not actually doing it right.
    - RamblingCTO 5y ago
      Yes, I got that! That's why I used "agile" as well. My first thought was that it might be true what they said because it might be harder to account for said work, but I think in the end it depends on the management style and the priorities. If management and the dev team don't have the right priorities, traditional or agile can't do anything about it. And the technology leader (i.e. a CTO/tech lead etc.) needs to protect devs from pressure and stress of stakeholders and users. You need to foster understanding that developing software takes time and things like proper testing, QA, security, refactoring, updating libs etc. saves you money and allows you to keep the momentum. That's the job of the CTO imho. Also: if you want to move faster, grow your team (and your structures) and see where time is wasted (we don't have a lot of meetings for devs that are mandatory besides demo, sprint planning, retro and standups and all have a max time) and don't cut corners all the time, they are coming back to bite you most of the time. If anyone's interested, I can only recommend "Scrum and XP from the trenches"! /e: sorry for the long text, tl;dr: have the right priorities to produce good software, agile is not the cause, your shitty management is
harles 5y ago
38 hours (the estimated work week) is exactly half of the 996 week (76 hours) of some companies in China. I don’t think that’s healthy, but if I had to bet, I’d pick the 76 hour workers outcompeting their 38 hour counterparts.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- amelius 5y ago
  A race to the bottom it is.
- bla3 5y ago
  Depends on the type of work, surely. If it's menial tasks and labor is plenty, you can afford your workforce continuously burning out, since it's fast to train and easy to replace. It's exploitative, but as long as it makes the market happy... For highly-educated jobs where people need 6 months of onboarding and institutional knowledge matters, it's probably more efficient to reduce churn.
  - jonathonf 5y ago
    > it's probably more efficient to reduce churn That would be lovely. Unfortunately, many places would rather you move job than give you a raise. It's cheaper in their accounts, and that's what (ah) counts.
    - IMTDb 5y ago
      You are living under the assumption that giving a raise would prevent churn. In many cases it does not work like that, just reading the comments in this thread shows that many people would be OK earning less if that meant working part-time. This is consistent with many studies showing that above a certain level of revenues, money matters less and less, while free time matters more and more. Since training is expensive, what companies are looking for are people that are willing to work more so that those costs are divided amongst more working hours. And they notice that paying more does not translate in people working more, for the reasons outlined above. A equilibrium is reached when people work the amount that they need to reach a certain comfort level then switch to looking for more free time.
baybal2 5y ago
UAE switched to 36 hours workweek in January
- Loic 5y ago
  Only for the UAE Government and Federal entities. Do not worry, the construction workers together with all the foreigner workforce will continue working 70h+ per week.
  - parkerduckworth 5y ago
    This was the hardest part about being in the country. Couldn’t enjoy the novelty of Abu Dhabi/Dubai because of the absolutely destitute conditions facing the vast majority of the “population”
sAbakumoff 5y ago
I recall times when I worked at the office. Friday was a dead day. No one was interested in doing anything but waiting until 5pm. People were wandering around the office like zombies, having endless coffee-breaks and meaningless chats. I guess that it's quite common situation for office workers, unless they are under strict surveillance and control(f.e. Amazon, EPAM).
- rdsubhas 5y ago
  Yes indeed, I can relate to. But just out of curiosity, if we get used to a 4 day week, will Thursday become the new Friday? (genuine question plz, I have no clue either way)
  - sAbakumoff 5y ago
    Who knows, people are strange creatures. I guess we will find out as more countries embrace 4-days week. In the Netherlands, I hope that the liberal "D66" party will crush the "right-wing" incumbent in the next election, win the majority in the parliament and do something similar to that they did in Belgium.
  - McWobbleston 5y ago
    I think it will in some cases and others it won't. I feel like I would have a hard time making good progress in software if Thursday was a wasted day like Friday often is, but I imagine some people will be able to knock out good progress in 3 days and get back into it the next week
neilsense 5y ago
The decline of the West continues
- qazwse_ 5y ago
  I was feeling grumpy this morning, but this comment made me laugh and brought a smile to my face. Thank you.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
simonebrunozzi 5y ago
Title should be "Belgium approves four-day work week". Without the "work", it is incorrect, even if it could be guessed.
purple_ferret 5y ago
Big Chocolate in shambles
app4soft 5y ago
> Belgium approves four-day week Without mentioning "work" or "job", the title looks like week in Belgium would consist of only 4 days now: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday.
- stronglikedan 5y ago
  Makes sense. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are the new weekend. ;-)
  - app4soft 5y ago
    > Friday, Saturday, and Sunday There are no such days in Belgium anymore.
sylware 5y ago
for instance: if the medical staff is at 3 'days a week', this should make them work better because with less fatigue. It means there will be a need of more medical staff, probably 2x. Then once a pandemic hits like corona, if the infrastructure was properly sized, that should help a lot to handle the blow. Ofc, this is very foreign to all current running economy models.
PeterStuer 5y ago
For context, the workweek was 38 a week in Belgium already. The only difference is you can officially spread it over 4 days instead of 5. In IT it makes a real difference as it wiil change from a de facto 50h to 40h. ( You work 50 h but are only allowed to put 38h on the official time-sheet)

165 points by achow 5y ago

"In practice this means maintaining a 38-hour working week, with an additional day off compensating for longer work days." Unfortunately it's a compressed 4 day week, instead of a "proper" 4 day work week (i.e. 4 x 8 hour days, e.g. https://4dayweek.io https://4dayweek.io) A step in the right direction however

krickkrack 5y ago
As an employer there are plenty of jobs that I would be perfectly fine allowing the employee to work 20% less, as long as they cost me 20% less.
- jd115 5y ago
  That's literally missing the entire point of it. You already have this now - always had it. There's nothing new or interesting about what you're "proposing". What IS new and interesting is getting employees who work 20% less, AND THEREFORE are 20% more productive (and presumably 20% happier), at the same cost.
  - IshKebab 5y ago
    > You already have this now - always had it. There's nothing new or interesting about what you're "proposing". That's not remotely true. There's a real stigma about part-time work and most employers would just say NEXT! if you said "please can I work 4 days a week for 80% pay?".
    - ghaff 5y ago
      Well, it's not 80% pay given benefits and overhead costs associated with having an employee. Probably more like a 30%+ cut. ADDED: Assuming it really is a 20% cut in productivity which, for office workers, probably isn't the case but would be for many others including white collar jobs like lawyers, doctors, consultants, etc.
      - IshKebab 5y ago
        Yeah mean a 15% cut right, because the fixed overheads stay the same? Yeah that's probably why most employers aren't keen on it.
    - thesuitonym 5y ago
      Yes, but the person you're replying to is talking to an employer who wishes they could hire someone to work 80% time for 80% pay, but somehow isn't able to do that (Hint: It's because they don't really want to)
      - krickkrack 5y ago
        Employees can and do work part-time. What a silly 'diss' lol.
        hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
        Not as much as they would like to. I'd love to exchange a day for 20% cut, but it's not an option. Nobody will agree to that. Same with my colleagues. We don't need that 20% money but nobody cares. Even now when we're working from home at least a few days a week. It's simply not an option. But thanks to global changes, country by country, this mentality will slowly be changed and finally 4-day week won't be some strange option but a norm.
        thesuitonym 5y ago
        You sure can, and you can enjoy not having health insurance, vacation time, retirement contributions, or anything else that makes working less unbearable.
    - mettamage 5y ago
      It is possible, you need to be at a company where work is viewed as work and the rest of your life as the rest of your life. Not all companies are like this, some companies think that your work is your life. With those companies they'd probably next you. Then again, I'm just n=1.
      - IshKebab 5y ago
        Yeah I mean, I've done it for about a year. But we're definitely the lucky ones.
  - krickkrack 5y ago
    Wow... So like magic? Why aren't all successful businesses already doing this if they can get more productivity for less time?
    - onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
      In fairness - there are a lot of studies on how much people actually work in white collar jobs. I don't know of a consensus, but I've seen many studies where >20% of people self report working ~20 hours per week. Many studies like this: https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-average-worker-is-productive-for-this-many-hours.html https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-aver... - say that the average white collar worker only works ~20 hours per week. There is little reason to believe the vast majority of workers can't keep the same work load with less hours. Sure - maybe 20% or your workers get 80% of your work done - and those people actually do work the full 40 hours (or more). But who's to say they won't continue working more than "required"? For non-white collar jobs - particularly service workers - I think this is a completely different story. You can't give the same amount of hour-long massages in 4 days as you can in 5. You can't wait on as many tables or work the cash register for as many hours and so on... The thing is - most of these people are paid hourly - so you just need to find more workers (which currently, at full employment, is hard). If you're trying to push up wages - this seems like it obviously will. I can see why businesses would be against that. But in a world where all wages go up - there's obviously winners AND losers. Not all businesses will be hurt by higher wages. If your labor inputs are a large portion of your COGS and you don't have pricing power - that's bad (traditional restaurants, discount retail). If labor inputs are low - and you do have pricing power (digital services, luxuries) - now you have many more people with higher incomes and more time to buy your products! To me, this seems like it is good for the biggest businesses and lower-end salary workers and bad for the most common small businesses and upper-end salary workers. But I have no clue how this will turn out. I don't think anyone does, really. But I think it's a very exciting experiment we shouldn't be too pessimistic about.
      - dahfizz 5y ago
        > I don't know of a consensus, but I've seen many studies where >20% of people self report working ~20 hours per week. > Many studies like this: https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-aver https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-aver... - say that the average white collar worker only works ~20 hours per week. Another way of phrasing this is that people tend to be productive for 50% of the time they spend "working". It's not self evident that people will still be productive for those 20 hours if the work day was shortened. It could just as easily be the case that people will still goof off for 50% of the shortened work day.
  - dahart 5y ago
    The article didn’t make any arguments about increased productivity, it was suggesting that better work-life balance was healthier and helps parents with children. What evidence is there for an increase in productivity when moving from 40 to 32 hours/week? I believe productivity increases have been demonstrated in some cases for hourly reductions when moving from overtime (say, 60 hours/week) down to 40. This is grounded in two parts - the diminishing returns of working more than 40 hours/week, and the fact that above 50 or 60 people start getting too tired and too focused on narrow tasks to make good long-term judgements. But I haven’t seen studies showing what you’re suggesting, which is a complete 100% reversal of productivity from 32 to 40 hours/week. The logical extension, of course, doesn’t work. It’s not possible to work 100% less and therefore be 100% more productive or happier. (I mean, maybe happier, but not more productive, right? ;)) And we already know the delta change in productivity for a given delta change in hours depends heavily on how many absolute hours we’re starting with, and also depends heavily on the job at hand. So is the question about what number of hours gives people peak productivity for a given job? Or peak happiness? Or is this just about making sure employment has reasonable limits, and not even trying to optimize productivity? * Edit: I googled it, and found the story about Microsoft Japan and it’s 4 day work week. I totally remember reading about this a few years ago. Lots of commentary on HN. The claim is a 40% increase when going to a 4 day week. It was measured for only 1 month, and they changed many other aspects (notably, they capped meeting times). Many people pointing out this is likely Hawthorne Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect). Personally, 40% seems completely implausible, which is why I wrote it off and forgot about it. It seems obvious that if that’s true, it means something was going terribly wrong with their 5 day week. Or that this effect isn’t measuring the change in hours at all.
    - renewiltord 5y ago
      I think we can agree that working 100% of the time leads to poor societal outcomes and 0% of the time leads to poor societal outcomes. We probably have some shared view that it’s Laffer-curvish without being sure of the shape. It just seems unlikely to me that 40 hrs is a total system optimum since it was a historical accident. Personally I think it might be 50 hrs/week but it just seems strange that we’d believe that 40 is the peak of this curve.
  - parasense 5y ago
    > You already have this now - always had it. There's nothing new or interesting about what you're "proposing". Where are these rainbow unicorns who produce 20% more value in 80% of the time?
- bloqs 5y ago
  I think you have misunderstood the reason behind the move towards the 4 day workweek across Europe. It's literally more productive for less hours.
  - krickkrack 5y ago
    If workers were more productive working less hours you wouldn't need the government to do anything - businesses acting in their own interests would do this automatically. The government doesn't know how to run businesses better than the businesses themselves.
    - brthsim 5y ago
    - bloqs 5y ago
      Well many private businesses are already, take MSs pilot recently. Do you know how the 40 hour 5 day week was initially established in the US? The postwar era status quo of people travelling hours each way to their job, then to spend most of it in meetings or in an open plan office (chosen for managerial oversight, not productivity, which is a clue we will come back to) with too much noise to be productive are being challenged (cv19) The research is clear, most white collar workers report much less productive work time compared to their work hours. Reporting and data collection in this ever increasing era of cognitively demanding work is becoming far more accurate. In previous times, people's fear of redundancy has caused false overreach of business hours, and competitive presenteeism. Between this, and micromanagerial institutions like the open plan office, there is plenty of activity that doesn't accurately report productivity up to the business. Assuming the business has perfect information here is the fault. There are forces shaping these standards that are beyond the reach of produtivity, cultural normalisation of unhealthiness is rife. Look at China.
      - dahfizz 5y ago
        Assuming that a person will always be productive for X hours a day, regardless of how long they are in the office, is naive. The reality is that people spend some percentage of their time being productive. During the day they take coffee breaks, chat with coworkers, check Twitter, etc. Assume people are productive for 20 hours now. If you reduced the work week to be 20 hours, productivity would go down. There would still be meetings, coffee breaks, etc that eat into those 20 hours. Now people are only productive for, say, 15 hours a week.
- ThalesX 5y ago
  Is it really a good use of an agile employer's time to come up with linear compensation schemas for the workers? I would be perfectly fine allowing the employee to use the bathroom given it costs me a couple percentage points less...
- onion2k 5y ago
  As an employer there are plenty of jobs that I would be perfectly fine allowing the employee to work 20% less, as long as they cost me 20% less. The point of the 4 day week is to decouple the link between output and time. Most employers aren't paying people for 5 * 8 hours of their time. They're paying them for "however much of X work you can do in 40 hours". But, and this is the key point, if tech has moved forward to enable people to do "40 hours of X work" in 32 hours then people could work a 4 day week for the same money that they're earning now. For a large number of jobs that absolutely is the case, and people sit around wasting 8 hours a week doing very little because they can get all their work done in less time. Rather than them wasting the time, which doesn't benefit you at all, why not just work 4 days? People get more time for themselves, so they're happier, and you benefit from happier, more motivated staff. Everyone wins.
HWR_14 5y ago
Given how many people are working 10x5 right now, it seems like it is a "proper" 4 day week in your parlance.
marlowe221 5y ago
Yeah... compressed 4 day weeks do nothing for you if you're a parent. My kids get out of school/daycare at 3:30 pm. That's hard enough to deal with working 8x5 days, especially post-COVID when after school care of any kind is basically unobtainium a this point. I literally cannot work 9 or 10 hour days.
- sam_lowry_ 5y ago
  You probably have a partner and can arrange for shifts. Part of the deal is about flexible working hours. But yes, it is nowhere as bold as the French 35-hour work week.
  - pipodeclown 5y ago
    In the Netherlands, 36 hour workweeks (many workers doing the 4x9 set up), is becoming more normal. I'm in the financial sector and all of the large banks have a 36 hour workweek.

hatchnyc 5y ago

It seems that with these types of changes, I mean with more and more of the workforce working on schedules that don’t overlap, it is going to become more and more important for business software to run autonomously without anyone there to babysit it, but it seems to me we have been moving in precisely the opposite direction for some time now. Specifically “doing agile” seems to encourage this, I always see lots of supporting infrastructure being skimped on so a new feature can be delivered faster, with some hand wavy plans to fix it in some future sprint.

RamblingCTO 5y ago
How on earth is this related to "agile" software/product development? > I always see lots of supporting infrastructure being skimped on so a new feature can be delivered faster That's bad management and has nothing to do with agile. Reserve time for bug fixes (or have fire fighting capabilities) and refactoring, include time for tech tickets. ALWAYS. Plan workload jointly with developers, talk to them regularly. It's that easy.
- wccrawford 5y ago
  They did put "doing agile" in scare quotes to suggest it isn't really true agile development. They're claiming it, but not actually doing it right.
  - RamblingCTO 5y ago
    Yes, I got that! That's why I used "agile" as well. My first thought was that it might be true what they said because it might be harder to account for said work, but I think in the end it depends on the management style and the priorities. If management and the dev team don't have the right priorities, traditional or agile can't do anything about it. And the technology leader (i.e. a CTO/tech lead etc.) needs to protect devs from pressure and stress of stakeholders and users. You need to foster understanding that developing software takes time and things like proper testing, QA, security, refactoring, updating libs etc. saves you money and allows you to keep the momentum. That's the job of the CTO imho. Also: if you want to move faster, grow your team (and your structures) and see where time is wasted (we don't have a lot of meetings for devs that are mandatory besides demo, sprint planning, retro and standups and all have a max time) and don't cut corners all the time, they are coming back to bite you most of the time. If anyone's interested, I can only recommend "Scrum and XP from the trenches"! /e: sorry for the long text, tl;dr: have the right priorities to produce good software, agile is not the cause, your shitty management is

harles 5y ago

38 hours (the estimated work week) is exactly half of the 996 week (76 hours) of some companies in China. I don’t think that’s healthy, but if I had to bet, I’d pick the 76 hour workers outcompeting their 38 hour counterparts.

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amelius 5y ago
A race to the bottom it is.
bla3 5y ago
Depends on the type of work, surely. If it's menial tasks and labor is plenty, you can afford your workforce continuously burning out, since it's fast to train and easy to replace. It's exploitative, but as long as it makes the market happy... For highly-educated jobs where people need 6 months of onboarding and institutional knowledge matters, it's probably more efficient to reduce churn.
- jonathonf 5y ago
  > it's probably more efficient to reduce churn That would be lovely. Unfortunately, many places would rather you move job than give you a raise. It's cheaper in their accounts, and that's what (ah) counts.
  - IMTDb 5y ago
    You are living under the assumption that giving a raise would prevent churn. In many cases it does not work like that, just reading the comments in this thread shows that many people would be OK earning less if that meant working part-time. This is consistent with many studies showing that above a certain level of revenues, money matters less and less, while free time matters more and more. Since training is expensive, what companies are looking for are people that are willing to work more so that those costs are divided amongst more working hours. And they notice that paying more does not translate in people working more, for the reasons outlined above. A equilibrium is reached when people work the amount that they need to reach a certain comfort level then switch to looking for more free time.

baybal2 5y ago

UAE switched to 36 hours workweek in January

Loic 5y ago
Only for the UAE Government and Federal entities. Do not worry, the construction workers together with all the foreigner workforce will continue working 70h+ per week.
- parkerduckworth 5y ago
  This was the hardest part about being in the country. Couldn’t enjoy the novelty of Abu Dhabi/Dubai because of the absolutely destitute conditions facing the vast majority of the “population”

sAbakumoff 5y ago

I recall times when I worked at the office. Friday was a dead day. No one was interested in doing anything but waiting until 5pm. People were wandering around the office like zombies, having endless coffee-breaks and meaningless chats. I guess that it's quite common situation for office workers, unless they are under strict surveillance and control(f.e. Amazon, EPAM).

rdsubhas 5y ago
Yes indeed, I can relate to. But just out of curiosity, if we get used to a 4 day week, will Thursday become the new Friday? (genuine question plz, I have no clue either way)
- sAbakumoff 5y ago
  Who knows, people are strange creatures. I guess we will find out as more countries embrace 4-days week. In the Netherlands, I hope that the liberal "D66" party will crush the "right-wing" incumbent in the next election, win the majority in the parliament and do something similar to that they did in Belgium.
- McWobbleston 5y ago
  I think it will in some cases and others it won't. I feel like I would have a hard time making good progress in software if Thursday was a wasted day like Friday often is, but I imagine some people will be able to knock out good progress in 3 days and get back into it the next week

neilsense 5y ago

The decline of the West continues

qazwse_ 5y ago
I was feeling grumpy this morning, but this comment made me laugh and brought a smile to my face. Thank you.

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simonebrunozzi 5y ago

Title should be "Belgium approves four-day work week". Without the "work", it is incorrect, even if it could be guessed.

purple_ferret 5y ago

Big Chocolate in shambles

app4soft 5y ago

> Belgium approves four-day week Without mentioning "work" or "job", the title looks like week in Belgium would consist of only 4 days now: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday.

stronglikedan 5y ago
Makes sense. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are the new weekend. ;-)
- app4soft 5y ago
  > Friday, Saturday, and Sunday There are no such days in Belgium anymore.

sylware 5y ago

for instance: if the medical staff is at 3 'days a week', this should make them work better because with less fatigue. It means there will be a need of more medical staff, probably 2x. Then once a pandemic hits like corona, if the infrastructure was properly sized, that should help a lot to handle the blow. Ofc, this is very foreign to all current running economy models.

PeterStuer 5y ago

For context, the workweek was 38 a week in Belgium already. The only difference is you can officially spread it over 4 days instead of 5. In IT it makes a real difference as it wiil change from a de facto 50h to 40h. ( You work 50 h but are only allowed to put 38h on the official time-sheet)