5 ms·

I still don’t understand the 100% as productive in 80% of the time. The math doesn’t check out there unless the expectation is people are working 10 hr days Mon

by sshah1983 4y ago

I still don’t understand the 100% as productive in 80% of the time. The math doesn’t check out there unless the expectation is people are working 10 hr days Mon-Thurs. Even in that scenario, not everyone has the stamina to execute at that pace and it also makes it hard to recruit anyone with a kid who needs to navigate school dropoffs/pickups etc.

xnorswap 4y ago
People aren't machines, they bend to their environment. Even without crunching extra hours per day, you can be essentially as productive with fewer working days per week if you are more focussed on the days do you do work.
- sshah1983 4y ago
  Agreed but I’ve yet to hear the killer tactic for how a company gets every employee 100% focused 100% of the time. I think there are some roles that end up suffering. Like someone who is a product designer and now has to cram more creativity in fewer hours. Someone who is in inside or outside sales and has less time where they overlap with customers to perform demos and close deals. It may work - it may not work. The penalty for being sick for a day (or your kid being sick for a day) is more drastic too. Although perhaps those folks just use their extra day to catch up. I’m more bullish on remote work than these 4 day a week experiments.
  - xnorswap 4y ago
    100% focussed 100% of the time is a strawman argument set up to fail, there's no killer tactic because it doesn't exist and no-one is arguing it does. You literally don't have to cram in the hours, you can just work less, enjoy a healthier work/life balance and still be productive. To argue otherwise is to suggest that we should all work 6 day weeks. If you accept that working 5 day weeks has benefits over 6 day weeks then why not accept that 4 day weeks could have benefits too?
    - RHSeeger 4y ago
      This is a fair, argument, but... People seem to put forth the argument that "people will work more efficiently if they work less hours" to counter the argument "if less time is being worked, then less work is being done, then costs/prices go up". And, while it may be (and probably is) true that efficiency will go up, it's almost certainly true that overall work will go down (because efficiency will not go up enough to compensate for the loss of work time). Now, the/your argument that the overall loss in work is worth it for the work/life balance benefit is one worth considering. It's just a different point from the one that that less work, overall, will be done, likely resulting in higher costs. I guess another way to look at it might be - Am I willing to earn 10% less in exchange for working 20% less? And, as a reverse example for the 6-day work week - Am I willing to earn 10% more in exchange for working 20% more? For me, at least, the answer is no to both, because I'm comfortable with my 5 day work week. For some people, the answer to one or the other of those is yes.
      - franciscop 4y ago
        > it's almost certainly true that overall work will go down (because efficiency will not go up enough to compensate for the loss of work time) That might be true, or it might not. It depends on how much efficiency goes up and how much buffer time people has, right? In many jobs people spene a non-trivial amount of time reading news, or in FB/Twitter/etc, so it def can be true that removing one hour of news+twitter yields the same productivity.
        RHSeeger 4y ago
        I've seen no compelling evidence to suggest that working fewer hours will raise efficiency enough to result in the same amount of work being done in those fewer hours. It _can_ be true, but it seems unlikely enough (to my intuition) that I'll assume it would not be the case unless someone can put forth a convincing argument/evidence.
        mlyle 4y ago
        I assume you don't quite break even. I really support 4x9, though, for a lot of reasons. It should become a work norm (and 36 hours set as the nominal workweek by government). - I do think productivity will go up some, and the fall in output will be less than 10%. Split the difference, and call it 5%. - Because there will be some fall in output, and because there are some professions where you need butts-in-seats for coverage... I think it will, by reducing the supply of labor, push up the equilibrium price and get more people into skilled work. - It's a hedge against automation reducing demand for labor. - I think we'll recognize a lot of ancillary benefits from reduction of commute times, etc. - It's a massive difference in quality of life.
  - aiisjustanif 4y ago
    > I think there are some roles that end up suffering. Like someone who is a product designer and now has to cram more creativity in fewer hours. I’m sure everyone said similar things moving to work week with 40 hours and 5 days. Nothing magical about it, people still work over when they feel the need to because deadlines are silly in some cases. This is a pilot for a reason. A work week with 32 hours and 4 days does improve the health of people overall, but we will see if it’s the same as 40 hours which also didn’t have merit when it was chosen.
basisword 4y ago
You're assuming people are 100% productive each day currently. If people are told they need to keep hitting the same KPI's etc. or they go back to a 5-day week, you bet they're going to work a bit harder on those 4 days. A bit less news, Facebook, chatting etc and a bit more actual work.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  Also a bit less meetings with no agenda that waste a bunch of time because no one is organized. I have at least one hour meeting every day that could be 30 minutes (or non-existent).
sokoloff 4y ago
Take the counter direction. Imagine there was a push to extend the current normal to a schedule of 6 days of 8 hours each. Would you expect the typical office worker’s weekly production to soar by 20%? I would not.
- truthwhisperer 4y ago
mejutoco 4y ago
One way I make sense of it is that employers are competing for talent. Better working conditions (such as 4 day workweeks) might attract better employees for the same price. This could unlock enough productivity to compensate for the 5th day.
jstx1 4y ago
Plenty of bullshit jobs where your input hardly matters. It's like a thin gas that expands to fill the working week - 20% compression doesn't mean much in that context.
aiisjustanif 4y ago
> also makes it hard to recruit anyone with a kid who needs to navigate school dropoffs/pickups etc. But this is a pilot in a country where over 40% of kids go home and get to school by themselves starting at age 5 [1]. Not to mention we are talking about a continent where many children are independent in terms of mobility to school [2]. Denmark, Spain, Poland, Italy, Czechia, Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Finland, Great Britain, Norway, and the list goes on. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-22570898 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-22570898 [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7731133/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7731133/
matwood 4y ago
Unless people are machines, it's incorrect to strictly equate hours with productivity. What actually happens is there is quite a bit of slack time in the typical day. Going to 4 days/week is applying a forcing function[1] to remove some of this slack time and given it back to employees. I think a better question is how much of this slack time is necessary to reach the current productivity levels, and how much is just...slack? [1] There are a lot of anecdote stories where people have a kid which limits their available time, and suddenly they are more productive than they have ever been during that small time window and get their startup off the ground etc...
danaris 4y ago
In addition to what other people are saying about productivity not being linear: Screw productivity. We, as a society, produce vastly more than enough stuff of all kinds for everyone to live comfortably. Insisting that everyone must continue working a 40-hour week every week forever just because that's the best that could be negotiated the first time workers successfully fought for their rights after the Industrial Revolution is foolishness. Total productivity has skyrocketed since computers came on the scene and helped to streamline millions of different processes. And where have those gains gone? Eaten up by the very wealthy. A 4-day work week is one very small step toward letting us, the regular workers who actually produce all the stuff, genuinely share in the spoils that streamlining created.

xnorswap 4y ago

People aren't machines, they bend to their environment. Even without crunching extra hours per day, you can be essentially as productive with fewer working days per week if you are more focussed on the days do you do work.

sshah1983 4y ago
Agreed but I’ve yet to hear the killer tactic for how a company gets every employee 100% focused 100% of the time. I think there are some roles that end up suffering. Like someone who is a product designer and now has to cram more creativity in fewer hours. Someone who is in inside or outside sales and has less time where they overlap with customers to perform demos and close deals. It may work - it may not work. The penalty for being sick for a day (or your kid being sick for a day) is more drastic too. Although perhaps those folks just use their extra day to catch up. I’m more bullish on remote work than these 4 day a week experiments.
- xnorswap 4y ago
  100% focussed 100% of the time is a strawman argument set up to fail, there's no killer tactic because it doesn't exist and no-one is arguing it does. You literally don't have to cram in the hours, you can just work less, enjoy a healthier work/life balance and still be productive. To argue otherwise is to suggest that we should all work 6 day weeks. If you accept that working 5 day weeks has benefits over 6 day weeks then why not accept that 4 day weeks could have benefits too?
  - RHSeeger 4y ago
    This is a fair, argument, but... People seem to put forth the argument that "people will work more efficiently if they work less hours" to counter the argument "if less time is being worked, then less work is being done, then costs/prices go up". And, while it may be (and probably is) true that efficiency will go up, it's almost certainly true that overall work will go down (because efficiency will not go up enough to compensate for the loss of work time). Now, the/your argument that the overall loss in work is worth it for the work/life balance benefit is one worth considering. It's just a different point from the one that that less work, overall, will be done, likely resulting in higher costs. I guess another way to look at it might be - Am I willing to earn 10% less in exchange for working 20% less? And, as a reverse example for the 6-day work week - Am I willing to earn 10% more in exchange for working 20% more? For me, at least, the answer is no to both, because I'm comfortable with my 5 day work week. For some people, the answer to one or the other of those is yes.
    - franciscop 4y ago
      > it's almost certainly true that overall work will go down (because efficiency will not go up enough to compensate for the loss of work time) That might be true, or it might not. It depends on how much efficiency goes up and how much buffer time people has, right? In many jobs people spene a non-trivial amount of time reading news, or in FB/Twitter/etc, so it def can be true that removing one hour of news+twitter yields the same productivity.
      - RHSeeger 4y ago
        I've seen no compelling evidence to suggest that working fewer hours will raise efficiency enough to result in the same amount of work being done in those fewer hours. It _can_ be true, but it seems unlikely enough (to my intuition) that I'll assume it would not be the case unless someone can put forth a convincing argument/evidence.
        mlyle 4y ago
        I assume you don't quite break even. I really support 4x9, though, for a lot of reasons. It should become a work norm (and 36 hours set as the nominal workweek by government). - I do think productivity will go up some, and the fall in output will be less than 10%. Split the difference, and call it 5%. - Because there will be some fall in output, and because there are some professions where you need butts-in-seats for coverage... I think it will, by reducing the supply of labor, push up the equilibrium price and get more people into skilled work. - It's a hedge against automation reducing demand for labor. - I think we'll recognize a lot of ancillary benefits from reduction of commute times, etc. - It's a massive difference in quality of life.
- aiisjustanif 4y ago
  > I think there are some roles that end up suffering. Like someone who is a product designer and now has to cram more creativity in fewer hours. I’m sure everyone said similar things moving to work week with 40 hours and 5 days. Nothing magical about it, people still work over when they feel the need to because deadlines are silly in some cases. This is a pilot for a reason. A work week with 32 hours and 4 days does improve the health of people overall, but we will see if it’s the same as 40 hours which also didn’t have merit when it was chosen.

basisword 4y ago

You're assuming people are 100% productive each day currently. If people are told they need to keep hitting the same KPI's etc. or they go back to a 5-day week, you bet they're going to work a bit harder on those 4 days. A bit less news, Facebook, chatting etc and a bit more actual work.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
Also a bit less meetings with no agenda that waste a bunch of time because no one is organized. I have at least one hour meeting every day that could be 30 minutes (or non-existent).

sokoloff 4y ago

Take the counter direction. Imagine there was a push to extend the current normal to a schedule of 6 days of 8 hours each. Would you expect the typical office worker’s weekly production to soar by 20%? I would not.

truthwhisperer 4y ago

mejutoco 4y ago

One way I make sense of it is that employers are competing for talent. Better working conditions (such as 4 day workweeks) might attract better employees for the same price. This could unlock enough productivity to compensate for the 5th day.

jstx1 4y ago

Plenty of bullshit jobs where your input hardly matters. It's like a thin gas that expands to fill the working week - 20% compression doesn't mean much in that context.

aiisjustanif 4y ago

> also makes it hard to recruit anyone with a kid who needs to navigate school dropoffs/pickups etc. But this is a pilot in a country where over 40% of kids go home and get to school by themselves starting at age 5 [1]. Not to mention we are talking about a continent where many children are independent in terms of mobility to school [2]. Denmark, Spain, Poland, Italy, Czechia, Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Finland, Great Britain, Norway, and the list goes on. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-22570898 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-22570898 [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7731133/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7731133/

matwood 4y ago

Unless people are machines, it's incorrect to strictly equate hours with productivity. What actually happens is there is quite a bit of slack time in the typical day. Going to 4 days/week is applying a forcing function[1] to remove some of this slack time and given it back to employees. I think a better question is how much of this slack time is necessary to reach the current productivity levels, and how much is just...slack? [1] There are a lot of anecdote stories where people have a kid which limits their available time, and suddenly they are more productive than they have ever been during that small time window and get their startup off the ground etc...

danaris 4y ago

In addition to what other people are saying about productivity not being linear: Screw productivity. We, as a society, produce vastly more than enough stuff of all kinds for everyone to live comfortably. Insisting that everyone must continue working a 40-hour week every week forever just because that's the best that could be negotiated the first time workers successfully fought for their rights after the Industrial Revolution is foolishness. Total productivity has skyrocketed since computers came on the scene and helped to streamline millions of different processes. And where have those gains gone? Eaten up by the very wealthy. A 4-day work week is one very small step toward letting us, the regular workers who actually produce all the stuff, genuinely share in the spoils that streamlining created.