4 ms·

I think your problem is thinking of this council as a "business". If a local council was a business there would be a fire in the basement one Sunday morning.

I think your problem is thinking of this council as a "business". If a local council was a business there would be a fire in the basement one Sunday morning. Follow on - I do a "kind of" 4 day work week at full pay. four full days then 2 hours of wash up on the Friday. Its highly sector dependant to make it work, couldn't possibly work for everyone if we had SLA's to meet.

Danieru 4y ago
> If a local council was a business there would be a fire in the basement one Sunday morning. Sorry I've read this sentence a couple times and I cannot discern the meaning. Perhaps it is a British expression I do not know. Can you elaborate? Why would there be a fire in the basement? Why on one Sunday morning? Why once?
- swarnie 4y ago
  Because that's the best time to burn it down for the insurance money with minimal human cost. My point is its not a business, it doesn't have to make money and if it was held up to the standards of a commercial enterprise you'd have no better solution then to burn it down. This is in response to OP's idea that you need to fulfil some kind of service requirement, or even run an effective service at all.
logifail 4y ago
> I think your problem is thinking of this council as a "business" I wasn't aware I had a problem :) I've been reading about trials of four day weeks for a while[0]. Strangely (or not so strangely) stories like these are always suspiciously light on specifics(!) From [0]: "The trial is based on the 100:80:100 model – 100% of pay for 80% of the time, in exchange for a commitment to maintain 100% productivity" It talks about "an extra day off", but doesn't mention the word Friday. So how do the extra days off get allocated? "We’ll be analysing how employees respond to having an extra day off, in terms of stress and burnout, job and life satisfaction, health, sleep, energy use, travel and many other aspects of life" That article claims a fish and chip shop is participating. If you have retail staff working - say - four days per week instead of five, you obviously need more recruit and pay for additional staff to cover the lost day, or your shop loses an additional day's trading each week. Are they hoping to cook and sell more fish per hour to cover this additional cost due to staff productivity increases? Or convince all customers to purchase the same overall amount of fish and chips each week but to do it over fewer days? Must confess I've never considered how to increase productivity in a fish and chip shop :) [0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jun/06/thousands-workers-worlds-biggest-trial-four-day-week https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jun/06/thousands-w...

Danieru 4y ago

> If a local council was a business there would be a fire in the basement one Sunday morning. Sorry I've read this sentence a couple times and I cannot discern the meaning. Perhaps it is a British expression I do not know. Can you elaborate? Why would there be a fire in the basement? Why on one Sunday morning? Why once?

swarnie 4y ago
Because that's the best time to burn it down for the insurance money with minimal human cost. My point is its not a business, it doesn't have to make money and if it was held up to the standards of a commercial enterprise you'd have no better solution then to burn it down. This is in response to OP's idea that you need to fulfil some kind of service requirement, or even run an effective service at all.

logifail 4y ago

> I think your problem is thinking of this council as a "business" I wasn't aware I had a problem :) I've been reading about trials of four day weeks for a while[0]. Strangely (or not so strangely) stories like these are always suspiciously light on specifics(!) From [0]: "The trial is based on the 100:80:100 model – 100% of pay for 80% of the time, in exchange for a commitment to maintain 100% productivity" It talks about "an extra day off", but doesn't mention the word Friday. So how do the extra days off get allocated? "We’ll be analysing how employees respond to having an extra day off, in terms of stress and burnout, job and life satisfaction, health, sleep, energy use, travel and many other aspects of life" That article claims a fish and chip shop is participating. If you have retail staff working - say - four days per week instead of five, you obviously need more recruit and pay for additional staff to cover the lost day, or your shop loses an additional day's trading each week. Are they hoping to cook and sell more fish per hour to cover this additional cost due to staff productivity increases? Or convince all customers to purchase the same overall amount of fish and chips each week but to do it over fewer days? Must confess I've never considered how to increase productivity in a fish and chip shop :) [0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jun/06/thousands-workers-worlds-biggest-trial-four-day-week https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jun/06/thousands-w...