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Companies ran an experiment: Pay workers their full salary to work fewer days
- zach_garwood 4y agoI'm reminded of Parkinsons Law: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
- rolenthedeep 4y agoI work at a startup that has mostly unstructured time requirements. The attitude is "as long as you get your work done, work the hours you want in the office or at home" When I get tired and unable to focus, I go home and rest. That might be 2:00 or 7:00. If I go home early, chances are that I'll end up doing more work in the evening. I work as much as I want and am able to, which turns out to be an order of magnitude more work than when I was trapped in 10-12 hour shifts 6 days a week. I find that I'm very rarely "killing time" at work. I'll pop open mastodon for a few minutes now and then, but I've never had to waste multiple hours waiting for my shift to end. If I'm done working, I just leave. If I have a doctor's appointment, I just throw a note in the group chat. At this point, I don't think I could ever go back to a traditional workplace. You'd have to be some kind of idiot to pay people per hour to waste time on their phone just to tick off the requirement of being in a chair for 8 hours in a row. This is just clearly the wrong model for many industries.
- SergeAx 4y agoAs an SWE I know that my brain works on problems 24/7, and not only 9 to 5 Mon-Fri. Lots of times when I stuck with some debugging or corner case or architecture problem - I just put it away and next morning the answer is just there in my head, ready to be typed down. As an engineering manager I can regulary see the same in my reports. Moreover, best ones are doing it on the vacation: coming back they just start typing and don't stop for 2-3 days. Normally typing/thinking cycle is at most 50/50, usually 40/60. There's one exclusion. All said things are not working if an engineer is working for two employers. When COVID mandatory WFH started, I initially thought that some of my direct or indirect reports just can't adapt to it, but it always turned out to be a second job or a personal project. I am 100% sure that 4 day workweek will lead to a lot of people in IT taking second jobs/side gigs, and it will severely impact their performance.
- lapser 4y agoThe arguments against 4-day work weeks are slowly eroding, and I'm here for it.
- yrgulation 4y agoI genuinely think it will be met by the same kind of resistance as remote work. People simply wouldn't know what to do with the new freedom. Some will miss spending more time “socialising at work” while others will complain they feel “useless”. Just watch it happen.
- everdrive 4y agoI’m a bit skeptical of the study, however I’ve long suspected that a lot of what happens at work is simply part of a set of special social expectations, and actually pretty disconnected from productivity.
- ShaneMcGowan 4y agoFrom my personal experience Stress free 5 days > Fire fighting for 4 days
- ntp85 4y agoYeah, but Fire fighting for 4 days > Fire fighting for 5 days.
- cassianoleal 4y agoAlso stress free for 4 days > stress free for 5 days.
- MEMORYC_RRUPTED 4y agoThis won't be valid for everyone, but I'm getting more and more convinced that most (a lot of?) people don't "work" work 40 hours anyway. I'm not even mentally capable of doing 40 intense hours of focussed work. Not saying I don't have other tasks besides coding/thinking in that time, but honestly not for the full slot of time. It just feels to me like some sort of secret we all share and pretend like it's fine, but being honest and just doing the same stuff in say 32 hours and cutting out the cruft in between would be great. Or maybe it's just my add that likes a bit more pressure, I don't know. But what I do know is that, even with a very relaxed employer that allows you to take your time and chill, go workout or play a game for an hour, I can't fully relax or disconnect knowing that I'm expected to do those 40 hours, regardless of how often they say it's fine.
- lucasyvas 4y agoMost remote jobs I've worked at, I can't reach anyone on Friday. Probably not a coincidence. Even years ago when I was in the office, everyone would go on insanely long lunch breaks on Friday instead. If you work an office job, I can assure you that the number of people actually working on Friday is statistically irrelevant.
- vidanay 4y ago"Never buy a car built on a Friday or a Monday."
- thenerdhead 4y agoYou're probably not wrong. The data supports it. > In October, the average workweek for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls was 34.5 hours for the fifth month in a row. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm
- welshwelsh 4y agoThat doesn't mean they actually work for 34.5 hours, that's just how long they get paid for. A UK company did a study which showed the average office worker, who is in the office 40 hours a week, is only productive for less than 3 hours a day. https://www.vouchercloud.com/resources/office-worker-productivity https://www.vouchercloud.com/resources/office-worker-product... I would guess the average workweek, only counting the time people are actually productive, is 10-15 hours a week. The rest of the time people waste procrastinating, posting on social media etc.
- 5350-uiop-1130 4y agowhy would a company agree to pay the same salary for fewer hours of custody? it reminds me of the macchiavelli quote: > “How we live is so different from how we ought to live that he who studies what ought to be done rather than what is done will learn the way to his downfall rather than to his preservation.” productivity study is interesting but that's not how the real world incentives are aligned.
- socialismisok 4y agoBecause the workers produce as much (or more) in that arrangement.
- 5350-uiop-1130 4y agomore is never enough in the capitalist system
- erinaceousjones 4y agoThis makes the assumption that capitalism exists in a vacuum: It doesn't. Companies aren't *always* trying to simply optimise for financial growth at all times. They're made of humans, some of whom aren't necessarily megacapitalists.
- Octoth0rpe 4y agobut more is still, well, more. So, it's still a better deal for the company. Maybe we haven't found the optimal point, but it definitely doesn't appear to be 40hours (or at least, not 8 * 5).
- PM_me_your_math 4y ago[flagged]
- socialismisok 4y agoThis is objectively false. Did you mean to say under Stalinist systems?
- thenerdhead 4y agoWhat’s interesting to me is that I’ve seen many colleagues and general sentiment towards using your own time off to make work sustainable in this fashion of 4 day work weeks. They sacrifice the ability to disconnect from work with regular 1-2 week vacations however. Also the increase of sabbatical years tends to show just how unsustainable this can be over a long period. Especially in a stressful position. I don’t think productivity is the right word to use. I would say efficiency is better. Output vs outcome is important in knowledge work.
- philmcp 4y agoOver 200 companies have now made the switch to a 32hr work week: https://4dayweek.io/companies https://4dayweek.io/companies The benefits for the employee are pretty obvious, but there are also many benefits for the company: - Staff are more productive (for previous pilots: output almost always hits 100%) - Job listings get (way) more applications - Staff are happier - Staff are healthier i.e. off sick less - It's better for the environment - Staff turnover reduces - It attracts experienced candidates - Costs reduce - It's better for gender equality Most of these companies on the site offer 100% salary, some offer 80% (but I hope to remove these in the future)
- Gene_Parmesan 4y agoThis is one of those situations where it's a clear documented (via study and real world experiment) benefit to both workers and employers, so you wonder why it's taking so long to spread. One problem is I genuinely believe it has to be mandated. Every company has people who will take any action purely to make themselves look attractive for the next promotion cycle. And if even just one person is actually putting in 50/wk at a company that's supposed to be 32/wk, everyone else is going to feel pressured to work 50.
- banannaise 4y agoThe farther people are from the front lines, the more they seem to prefer the stick to the carrot. Government officials, upper management, etc. are typically far more worried about enforcement than encouragement. Shorter workweeks are an encouragement tool. Longer ones are an enforcement tool.
- kipchak 4y agoI think to some degree the people making these decisions to some extent are more likely to be those who enjoy the external approval aspects of work - the "clueless middle management" in the Gervais Principle framework, who enjoy doing more work and want to see those below them do the same.
- marcosdumay 4y ago> This is one of those situations where it's a clear documented (via study and real world experiment) benefit to both workers and employers, so you wonder why it's taking so long to spread. Since open floorplans became universal a while ago, and are only getting partially replaced by work from home because the rent is cheaper, what I wonder is if that is the rule, instead of the exception.
- thebigspacefuck 4y agoFor me the real productivity benefit would be the 5th day when nobody is “working” but I log in and have an entire full day to focus without interruption.
- dagw 4y agoOnly works if everybody agrees on which day is the '5th' day. My wife has chose to work 4 days a week (80%) and she has to constantly fight to keep her free day actually free, since people keep trying contact her or book stuff with her on that day.
- kwindla 4y agoWe try to nudge towards making this possible by having a "soft rule" discouraging scheduling any standing or cross-team meetings on Fridays.
- kingofheroes 4y agoWe tried this several times, specifically banning meetings on Friday, and it never sticks. Some manager or executive always winds up ignoring the rule and setting a meeting anyway, which throws the whole thing out.
- PM_me_your_math 4y ago
- boc 4y agoNPR is not funded in a significant way by the government. Only about 4% of their annual funding is from government sources. [1] [1] https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/national-public-radio-npr/ https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/national-public-ra...
- PubliusMI 4y ago
- viscountchocula 4y agoWhat news source would you take seriously?
- crdrost 4y agoYou are failing to engage with the content here. Work itself is behaving like a complex system with bottlenecks and constraints and all that. The deadlines are being shown to expand to the time allotted, in a similar fashion to how opening a new lane on a highway often does not improve traffic and might even make it worse. In complex systems, the “greedy algorithm” (gradient descent) fails. For example, you might see some welders playing cards, and yell at them to go be doing work, (greedy algorithm: any inefficiency you see, correct it immediately) but this might cause huge delays for your customers rather than making things faster. How? Well it comes down to why were they playing cards. If it truly had to do with them being lazy, that's one thing. The Union rep might even back you up and yell at them for you. But they might also be implementing a low-latency subunit. They don't have work to do right now and it's important that the moment they have work to do, they can start it in an instant. You send them all to look productive God knows where, then when work comes in folks have to hunt them down and get them back here. Or, the card playing could implement a backpressure mechanism, “yeah we know the QC folks who will handle these are still pretty swamped with the backlog...” So if you give me a linear circuit comprised of resistors and capacitors and inductors, and you propose increasing the voltage on the lines that feed it, I know that other voltages seen across the circuit will scale proportionately—this is your “20% more.” and same with “if I reduce this resistor's resistance, more current will flow over there” etc. But once you throw a diode or transistor in there, all bets are off! “No, when you tweak this the diode goes from being forward biased to being reverse biased and NO current flows over there.” So it matters terribly much whether work is a simple linear system or a complex of feedback loops.
- vjk800 4y agoI already work (remotely) much less than my contract says. I simply can't stay engaged to cognitively demanding tasks for a full day. The rest of the time I just feel kinda bad for slacking, which increases my stress levels for no good reason. If I got the permission to actually work less, I wouldn't feel so bad about it, which would probably lead to less stress and higher productivity. I work in finance and I can attest that 90% of the work people do in my office could simply be left undone and no harm would come to the world or even the company. The industry just has a culture of "being very productive" which leads to people doing something all of the time, even when they don't have a clue what should be done.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago>I already work (remotely) much less than my contract says. I simply can't stay engaged to cognitively demanding tasks for a full day. The rest of the time I just feel kinda bad for slacking, which increases my stress levels for no good reason. If I got the permission to actually work less, I wouldn't feel so bad about it, which would probably lead to less stress and higher productivity. How do you know it wouldn't just allow you to slack down to working 24 hours a week and feeling the same degree of guilt you are accustomed to now? I have no idea. It just reminds me of the saying about lottery winners "If you weren't happy before you won, you won't be happy afterwards".
- ITB 4y agoA lot of people have a goal to minimize work and maximize income, and for those people, no matter what flexibility they are given, they will continue to minimize productive work. It’s sad in my opinion, and it leads to hedonic pursuits instead of the intrinsic satisfaction that comes from doing good work. But for too many people work is about man vs “the man”, instead of our individual quest to do something interesting.
- throwaway675309 4y agoWhy does it inherently lead to hedonistic pursuits, that's a bit of an oversimplification. Minimizing work and maximizing income (aka minmaxing) is what you should do as the employee in the equation, just as the employer will try their best to set up a contract where and they maximize your work while minimizing your income, to do otherwise is just blind naïveté. And for some of us less hours spent on the job means more hours we can spend on the cultivation of hobbies, physical health and overall improving ourselves. Working as a software engineer is but a small facet of who I am.
- arcturus17 4y agoA lot of businesses have a goal to maximize work and minimize wages, and for those businesses…
- toomuchtodo 4y ago“Darling I told you several times before. I have no dream job, I do not dream of labor." — James Baldwin Not everyone wants interesting work. That’s just a hobby you get paid for.
- vsareto 4y agoIt's hard for a stoic mindset to pave over the fact that you're only working a job because you have to. You'd see less of that if we have a society that gives a decent standard of living without having to work (ever), but even then, there will always be people looking to game any system for the thrill of it. That's the intrinsic satisfaction they get.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
- mike503 4y agoCompensation should be based on output. If hours translates to more output (like an assembly line worker or something) - great. Simply pay hourly and require minimum amount of hours (like 40) with options for "go-getters" to work more if they want. Plenty of jobs (like a lot of tech) should be based on "if you're producing what we need from you (or more if you want) we're happy" regardless of the hours.
- nottorp 4y agoExcept in tech you get metrics like lines of code instead then ;) Although it would be nice to be paid by line of code. Except in python or any other language where line ends are significant.
- yrgulation 4y agoI am always fascinated by people who want to earn less, pay more in tax, have less rights, etc. Curious, why would want to be paid by the hour instead of getting the same pay for less hours as this experiment would want to do? Technically thats a pay raise and better for your quality of life.
- banannaise 4y agoIt's the cult of the entrepreneur, with a splash of anarcho-capitalism. Worker exploitation is impossible because employment is a mutual agreement, and individuals should be empowered to agree to work in arbitrarily bad conditions for arbitrarily long hours, because that preserves the meritocracy for those who work the hardest for the longest.
- cdkmoose 4y agoHow would you measure output? How do you measure "what we need from you"? As a software engineer a fair percent of my time was spent in collaboration that sometimes manifested itself in someone else's "output". Not advocating that hours are the best measure, but there does need to be an accounting of my time being available for others and not focused on my "output"
- sam0x17 4y agoAt my previous startup we tried this with engineering and actually saw a productivity _increase_ from 4-day work-week.
- dagw 4y agoDid everybody take the same day off or could everybody choose?
- Arrath 4y agoI will say the morale improvement on my team when we switched to 4/10s was worth it alone. We couldn't swing the reduction in hours unfortunately.
- Maxburn 4y agoThis is a bit different from a 32 hour week. But yes you will see productivity go UP with 4 10s. That's a full days worth of break and lunch interruptions that isn't there. I switched to 4 10s a couple years back and it's nice, but the days are quite long so anything else you plan to do probably isn't happening. Like gym time, which is going to cost long term.
- Arrath 4y agoTo be fair this was heavy construction, so a baseline of physical activity was there. Out-of-town work as well, so longer days were a bonus since off-duty time would be sent sitting in your trailer or at the bar. An extra day to travel and spend with the family at home was huge for the guys. > That's a full days worth of break and lunch interruptions that isn't there. A constant battle I've seen between superintendents and schedulers/penny pincher types. "oh no we can't pay any over time!" without realizing the productivity gains the superintendent is chasing from the extra working time unencumbered by extra breaks.
- Maxburn 4y agoI'm also in a construction related trade and we get compensated for travel time to/from work sites. Eliminating a day of travel time alone is a big deal for the employer. When things get busy having a additional 10 hour day in the week can really get things moving too. They do pay overtime for that though.
- rr888 4y agoEven with 5-day weeks lots of colleagues were running side projects. Honestly a 4-day a week job WFH I'd probably try to run two jobs at a time. I'm here to work and get paid, not have a good balance.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Brian_K_White 4y agoI think I personally know many people that will simply use the extra time to work another job, thus erasing the intended benefit to the generous company. They work you less so that you will have better morale and energy and loyalty while you are there. But you use the time to collect a 2nd paycheck, and the gets the same tired employee they would have had if they just worked you fully the old way. I don't know what could practically be done about that. It also seems like a 6 month trial where the participants are still the exception not the rule, doesn't really predict what would happen if it became the rule. If most companies adopted this as a norm, surely simply the average salery would just inch down over time until it became essentially necessary and the norm to work 2 jobs, since the 4-day job won't actually be enough by itself except in theory, like how minimun wage is supposed to be enough in theory. There will always be huslters aggressively trying to maximize every minute, and they will always set, or at least perturb, the going rates for things. I think this experiment can only really exist as a special bubble experiment where the ceos just wanted to do it, and all employees were convinced to voluntarily play along and not just fill the gap with a side job. Maybe there can always be some few companies that can do it as their particular distinctive policy just like there already are different companies with different cultures and norms. But across the board? I think the hustlers and hungry scrappers will just set the going rates.
- dbsmith83 4y agoNot sure why you are getting downvoted. I thought your reply was at least a lot more thoughtful than the average one here. It seems like in this topic: <personal anecdote or opinion> pro 4-day workweek = upvote <personal anecdote or opinion> skeptical of 4-day workweek = downvote I guess it is human nature to dismiss skepticism of an outcome when the outcome is strongly desired
- christkv 4y agoThis mentality is less prevela t in Europe so that might be a factor to keep in mind.
- stavros 4y agoI've been working four-day weeks for almost a decade now, and it's been amazing. I briefly switched back to a five-day week at some point, but I had enough of that after a few months. The weekends felt way too short and the workweek way too long. Four-day weeks are just the right balance, though I wonder if I'll like three-day weeks even more.
- joeman1000 4y agoThat’s not an experiment, that’s a rise in pay-rate… it’s very much past due in a lot of countries for a lot of job categories.
- mbrodersen 4y agoThere is nothing magical about 40 hours. It just happens to be the number of hours that most companies (in the west) happens to choose for historical reasons: https://www.okta.com/au/identity-101/40-hour-work-week/ https://www.okta.com/au/identity-101/40-hour-work-week/