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My company recently spun out of a much larger corporation and has just implemented a 4-day week policy after nearly 5 years of flexible work (ie. come in when y
by Aromasin 2y ago
My company recently spun out of a much larger corporation and has just implemented a 4-day week policy after nearly 5 years of flexible work (ie. come in when you need to be in to do your job).
Since then, my team has halved and the senior leadership at the site have almost all left to competitors except for a couple of people closing on retirement anyway. We're struggling to get the bare minimum done and have to ZBB almost everything that isn't core work. It's miserable.
It's just the most baffling time to force such a radical shift, and the executive team were pretty much entirely against it; except for the new CEO who was a transfer from the bigger corp. During the midst of a spin-off where everything needs migrating from systems the wider organisation used - HR and legal, our internal Wikis, product tracking systems, Salesforce, customer comms, forums, documentation, the whole bloody lot - this new CEO decides to make their mark by hamstringing the company in the middle of one of the most important projects of the companies history potentially. They've had to cut a couple of things off the product roadmaps that have been worked on for years simply because we now don't have the staff to drive them to completion. Just madness.
- matsemann 2y ago> 4-day week policy You mean 4 days in the office, not a 4-day work week, right?
- Aromasin 2y agoSorry less, I mean 4 days in the office, 1 from home.
- jack_riminton 2y agoEven more bizarre considering that there have been numerous studies showing that remote working is more productive and less costly
- zeroCalories 2y agoCan you link these studies? I often feel like people greatly misrepresent what these studies find. Anecdotally, we've been happy to cut remote senior engineers and bring in local people, sometimes at a significantly higher total comp, just because they play such an important role in coordination, which is far more important than their trivia knowledge about our system.
- jack_riminton 2y agoHere are some: 1) https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0274728 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... 2) https://www.nber.org/papers/w28731 https://www.nber.org/papers/w28731 3) https://scholar.harvard.edu/eharrington/publications/working-remotely-selection-treatment-and-market-provision-remote-work https://scholar.harvard.edu/eharrington/publications/working...
- MiguelX413 2y agoYou should use DOI links: 1) https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274728 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274728 2) https://doi.org/10.3386/w28731 https://doi.org/10.3386/w28731 3) https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4466130 https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4466130 , respectively
- coffeedan 2y agoA few things: - the first two were conducted while we were in the thick of the pandemic and loathe to be near anyone outside of our pod. WFH made sense then, and I’m sure people were more comfortable knowing they wouldn’t get Covid WFH - the third was in 2023 when the world opened up, but studied call center operators. Yes, I can see how they would be more productive at home. However, imho any position that requires collaboration and many interactions between staff is more productive in the office and this study doesn’t address that.
- thesz 2y agoLet me quote the first one, which is meta-analysis: ". Of the articles published prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, 79% (n = 19) demonstrated that work-from-home increased productivity and performance whereas 21% (n = 5) showed mixed or no effects. Of the articles published during the pandemic, 23% (n = 3) showed positive effects, 38% (n = 5) revealed mixed results, and 38% (n = 5) showed negative effects." So it seems that there are numerous studies that show WFH is beneficial to productivity, that are done before pandemic.
- lolinder 2y ago
- HumblyTossed 2y agoIt's about rule and control. Some people see employees as "less than equals" and they need a thumb on them at all times. Others are steeped in Right-Wing Bullshit and are willing to burn it all to the ground for one more profitable quarter.
- georgeburdell 2y agoLet me guess: Sandra Rivera
- formerly_proven 2y agoSounds like someone got drunk on power on day one.
- p_l 2y agoIt's part of "hostile environment" tactic to force reduction in headcount without appearing to be firing anyone. That it results in more experienced people leaving is just a bonus to the all-governing excel chart that gives orders to the CEO.
- llm_trw 2y agoStop assuming that these people are competent. I've been in the c-suite meetings where these things are decided and it boils down to "In my day the office was good enough for me, so it will be good enough for everyone else too".
- diggan 2y agoEqually, stop assuming that their intent is good. Unless we have internal details, we can argue either way, but assuming anything at all seems wrong. Just as likely as they're just stupid, it feels as likely they're doing it to reduce costs/headcount.
- otherme123 2y agoBeing disconnected from reality, or not being able to adapt is not the same as being stupid. One of my bosses while being absurdly smart for work related things, has no clue about how to deal with millenials and younger. He still lives in the world of loyalty to the corporation, and it works with X-gen and above. The younger laugh and leave
- _heimdall 2y agoThat's really nothing new. Most people get to a point where they don't quite understand the generations behind them. You grow up in a different time with different norms. It may be easy enough to understand at a more surface level what younger generations seem to care about, how they talk, etc but it's much harder to deeply understand what it's like to be that younger generation and how, therefore, to fundamentally adjust the way you work and interact or even view the world yourself.
- justinclift 2y agoWhat's "ZBB"?
- rsanek 2y agoprobably zero based budgeting
- justinclift 2y agoThanks. :)
- jpm_sd 2y agohttps://www.oracle.com/performance-management/planning/zero-based-budgeting/ https://www.oracle.com/performance-management/planning/zero-...
- dboreham 2y agoA thing that tells you to run away fast.
- _heimdall 2y agoWhat's wrong with having to justify a budget each year rather than assuming last year's budget was fine and still makes sense as a starting point for this year?
- KineticLensman 2y agoOne issue I can see is a massive performance hit at the year boundary as everyone goes into 'justification' mode to ensure their jobs and projects persist. Or just dusts off the forecasts and justifications they used last year, which sort of defeats the whole point.
- _heimdall 2y agoThats a fair point. Trust would definitely have to be a requirement for a functional zero-based budget. Employees would need to know their jobs are secure and the company is just going through a regular process of deciding where to invest. As long as the perception, whether true or not, is that companies are always willing to fire employees to save a buck then no one really has incentives to honestly propose budgets and priorities.
- cdchn 2y agoDoes 4-day week policy mean you have to be in the office 4 days a week, or that your work week is 4 days long?
- throwaway984393 2y ago[dead]
- kkfx 2y ago4-day work week is a "gift" to keep people in the office, and I hope it FAILS miserably because being in the office in 2024 it's not different than dress like ancient Celts to go to a court. A nonsense. Some want slaves and to ensure them, to reach the "in 2030 you'll own nothing" they need the city, tall buildings used less than half of the day moving between them for the rest of the day only to keep people busy and unable to own. This is simply untenable: a city can't really evolve and we are in changing world and in a changing society, cities to change needs to be rebuild, something impossible for actual available resources, we must be no more than 3 billion to have enough planetary resources to evolve in cities, while we can be the double to live spread and have more intelligence and ideas being more in a spread model where we can evolve and sustain the climate change as well. That's why ruling class want cities https://kfx.fr/articles/2024-04-26-onnewdealexp-contrapolis/ https://kfx.fr/articles/2024-04-26-onnewdealexp-contrapolis/ and we should say no thanks.
- Spivak 2y agoOh hey, our new CEO did the same exact "hybrid 4" bullshit so he technically didn't violate our employment contracts that said we were hybrid employees. Literally at his 6 month mark announced a thing that made everyone hate him which is a pretty bold move for a new CEO. The only person who supported him was a newly hired director who was kissing ass so hard it almost a rimjob. I just don't get it, there was no issue that caused the change, no metric he was looking to improve. He even told us he was willing to eat 20% productivity to be in the office. But turns out the overlap between someone willing to write code all day and adhd is pretty strong so my team all put in the paperwork for ADA exceptions and got them, literally the only reason I'm still here.
- rybosworld 2y ago> He even told us he was willing to eat 20% productivity to be in the office. I'm not shocked that an exec would think this. But I am shocked that one would say this publicly.
- SaberTail 2y agoMy experience has been that "spin off" CEOs are often there only so they can check a "CEO experience" box in the hope that it will help them climb higher in the larger corporation. This leads to all sorts of bad decisions and a pretty miserable environment because they don't actually care about building something that will be successful and endure. They only care about speedrunning the experience they think a CEO needs so they can talk about it when interviewing for something better.
- Aromasin 2y agoIt does feel that way. They are an ex-division executive. If anything, I feel like this could be a case of them getting nicely managed out while building out that CEO experience before they go off and retire successfully into the sunset after making a shit tonne through an IPO, ignoring the gutting of the company they've done to make sure the short term balance sheet looks good; while the long term viability of it is in shambles.
- alexeiz 2y ago> spun out of a much larger corporation > ZBB Microsoft?
- Aromasin 2y agoNot in this instance no. ZBB is a pretty common budgeting method I think. All the corporations I've worked at have used in in some regard.