We're moving to a four-day work week at Beacon(beaconcrm.org) |
We're moving to a four-day work week at Beacon(beaconcrm.org) |
Advocating for working 32 hours a week as if 40 is hard? I don't really get that at all. I know lots of people in other areas who easily work 60+ hours a week for years on end.
I suppose if all you want to do is coast along at a company that will likely get wiped out by the competition when TSHTF, it would be nice to work 32 hours, but if you want to get ahead, don't set your sights so low.
Sure, some benefits sound decent but also deceiving… pension match is nice but 6 weeks of holiday (+BH) is actually 24 days and getting £60 for each holiday day taken is £1440 a year that won’t rise with pay rises.
I’ve always found Monday is a slow day for me to reload everything back into my working memory and get back into flow.
I wonder if this is why Monday meetings are good. So that everyone can be reinvigorated for the week ahead.
so while I would not mind having 20% income cut considering I work most projects for company which embrace more likely 996 scheme this would either mean I would have on Monday twice as much work as usual or i would lose these projects
this can't work unless you are isolated company (hard to imagine the field) or there is nationwide law making this standard
You are doing the same amount of work in less time, not less work. Company goals do not change, nor do their deliverables or expectations of you.
A reduction would only make sense for hourly employees (though I think the hourly rate should go up so the total weekly pay is the same) but if you are being paid full time, it should not matter how much time it takes you to complete your work.
You are paid for your knowledge, skill, and ability to deliver. You are not paid to be working a set amount of hours or days.
When someone burns you, don't go back to him / her for the second go around! Even if that person is a good friend. That's what I've learned. Alternative version of this is don't start a company with someone who is a newly minted millionaire & is single, not sure of what to do next in life, and not all that interested in money.
1. They are facing a huge negative demographic dividend.
2. They are facing steep inflation, low energy and food security and lower economic growth.
3. High social security costs may not be sustainable in the long term.
4. Finance is crumbling and real economy is taking over. Monetary expansion had its run and is no longer the panacea.
How will they handle this and still emerge unscathed while competing with China and India and Indonesia and the likes.
Soon you'll only stand out by announcing the 3 day work week.
...and get killed by a team that just outworks you. How many pro-sports teams have switched to less and less training :)
I do hope all our competitors switch to 0 day workweeks...
Pro sports is flipped, and often each week the athletes are learning new tactics/counter-tactics based on their opponent, or adjusting their existing patterns to perfection, or grinding out exercise routines to be able to demand more from their body. Drills are required to "train" their body into being able to do these routines reliably on-demand, and new exercise routines are often the best at forcing your body to adapt and grow.
That said, even pro-athletes have rest periods once the season is over. Also, many of them incorporate rest into training routines as well. An NFL player usually will rest after game day for 1 or 2 days.
I live close to Shoreditch but preparation time and travel both ways is easily 2 hours a day (for some of my colleagues that would be 3+ hours a day).
If you went from working from home 100% 5 days a week to working from the office 100% 4 days a week results in the exact same amount of time, except you remove all the monetary savings from working from home (~100GBP in travel alone).
No thank you.
They claim 80% of time but it's not true at all as I explained before. Not only that but the cost for the individuals is huge when going back to the office.
You must not live in London to comment that.
They tell people they will spend 20% less time to work-related activities which as I said is a lie.
Not only will they spend just as much time for work, it will be more unpleasant and more costly than working from home.
This isn't even accurate. What is EU competing with China and India on? It should the reverse if anything, how will India and China compete in High Tech and Precision Manufacturing with the West when they are suffering massive brain drain?
But it is something only information workers can do because productivity doesn’t translate linearly to hours put in.
But anything physical, manufacturing, etc, it is simply more time = more output.
Unless we use more and more automation and better tools of course. Which is also happening.
My grand-parents bought a house to my parents when they were 27. My parents had it easy and never learned personal finance. They refused to lend me 30k to start a mortgage for the house in Budapest, Hungary despite having 2 young kids because they didn't trust Hungary stability and wanted me to go back to Italy.
They have been keeping 60k in their checking account for the past 10 years. I've tried to convince them to invest a part of it in ETF but my father wrote me that: "They have invested in the Italian social security system and they have no need for other investments other than their government pensions and the house they own". Real estate value in Rome has declined 30% since 2012.
I have been telling them about the population decline and how the pension system is gonna go belly up in the future. Then Elon Musk also tweeted about Italy grim population collapse future last month. I told my father in great distress that I was sadly right. He told me I'm working too much and I need to relax and essentially he won't be taking advice from me because I'm not thinking straight, implying I need medical attention.
Try to save Italy and you will be called crazy.
> That would absolutely demolish my desire to work.
I've watched probably the screenshots 3 times in 2 years when someone was underperforming and it turned out s/he was just not working at all. If you had the desire to work to start with, I would have never checked your screenshots because you have hit goals or showed me you could do awesome stuff.
Tons of people would prefer a 4-day in-office work week over a 5-day remote work week. You may not, but there are many who do.
The number of people who are working from home will not be 100% nor will the number of companies working from home exclusively be 100%.
Given we have had limited time to run this experiment, perhaps it would be good if we didn't just jump to conclusions that working from home is the be all and end all. The office has had a pretty good run of productivity over the last century.
I'd rather work a 5 day week if I could work from home then a 4 day work week and have to travel to the office
You can't measure the potentially wide-ranging negative impacts of your attitude and policies.
If you need to take 10-minute screenshots while your company only has 6 people, you've got the wrong 6 people and you're going to fail. At that stage you can't afford to have anyone who isn't pulling their weight.
If you're taking 10 minute screenshots with six people and don't need to do so, you're still going to fail, but it will be because you drove away your founding team.
No, they assume that people who are self-oriented and want to be autonomous and have a great work ethic are the people that you want to have working for you. You don't need to employ "everyone", you just need enough for your workload, and you will need fewer people if you optimize your company's structure for high performers rather than deadweights.
Your employee surveillance policies are beyond the pale (screenshots every ten minutes... really?!) and treat all your employees are completely inept, lazy, or both. With policies like that, you shouldn't be surprised when the only employees you manage to hire and retain are that way.
When you don't have money, you can compensate in other ways, like autonomy and work-life balance. You may not get the best of the best, but you'll get loyal employees who appreciate the flexibility you give them.
Alternatively you can try to build a company on the backs of people who you have to micromanage and who will be gone in a year (and if not, only stick around because they have no other options). I'll leave it to you to decide which is more likely to succeed.
What kind of job requires ten minute screenshots? Definitely not a software development job.
But in general, the problem with surveillance is that it is just all about appearances. People usually learn to "look" busy instead of being productive and that is counter-productive to actual productivity when people are just pre-occupied with appearances.
Another problem is that it creates an atmosphere of low trust in the company. When there is an atmosphere of low trust, people will be less motivated to work hard and to give their whole effort since they will feel they are just expendable since the manager doesn't trust them.
As for the goal to maintain 100% productivity whilst cutting back on hours, I'm confident that they will succeed. In fact, they'll succeed in this without requiring some kind of brilliant plan, as this recalibration happens automatically.
When you start working one day less, nobody will reduce your workload by 20%. You'll have the exact same workload as before and now need to achieve it in less time.
There's many ways to cross this gap. An obvious one is that a typical 5 day work week has moments of slack, depending on the culture. Friday after lunch is where productivity sinks in many offices. Wednesdays are also slower as it's typically the first moment in the week where things are running (planned, prepared, on track). In a 4 day work week you sacrifice this breathing room, the 4 days become more compressed.
Another natural change is to take a more aggressive stand in rejecting non-sense. Excess meetings, unimportant emails, etc. This works very well and is extremely effective for the simple reason that you MUST. As such this time compression is a blessing, a cleansing mechanism for yourself and the organization.
You'll be amazed at how much time you can win back. Let's say you do need to attend a meeting. It's a 1 hour meeting. You're needed in the meeting. Go in and say you only have 20 mins. As if by sheer magic, what needed to be discussed gets done in 20 mins. Without this forced "budgeting", people would just fill the hour with bullshit.
Counter intuitive, but by being rigid instead of elastic, you maximize value.
I'd say it's incredibly common for a modern office worker to be engaged in email, meetings and chat for some 4-6 hours per day.
Not only does this leave little time to do actual tasks, that little time is also highly fragmented across the day.
It's a point I've made repeatedly on similar threads: the problem with modern office work is too much collaboration. Pretty much we spent the vast majority of the day figuring out what to do when, instead of actually doing it.
Absolutely. The complete lack of slack in the modern office drives a lot of my stress. I am transmuting that into an long-term win, however: it is driving me to seek flexible working arrangements, working for myself, setting up passive income streams (however small they are) and generally working less. I refuse to give my best years of my life to my work, and will work 2x as hard (for myself, obviously) to partially decouple time from income.
> This same productivity can be achieved in wayy less time than the standard 40 hours/week.
The nebulousness with which productivity is defined based on the context suggests it is not nearly as objective as some would have you think.
I'm in a Staff role with my fingers in multiple projects across several teams, and I still only have 2-3 hours of meetings a day.
Only?? It's surprising you tolerate even that much.
I worked as a contractor for a while with a 32 hour/week schedule. I was essentially just as productive as I was full time.
Reality is for most creative jobs, there's a fraction of your work week where you're extremely productive. Everything else is just rounding out the admin work while your brain is mush.
Like, if a marathon only takes 6 hours then why can't you do a second one on Sunday? And if I harass you enough can you do another one on Saturday afternoon as well?
Every time I've tried this or seen it tried the meeting gets rescheduled and everyone's time is wasted. I wish it worked this way.
It's not impossible, it just requires a culture of consideration, communication, and prioritization.
Gonna say that, excluding standup, this has to be at least 50%.
And the older I get, the more I realize that thinking that such a thing exists is its own kind of immaturity.
Until you fix the institution you can't change the hours.
Where I work, we work output-based. We work in sprints where the amount of work that can be done in a sprint is fixed, expressed as velocity. This capacity is a hard constraint and immutable (unless you hire additional people).
The business is free to spent that velocity as they please, but they have no say over velocity itself. They also have no say over input (hours) or estimates (they're not qualified to do so).
These hard constraints are a thing of beauty, it forces serious prioritization. Call me old and cynical, but in my 25 years in IT, I'd say at least 80% of what gets build is bullshit. Untested brain farts from higher-ups that have no tangible benefit to any customer or user. Hence I fail to be impressed by almost any "priority" or "deadline", exceptions aside.
If they're doing this to compete for talent, go ahead by all means. I suspect they need to do something like this also because they're a UK SaaS company (so lower wages to start) serving the low-end of the non-profit market (price sensitive buyers). And they don't have the enterprise features to compete with Salesforce and CRM for the high-end segment.
I'm still searching for the golden goose "conversation" that's actually faster on Slack. Sure, a quick back and forth or check in is actually faster.
I have yet to find a meaningful discussion that's actually faster on Slack. It seems like they always drag out as sparsely filled, 45 minute threads. Nearly everyone of these would have been better served by a 10 minute call.
This, so much. Let's just jump on a quick Teams meeting almost always can be taken care of in an email. And then it's documented and can be referenced and sent to all parties who may need to know that were not included in the "quick" Teams meeting.
The upside/downside to this is that you can't filibuster on something that matters to you but nobody else cares about, because they already left the room before you started. But of course neither can any of the other people who think their hill is as valuable as yours.
So why pay cut
Magic? No, modern office work is incredibly ineffective. Most of the day is spent collaborating with almost no part of the day spent on actually doing things.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/apr/04/thousands-o...
From the article:
Employees from a wide range of businesses and charities are expected to take part in the scheme, which will run initially from June to December, including the Royal Society of Biology, the London-based brewing company Pressure Drop, a Manchester-based medical devices firm, and a fish and chip shop in Norfolk.
It comes as the push for companies to adopt a shorter working week – crucially with no loss of pay while aiming for higher productivity – gains momentum as a way of improving working conditions.
But it is only one factor. Good management, strong teams, and a whole lot of "soft" stuff is even more important than beanbag chairs and foozball tables. The "good management" part is where most companies go pear-shaped. I wouldn't want to go to Buckingham Palace every day, if I hated the people I worked with/for, and felt like my work was being treated badly[0].
Although I work exclusively at home, and have no desire to ever dress "business casual" again, I think that a good* office environment can be extremely conducive to great work.
* As in "not like 99% of today's offices."
I have managed to do this at a succession of several jobs now. When I briefly tried to go back to 5 days, it was really hard. It seems insane to me now that anyone works 5 days a week. (And I do know plenty of people work even more, and I am very lucky).
Fridays are for doctor's appointments and car repair and grocery shopping and errands. Which probably does mean I'm away from "work hours" for these things less than I would be full-time, I just schedule such things for Fridays where possible. In general, I am pretty convinced that I'm at least 90% as productive on 80% time as I would be on 100%, maybe more.
Working at non-profit academic, I'm definitely not making my "market" salary. I could be making a lot more than I am now, even at 80% of a salary, at various more typical organizations. But I'm not sure how viable the 4-day week is with potential employers -- even if I'm willing to take a paycut to 80% of salary, which I am! Unlike the OP which is giving everyone a 4-day week at full salary? My impression is that most high-paying software engineering jobs/organizations are not going to let you do 4-days a week? Which is crazy when they could get me for 80% of the cost with most of the productivity -- but I guess the high-paying organizations aren't exactly trying to save money on salary.
I really don't think I'd go back to 40-hour-a-week-standard unless I had to.
Tuesdays are the new Fridays, y'all.
What do these maxims of economics mean for a 4 day work week?
At Beacon, nothing*. But implement this at Tyson Foods, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Waste Management, the FX trading desk at JP Morgan Chase, etc. and you get 2-6% productivity declines & some amount of increased supply-driven inflation unless you offset with new technology (eg. software, robotics) or techniques.
Celebrate work from home, 4 day weeks, flex-time, etc.... but understand that as these benefits carry costs in important (not all) industries. Also, the migration to jobs having these benefits, from those important jobs that do not, drives inflation and/or illegal immigration and so-called "white collar" top-heavy joblessness risk during recession.
No free lunch, even on Fridays.
** Note: UK small business situation is concerning, even if it doesn't apply to Beacon: "Office for National Statistics (ONS) data, showing that 2 million (or about 40%) of the UK's small businesses had less than three months of cash in reserves to support operations. He noted that 10% (or 200,000) were in grave danger, and 300,000 only had a few weeks of cash left."
If the organization is focused on time spend no work (either in office or remotely) how can work be done in 80% of the time?
Really don't understand how it works in day-to-day. It resembles the unlimited vacation days policy which was later found out to be unhelpful to employees.
Arguably it matters in how you KPIs are set. I think it's reasonable to expect a full time employee to work more than one day a week. If you can meet all your KPIs with everyone working one day a week, then maybe you're aiming too low. Of course, if you require everyone to work 60 hour weeks to hit KPIs, that's an even bigger problem.
Banish from your mind the idea that "hours spent at work" translates directly into productivity. My butt in my seat doesn't produce anything. My brain is what produces code, designs, problem-solving, ideas, etc, and it, like any other part of my body, needs periodic rest in order to function properly.
Most businesses can move to a 4-day work week. If you’re an employer and you read this, just give it a try for a month and measure output.
Your limiting beliefs will most likely become weak opinions.
Seems like a case of one step forward, two steps back
I mean you do you, but Bleck. "You don't have to come to work on Friday but we still want you to spend 12 hours a week crammed onto a bus or train." How else could you possibly write code or sit in front of a computer all day?
A quick google search suggests that the average US commute is 28 minutes one way, or about an hour a day, not 3 hours a day. The average US commuter is probably in their own car though, mass transit is usually going to add some, despite other social and personal benefits. I also know it's going to be higher in certain major metro areas. And that the US built environment is kind of insane, and sometimes seems like it was honestly designed to maximize commutes.
I agree nobody should ever be spending 3 hours a day commuting. But it's not like the only possibilities are working from home or 3 hours commuting...
As some employees may lose like an hour a day just to travel whereas that hour could be spent working on features etc. if they didn't have to travel into the office.
Your commute is 3 hours per day?!
That's nearly 17 hours over a 5 day week assuming no problems.
It's absurd to compare a once-in-a-lifetime event to everyday work meetings.
Anticipating huge real CPI cost increases, weighed against net productivity of people working from home, is the bet that you can net the same amount of value and productivity from existing employees in a 20% shorter period, and compensate for inflation by giving them time "off" instead of spending cash on a raise?
Not cynical, just a very wise hedge. I will probably ask this on other 4-day threads, as it seems like a very economical way to retain staff at the same net productivity without paying out cost of living increases. If the economy ever finds a new equillibrium and your company is still profitable, it becomes a tempting private equity target, as they could buy it and simply remove the 4-day week compensation and reap easy growth benefits.
You can't directly compare salaries with the US though : the tax and benefits structure is vastly different.
By the way, it is common to be paid far less for 40 hours than you should receive as well, and plenty of people work unpaid overtime who would be happy just to work the 40 hours they get paid for.
Salary negotiations are always tricky, especially if you don't know your true market value. Given the difference between compensation at different companies one way you could attack this problem is to find a company that will match your current salary but at a reduced number of hours. Employees have the same problem that companies have: it is hard to charge by value if you don't know your value.
As a gardener my work is worth less than as a computer programmer than as a financial advisor. Because each of those domains values time entirely differently, and because there are different levels of competition.
If you can show your boss that if you work less that your productivity will likely remain the same or that it will go up they will probably wonder why they've been paying you for all that extra time in the past... so instead I would just argue to try moving to a different company at a better salary for the same amount of work or for the same salary with less work.
The obstinacy, arrogance, and stupidity of managers from these guys to Musk and Sandberg is incredibly disappointing.
Changing to 4-day work week at this time just shows how out of touch some people are. It's only a matter of time before reality catches up to them.
I see these stories all the time. I’m pro the idea. But it’s not going to work if one industry works Tue-Fri and another Mon-Thu and their customers are taking off Wednesday. That standard work week being _standard_ is a feature.
Of course, 4.0 days would be even better!
Completely agree, if you need to micro-manage then workday oriented results are easier.
Likely this doesn't work well on a team, or for more open-ended work. Never seen any organisation aside from private contractors who actually do this though.
I am surprised the lack of mention of Denmark, Sweden or the Netherlands. Most business persons I contact, normally only work 4 days a week.
That said, some of the last few weeks at the time of writing have in practise turned out to be four day weeks due to public holidays. Could this be what causes the confusion?
This, however, is not the same as an entire company working 4 day weeks.
Externally it might seem like 4 days a week, but its actually 5 with one where you can't reach them.
I want to know if 1-2 years down the line, the productivity is still running at 125%
The cube farm was hated at the time, but things only ever get worse if you work in an office.
I don't. Can you explain what it is about every single job there requires 8 hours of 100% availability?
That's the problem, there. One-size-fits-all approach.
Every job is different. A lot of it is up to the management. If they get it right, things are shiny. If they get it wrong, they're sitting on their beanbag chair, alone, waiting for the movers to take the furniture away.
But every company (and internal culture) is different. Some, I intensely dislike, but have to admit, they get results. Others, I like the culture, but I don't feel they get much done.
Also, every employee is different. I know people that dress up in bespoke suits for work, in a cube farm, every day, and absolutely love it.
I know people that hate remote work, and can't wait to get back into the office.
Different(folks).different(strokes)
Good managers, especially first-line managers, are worth their weight in gold, and are usually disregarded by upper managers.
A good manager can make an open-plan or cube farm job an absolute joy, and a bad manager can make a corner office career a nightmare.
I like to think I was a good manager. I kept really good employees for decades, in a pretty banal environment, and for a fairly low salary. They could have gone anywhere, and they knew it, but they stuck around, anyway.
When i say "I'm at least 90% as productive" -- I mean I am more productive per hour worked. Not that I end up working 90% hours but only getting paid for 80%.
I really do work 80% hours, only four days a week, Monday to Thursday. I am not expected to and don't work on Fridays, Saturdays, or Sundays.
I just get done I think 90% or more of what I would get done in five days, in four days. As seems to be commonly reported by people in this situation.
Some people have also said "Yeah, but in my remote software dev job, I work even less than 80% of my expected hours, I just don't tell them, and I get paid a full salary."
I'm not gonna say much about the ethics of that, I guess I think it depends on the specific situation. But regardless, I'd myself just be stressed out if I had to be less than honest about my work. And my 80% schedule is clear -- I really don't work on Friday, nobody expects to be able to reach me on Friday (any better than they could on a Sunday or at 4am, unless I'm on-call), I don't check my email or look at my work calendar, I am really not working. And that's the whole benefit to me -- it's a different thing than using lots of hours for personal social media or something (which, sure, I do to some extent too whether 4 or 5 days a week.
the funny thing is that the same people who talk about collaboration at the office are often the decision makers that set up open offices where everybody wears headphones and nobody ever talks to each other.
I think most workgroups have effectively been paying extremely high overhead in social costs just so the organization could have the option to organize easily. The problem then is that meetings are called flippantly. If it's hard to get everyone in a room, you'll do a better job capitalizing on when it happens.
The downside is there really are a large array of tasks that a group can tackle better than an individual, but I've never seen a corporate group meaningfully recognize or organize for those tasks. Far more often, I get pulled into meetings because some specific individual or another is lacking in autonomy and expertise.
Maybe they think about how to justify their working arrangements to us humans.
More people, more hours: more coal extracted.
Interestingly, farmers in the middle ages are a much more balanced model (catastrophes aside): the land they had was mostly manageable by a small group of people, and there's only only so much you can optimize, given the patch of land that you have. So you do what you have to do and when you're done, well, you're done.
Personally I believe in remote and that it will get even better as tech to facilitate it improves.
I don't believe in working 4 days for engineering specifically. The field changes rapidly, there is a large learning curve and it takes a lot of hours to really master it. There is also some fixed overhead in communicating with other departments which stays the same even if you work less hours. So you remove more than 20% of your productive hours with this approach. You also reduce the time you spend learning. This further hampers your productivity. I think it will be a niche thing only done by some startups that care about this, have no other way to attract talent and aren't very ambitious.
That being said, for some people it will work well. It's pretty common for some roles in the netherlands for instance.
I've worked remote and managed remote teams for many years.
Working remote definitely doesn't not make "most people" more productive. Some people are more productive remote, but the average person gets less done even if they work more hours when remote. It takes a lot of training, mentoring, and performance management to get them back to in-office baseline.
This is regarded as a feature, not a bug.
It’s obvious that the relationship is not as simple as one input, one output.
If you work your employees 8/5, and I do the same, but with a gym break with a company-provided trainer, my employees will work fewer hours than yours, but I’d bet my productivity will win in the long run.
This 4 hour work week experiment is along these lines. It’s not obvious to most of us how it will end or what impact it will have on productivity.
Yes. It's easy to say "if we assume everything is linear...". Justifying that assumption and demonstrating that it's valid is another, significantly more difficult, thing entirely.
People worked 40 hours a decade or two ago as well, and since then there's been enormous technical improvements. Why not use that improvement to work less and enjoy life, instead of chasing higher throughput in various industries?
This is the assertion this whole argument hangs on. I'd challenge it. At a farm or assembly line probably, I highly doubt it in knowledge work.
That seems pretty good for a 20% decline in working hours! Unless I'm missing something?
So what if productivity decreases by a few % if it means we all get better work life balance.
Change is not easy but over time equilibrium can be found which is not dependent on this paradigm of infinite growth.
Economists stopped repeating the ceteris paribus fallacy about half a century ago. At about the same time as systems modelling got mainstream.
I vote for retiring the no free lunch one next.
Rote assembly line tasks in a warehouse or factory setting, even there you will see a ramp up mistakes and accidents as the hours get beyond a certain point. The chances of these ever have been "work from home"are slim to begin.
That is shocking to me. It feels like I just push these buttons and the package shows up to my door like magic. I assumed everyone has a job pushing buttons so why would we waste time pushing buttons for more than 4 days a week.
Being in the office for the first time in my career showed me that there are definitely upsides, especially when you get along with your team really well.
Though 100% mandatory office time is BS.
I think the fact it's your first time has a big impact. Give it time. Any time I start a new job I enjoy being in the office for the first 6-12 months. Once it becomes routine (same commute, same lunch, same people) and you have learnt how to do your job (and rely on others less) it becomes much less attractive. I'm not saying you'd go full remote but I would bet you will go hybrid and transition further remote over time. This is what I've seen happen with all of my colleagues (including people I thought would jump straight back to the office post-pandemic).
In the US, COVID cases are five times higher than this time last year, and the CDC estimates that 1 in 5 will result in long COVID.
But not 5 days a week, no.
I'd rather walk to the lake and go for a swim during the afternoon, than walk to a train to walk to an office.
Take that time back, go use it to go on a walk or exercise. You'll thank yourself. Prior to the pandemic I worked remote but in a location less obsessed with productivity. I had flexibility to exercise in the middle of the day most days when my energy levels topped out and I was in the best shape of my life. Fast forward to now and infinite demand always likes to pretend everyone is somehow behind and I too let my reclaimed commute time slide. I've recaptured it, started exercising regularly again, and already feel great. This culture that obsesses with productivity generation for someone else above all else isn't healthy.
Better in my experience : https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/
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.
I have at least one hour meeting every day that could be 30 minutes (or non-existent).
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.
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.
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...
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.
I hope others on HN have had the opportunity to work in places such as these...
I'm sure this varies a lot for people working in different sectors, but I think every sector has seen the perceived importance of technology engineering increase over time.
they do it because they can. Engineers have the tendency to be overly individualistic and ignore collective bargaining which is the primary means by which people can gain better working conditions. As long as people are willing to put in those 60 hours to climb up the next career rank ahead of their peers it's gonna be that way.
One of my goals in life is to get better at identifying (read, admitting/accepting) when the team has defectors and finding someplace else to apply my skills. But the few times it has actually worked are a mighty incentive to try again, even when I should know better.
I say mostly tongue in cheek...
"I have to get out of the meeting as I need to work on a task."
A task? Ok, so you can stay?
It fits right into "wow, jealous of your agenda"...when it has some blank spots. The spots you actually do work, but somehow are regarded as slack.
Just recently I had to migrate a website to some new servers with a new OS. Server build, fully automating the post-build and deployment, code changes, and testing… done in 2 days. Working with other teams around networking, change management, etc…. 9 months of waiting and hell.
One could argue that we virtually never do actual work. Machines or remote workers do. All we are doing is defining, communicating and controlling others' work.
My point is collaboration (aka "figuring out what to do when") is pretty much the essence of our work. It is machines or remote workers that are "actually doing it", as I believe GP means it.
Whereas in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Scandinavian countries, etc. they typically accept 32 or 24 hours but with a proportional pay cut.
What we really should be trying to normalize is most everything shutting down an extra day where possible.
If it got to the point where I felt like I had to hide the amount of time I was spending "working"/"not working" from my boss, then even if it were ethical (I still think it depends on the situation), I would just find it too stressful and unpleasant an experience, to be routinely hiding or lying about what I did with my day.
To me, doing 'some amount' of personal stuff during the day (which should be acceptable at any job), is still an entirely different thing than "I don't work Fridays, don't expect to see me online". Qualitatively, not just quantitatively.
"meeting output expectations" is tricky, I think, because what is the amount of "output" expected from "a person week"? It obviously varies for different people, at different times in their career, different skills, and just from week to week different things going on their lives/stress level. Knowing that I am not "cheating" my week is part of what makes me feel justified and honest in pushing back if a workplace does try to assign more work than is possible. Barring emergencies (and "your failure to plan is not my emergency") -- we should not be expected to work extra hours to get more work done. We get done in a week what we get done in a week, and then we come back the next week and do more -- to some extent, as engineers, the amount we can get done in a week is simply defined by what we do get done in a week.
But still, my real point is that even using this humane "you get done what you get done" approach, in our line of work, most organizations would find, I predict, that people working only 4 days a week (80% time), get done 90% or more of what people working five days a week do.
These people are unconsciously aware that they are incompetent. They pull people into meetings in order to have a sense of having done work, at the cost of total productivity.
i would be happy to pay a premium for goods and services after 6pm or 7pm (or on the weekend) if it means those "essential" workers get paid more.
but of course many would not, and so people can re-evaluate their priorities. hence equilibriums can form which are more healthy than present.
Or why people keep using it?
I refuse to refer to people as resources. I won't willfully dehumanize people by treating them as raw materials or as machines.
This scolding "I'm not sure exactly how, yet, but you'll be sorry!" any time anyone admits that they're no longer hiding inside & wiping down every banana with bleach is getting a little tired.
If you as a freelancer want to work five days a week (or more), by all means, spend your life in such a manner. The rest of us work to live, not live to work.
A race to the bottom can avoided with laws and regulation.
In case it does, all power to you. I think it's fair game that when people work more, they earn more. Nothing wrong with that.
I work in SWE, which is almost always 40 hours in my experience YMMV.
Or you can have a true 4 days/week. With the pay cut. As for half time and so on… taxes though start to rise, because why not.
I hate so very much my government for this kind of shit.
It can work either way, depends on the type of discussion. Often the best is to hash as much out in chat as you can and then meet to finalize.
You also create inequality on the team since threads rewards the fastest to reply. This is a lot easier to manage on a Zoom call.
In my experience, sitting through a boring meeting while trying to appear engaged is way more mentally draining.
> You also create inequality on the team
Actually, I see the opposite, that video conferencing favors the most extroverted.
Scott Adams was blasting open concept offices before it was cool to blast them.
All of the sysadmins worked from one room, with a "datacenter" in the room next door. Imagine a single room, with desks lined up around the walls. No cubicles, and barely enough room for a keyboard/mouse/monitor and room for a soda or coffee. Crappy chairs too. Since I was the FNG, I got the desk in the back corner underneath the A/C duct. So I was perpetually frozen.
No one looks at each other since our desks faced the walls. The walls between our room and the "datacenter" had no soundproofing, so whenever I spun up the Sun gear (T2 cpus) the noise was like a helicopter taking off. Even over the A/C blasting down on me, I would hear these servers when I did a reboot.
I think the average salary at the time was around $70K or so, and there were 9 of us crammed into that crappy little room. So roughly $1M in compensation, but they couldn't find a real spot for us to work. Screw that place...
When I entered the workplace in 2003 I was lucky to get a peg for my coat, had to hot-desk during the day - there were 6 people on shift but only 4 computers. You'd go out to fix a printer or something and when you came back to base someone's taken your place
The Dilbert world of the time had cubicles, it was glorious. 3 years later the IT crowd had an entire room with just 2 people in, with their own phones, computers, desks etc.
Now of course I'm in a far more senior position and no longer deal with printers (literally have a high-viz saying "We don't do printers"). If I went into the office I'd still have to hot desk, although only on a per-day basis.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I’ve noticed that the way Teams “collapses” threads that often the last to reply is the only one read besides the opening post.
Result oriented work is: Here is how much I did this week. I either met, exceeded or fell short of some expectation. The person then decides if this is the place they want to be and the employer decides if they are a good fit.
Agile in most places is a managers whip. I will go so far to say I have never seen it implemented in a way that is beneficial to devs. (possibly by design)
Estimates are even worse... you cant estimate software at scale. spending dollars to pickup dimes as the saying goes.
They don’t need to micromanage, but they are choosing to, and doing it very poorly (as if there is a good way).
I quickly realized I didn't mind it at all once I found correctly fitting shirts. If you consider a tie to be too constricting, you have the wrong shirt.
Even as borderline OCD (self diagnosed, so likely wrong), I never found particular clothes to be a hinderance to me typing (I'm a software dev), and I'm one of those guys that can't stand tags in t-shirts and rip them out. I think 90% of the angst over "comfortable" clothes is a learned cultural thing, and overblown. IMO.
I believe this changed in the early 2000s. The dot-com crash reset Silicon Valley. And the Enron scandal reduced corporate America's pull on it. (Steve Jobs wasn't an icon when business casual began taking its hold.)
[1] https://high-tech-guide.com/article/how-did-steve-jobs-help-...
I think that banks in Manhattan may still have shirt-and-tie for engineers.
And actually, some things have gotten worse. I think requirements for natural light used to be much stricter in older buildings (that's where you get all those u-shaped ones) so you were more likely to be near a window, for instance.
But if your excuses for wanting to drag people back into offices are that you cant walk on your own, dont have friends, cant play politics, cant hold remote conferences or online chats, then i am sorry but you are on your own. Too many have been conditioned to think that you need to sit in a building and slave away for a praise and a rushed holiday every now and then.
This requires some degree of motivation. When you had to go to the office you were forced to get dressed, get outside and travel etc. When you are WFH it is so tempting to get up late, get online, and stay comfortable. This is true even when you know what you are doing is unhealthy. It's similar to people eating a poor diet. They know they're doing it, they know it's bad, but it's hard to do the right thing (even when the right thing is relatively easy to do).
I say this as someone who loves WFH but also has fallen into a lot of bad habits that have definitely impacted my physical/mental health.
It's different. I may not enjoy being with people, but I like being around them. Maybe because Manhattan is just so different from everywhere else, and provides a special level of intensity.
They weren't so loud, but those older ones, yeah I remember them.
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.
How will the people around you react to you using a suit? If it's badly, you are as much forced to wear a certain kind of clothes as the GP was.
Anyway, just because there is a dressing code, it doesn't mean that the culture normally associated with it dominates. Those are two different things, where one is a huge problem, and the other mostly irrelevant. It's always better if you react to problems that are rally there, instead of noisy proxies.
Different people can value these rules in different amounts, and to your point, I didn't value "what I'm wearing" as much as some other people do, so I get you.
A bunch of suiting trends come from this. Suit jacket with ruined pants? Now it's a blazer, so, casual wear. Handmedown worn 3-button suit that you're wearing casually at college, with the top button pretty much permanently unbuttoned? You've just invented the 2-roll-3 jacket style. And so on.
We've replaced this behavior with simply having all our clothes be disposable-cheap. Mending a hole and adding patches to keep wearing something's not really worth it when it cost $20 to begin with.
To defend myself a bit, though, most conversations I see around this topic are referring to comfort.
Plop me in a pair of shorts with a t-shirt or better, a hoodie and I feel great.
But what you're saying is also that those wanting to be at the office are friendless, need this as a substitute for a normal life etc. That's unnecessary, and just you being a total dick. Please present your arguments here in a better way.
> you're saying is also that those wanting to be at the office are friendless, need this as a substitute for a normal life etc
What did he characterize wrong?
>My personal observation is that most pro office folks are seeking to substitute gaps in their personal lives with onsite work. A drain on their coworkers to be frank. Lack of friends, proper housing, lack of exercise you name it. A tiring hindrance on those...
This is an unfair and spiteful characterisation of people who happen to have a different viewpoint than you. We can do better than that.
Overtime is extremely uncommon even in Europe and has to be agreed upon in contract, and even then most employers just provide extra time off instead of money for full-time workers.
Sure, high performers should be rewarded using subjective metrics, which is already the case for blue collar workers. This trial gives people the opportunity to not be penalized for working less, which is the case with all the existing flexible hour arrangements. If successful, I have no doubt that this would lead to a longer term bigger change in what counts as full-time employment when it comes to taxation, immigration, and retirement.
This is not how it works currently. You get paid your salary and are expected to do a minimum number of hours + any more reasonably required. You don't get extra for those extra hours in a salaried job so I don't see why you would if they reduced the hours required.
This is a geographically limited factoid, and even then lots of companies do pay overtime. But in those cases where they do not: I always wonder how those companies would respond if I treated them the way they treat their employees.
> You don't get extra for those extra hours in a salaried job so I don't see why you would if they reduced the hours required.
Because it is fair.
Possibly but it's widely true for UK based tech companies and that's what this article was about.
Whether it's fair or not and treatment of employees is a whole other discussion.
Someone who’s 25% less efficient at their job should get paid the same as someone else who’s more efficient?
The variables then are: your hourly rate, how many hours you are contracted for. I've never seen 'efficiency' in a labor contract as a metric, though, performance reviews may indicate that compared to your peergroup you are not performing well. In the end that then becomes an economics exercise, which in turn might lead to the company deciding that employing people for 32 hours is more efficient.
But until then they should pay for what they receive in terms of time spent on the job.
Person A gets their work done in 40 hours a week.
Person B gets the equivalent of Person A’s work done (plus a little extra) in 32 hours a week.
Do you think that Person A should earn more money?
Around the time you say, casual Fridays came in. The funny thing is the CEO got annoyed at one point because a lot of the engineers felt they need to underdress relative to the business people who were now dressing business casual on Fridays and increasingly most days.
I'd say that over the next couple decades, things got more and more casual to the point where ties, much less suits, are pretty uncommon in settings where not wearing one would have seemed out of place 25 years or so ago.
At trade shows, as I recall, at some point in the 90s, IBM booth staff showed up at one big show wearing branded polo shirts rather than suits. At which point, most everyone else went: If IBM isn't wearing suits, I guess we don't need to.
The amount of money it would take for me to put up with such ancient, sexist and conformist bullshit is hard to imagine.
Clearly, the answer is yes because the claim on the life of person 'A' is a much higher one than the claim on the life of person 'B'. And you could argue the opposite just as easily: Person 'B' should get more money because they've figured out a way to be much more productive that might scale to others, and besides, sometimes getting something done in one minute has immense value and getting the same thing done in a week has none. But in practice neither of these things will happen. There isn't really a free market when it comes to jobs, employers hold most of the power and the differences between employees for most jobs do not exceed the normal bandwidth available for compensation, almost nobody except a lucky few contractors get paid by the value they create for the company.
So what will happen instead is that employers will set a certain hourly rate for a certain kind of job with some leeway to incentivize people to come and work for them or stay and hopefully a career path so they can migrate into better positions if they perform well. This arrangement will be formalized using an employment contract which together with applicable law will govern the relationship. This is not without problems but in the end it is what we have as a solution. Whether your colleague (who gets their job done in 32 hours) and you (who work 40 hours) have different pay depends on who is in control of the relationship: if the employees have control then they might be able to get paid by the value they contribute but this is extremely rare for salaried employees. The alternative, an hourly wage is much more common.
And one of the fundamental reasons for that is that we (1) all recognize the value of our time and (2) have tried very hard to get away from labor that was paid 'by the piece', which was very common in the early industrial revolution days (and which is now returning through a backdoor as the 'gig economy').
Talking about a 'four day work week' is meaningless if you at the same time claim that you have to work more than those four days per week to satisfy your employment contract, it just turns one vague thing into an even vaguer thing.
You interview for a job -- the offer is €X @ 40hrs/wk; you tell the HR that you'd like to only work for 80% of the time since you have childcare responsibilities. HR either writes back that the job requires you to work 40hrs or they revise their offer to €0.8X.
When 80% is the new 100%
You interview, get an offer for €X @ 32hrs/wk; you tell HR that you'd like to work extra since you're really passionate. HR either writes back that you could take extra time off or they revise their offer to €X + conditional bonus of €Y.
Like you said, working more doesn't mean more productivity, and so if a company is paying more just for you sitting in front of your computer more, we're not talking about the same jobs.
And if all of this normalizes, sure, salaries would be rebased, but the negotiation changes, as described above.