More Companies Are Trying a Four-Day Work Week (reuters.com) 110
Companies around the world have cut their work week down to just four days and found that it leads to higher productivity, more motivated staff and less burnout. Reuters highlights some of those companies: "It is much healthier and we do a better job if we're not working crazy hours," said Jan Schulz-Hofen, founder of Berlin-based project management software company Planio, who introduced a four-day week to the company's 10-member staff earlier this year. In New Zealand, trust company Perpetual Guardian reported a fall in stress and a jump in staff engagement after it tested a 32-hour week earlier this year. Lucie Greene, trends expert at consultancy J. Walter Thompson, said there was a growing backlash against overwork, underlined by a wave of criticism after Tesla boss Elon Musk tweeted that "nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week. People are starting to take a step back from the 24-hour digital life we have now and realize the mental health issues from being constantly connected to work," Greene said.
Schulz-Hofen, a 36-year-old software engineer, tested the four-day week on himself after realizing he needed to slow down following a decade of intense work launching Planio, whose tools allowed him to track his time in detail. "I didn't get less work done in four days than in five because in five days, you think you have more time, you take longer, you allow yourself to have more interruptions, you have your coffee a bit longer or chat with colleagues," Schulz-Hofen said. "I realized with four days, I have to be quick, I have to be focused if I want to have my free Friday." Schulz-Hofen and his team discussed various options before settling on everybody working Monday to Thursday. They rejected the idea of flexible hours because it adds administrative complexity, and were against a five-day week with shorter hours as it is too easy for overwork to creep back in.
Schulz-Hofen, a 36-year-old software engineer, tested the four-day week on himself after realizing he needed to slow down following a decade of intense work launching Planio, whose tools allowed him to track his time in detail. "I didn't get less work done in four days than in five because in five days, you think you have more time, you take longer, you allow yourself to have more interruptions, you have your coffee a bit longer or chat with colleagues," Schulz-Hofen said. "I realized with four days, I have to be quick, I have to be focused if I want to have my free Friday." Schulz-Hofen and his team discussed various options before settling on everybody working Monday to Thursday. They rejected the idea of flexible hours because it adds administrative complexity, and were against a five-day week with shorter hours as it is too easy for overwork to creep back in.
Editors must be working 0 day weeks (Score:4, Informative)
The stress must be getting to you. Because we've saw it [slashdot.org] only days ago.
Re: Editors must be working 0 day weeks (Score:1)
As I keep saying with the surge in duplicate posts lately, the "editors" could easily quickly scan the RSS entires of the last 50 posts before submitting duplicates. It's ridiculous already.
Re: Editors must be working 0 day weeks (Score:2)
More websites are trying recycled content (Score:2)
"Read recycled news, it's good for website profitability and OK for you."
Prediction (Score:2, Flamebait)
This article will be flooded by angry replies from americans, insisting that only inefficient companies work so, and that the only way for efficency, self fulfillment, and complete human salvation, is to work 12/5 or 12/7...
Re:Prediction (Score:5, Insightful)
if costly benefits like healthcare and retirement savings are foisted onto employers, then having fewer employees that do the work of two or three is a savings. And hard working employees are simple to replace because "right to work" laws means no notice, no severance, and no reasons need to be given for termination.
We operate a highly efficient serfdom, and it boggles my American brain that Europeans aren't doing the same.
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if costly benefits like healthcare and retirement savings are foisted onto employers
Almost everything like that ultimately come from the employer in the form of wages or benefits. Whether the consumer pays/saves out of pocket, they pay it through taxes, or they pay through employment in lieu of higher wages. The consumer has no other source of money for these expenses than their job.
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Almost everything like that ultimately come from the employer in the form of wages or benefits. Whether the consumer pays/saves out of pocket, they pay it through taxes, or they pay through employment in lieu of higher wages. The consumer has no other source of money for these expenses than their job.
While that's true, if there's a choice between hiring 3 people @ 40 hours/week or 2 people @ 60 hours/week and you're paying a big overhead per head the incentive is to have as few employees as possible and work them harder. Who you employ probably also has an effect on your insurance rates, independent of how their qualifications as employees. It's also one more hold employers have over their employees, lose your job and you lose your health plan too.
If it's financed as a flat tax on income which I know is
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If the system was set up that way, it can be set up differently.
Good luck with that. I can hear the cries of "Communism! Venezuela! Compulsory gay maerriage!" already.
Re:Prediction (Score:5, Informative)
"right to work" laws means no notice, no severance, and no reasons need to be given for termination.
You are thinking of "At Will". "Right to Work" means something completely different: A ban on closed union shops.
With minor exemptions, "at will" is the law in all 50 states.
27 states have "right to work" laws.
At-will employment [wikipedia.org]
Right to work [wikipedia.org]
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Let's be blunt cowardice always finds excuses for lack of action, whilst proudly proclaiming how brave they are. So badly are they beaten, rather than fight for what they should be provided in exchange for them doing all the work, they would attack other workers who are getting too much or maybe, just maybe, that could be paid US government and Corporate propagandists, you know workers should beg for their jobs, worship their bosses and be grateful for the crumbs they receive and cowardice just laps that st
Re:Prediction (Score:5, Insightful)
If the 4-day work week actually improves productivity and competitiveness, you'll see it adopted in the US fairly quickly.
With regards to unions - there are places that could benefit from more unionization, and there are other places where unions are absolutely strangling progress.
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What you're saying does not invalidate anything the GP said. In fact it reinforces it. Screwing the workers, poor holidays, long hours, and a culture of living to work is one of the reasons the economy is as dynamic, healthy and advanced as it is.
People often like to say: "We are the most efficient".
To which I reply: "Yeah but we are happy"
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Since when do you give a shit about the lives of American working class?
And yet 99% of my criticism of America is the way their policies act on their own people.
You hate stupid people!
Nope, I hate stupidity. There's a big difference. In general I don't hate people, and I certainly don't hate generic groups of people. But really you don't seem to know me at all if you think I hate stupid people, which is a shame. I thought we had "a thing" but clearly this relationship was one sided.
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"Not number 1" = 19th in the world in terms of GDP/capita.
Comparing the US to south america's economic systems is a little rich, given that you guys have spent the last 70 years actively sabotaging them, up to and including arming violent military insurrections, bringing down governments, installing puppet leaders and assassinating foreign politicians who refuse to toe the line. Hardly a fair comparison.
America was founded on puritanical ideals, including the beliefs that hard work was virtuous and being id
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Not harsh enough - we need some guillotines & gulags.
This cartoon [wixmp.com] neatly addresses that bubble thinking. You have an absolute pile of shit for an economy when a single silicon valley billionaire has as much wealth as a hundred million Americans.
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BUT you must make yourself singularly available to them and not work for anyone else
In the US, I think that alone would force you to be classified as an employee rather than a contractor.
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if costly benefits like healthcare and retirement savings are foisted onto employers, then having fewer employees that do the work of two or three is a savings. And hard working employees are simple to replace because "right to work" laws means no notice, no severance, and no reasons need to be given for termination.
We operate a highly efficient serfdom, and it boggles my American brain that Europeans aren't doing the same.
Right to work laws mean that the unions can't insist on membership or a cut of worker's pay--if the union wants members and their money, they must actually provide benefits to the workers they claim to represent and convince them to join of their own free will.
No notice firings and no reasons for termination is entirely disconnected to right to work (the latter even is legal in all but one state), and severance is legally required in some form regardless of it's a right to work state unless you were fired w
Re:Prediction (Score:5, Interesting)
I never got that. I mean it has been known for a long, long time from studies by Ford and others that mental workers have peak efficiency at 6h/day for 5 days/week and that working more _decreases_ total (!) productivity. I guess there are so many americans that are virtue signalling by working (or claiming to work) much more that the sheer stupidity of doing so does not get through anymore.
So let me state this again: If you work 40h or more a week as a mental worker, then you are unproductive and self-destructive. If you work around 30h a week as mental worker, you are pretty much at peak overall (!) efficiently. And no, if you claim otherwise, then you are just uninformed. These facts are not up for dispute and they have not been up for dispute for a long time. The current experiments are just re-discovering known information.
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In the country where I come from (Israel), part time employees get benefits as well. Not everybody are americans (and thank god for that).
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The only one saying anything about "no benefits" here is you. I am merely pointing out that the metric used is fundamentally broken and that you should stop defending it. Also, in the civilized world, you get benefits regardless of how long you work and things like health insurance are _not_ tied to your job (for obvious reasons).
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Workers already reduce their effective work time to around this level.
They just don't do it by going home early. They do it by standing around the water cooler, by long bathroom breaks, smoking breaks, watching Netflix at their desk, by having unproductive meetings, or by padding the serious work with bullshit work.
Re:Prediction (Score:5, Insightful)
I know many workers who stay late doing nothing simply because management tends to appreciate workers who stay late, even if they don't do much.
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As I said, the stupidity is staggering. "Work hours" are generally not an useful productivity metric. They are only an useful metric to determine how many hours are missing from your life. The whole approach is utterly broken for most (not all) situations and that needs to change.
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The sheer overall stupidity of that is staggering. I know it does happen, but all it does is nicely illustrating the utter cluelessness of management.
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True. If you work around 40h formally, then an efficient mental worker will waste around 2h/day to improve efficiency. If you work, say,60h, then this does not work anymore and your productivity will sink significantly under that of somebody working 30h (or being at work 40h while working 30h).
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You think I do not speak to "the bosses" as well or that these limits do not apply to them? Whatever gave you that idea? Or do you not include "the bosses" in the "mental worker" category?
Also, I am not saying the "non-bosses" have the freedom to do something else. I do however notice that quite a few of the "non-bosses" defend working long hours and claim that this makes them more productive overall. And that is the thing I am talking about there: Lack of understanding. Understanding is a required componen
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mental work is more perspiration than inspiration (Score:2)
But, we must always allow for the exceptions to the rule. They are always there.
The problem comes in that no "mental" work is entirely that. Even "mental" work is usually far more perspiration that inspiration.
As a computer engineer I frequently wrote software. During my peak years there was one very large project for an embedded system with many processors and custom boards linked together that I took on that took two years.
As leader of a team of 10 that worked the software, I reviewed every line of every
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Productivity is defined as output per unit of input (usually per hour of labour). Totalling it makes no more sense than walking for five minutes, driving on a road for ten minutes and on a freeway for an hour and saying your total speed was 89 mph.
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Aaaand found the clueless nit-picker. As anybody with two brain-cells can see, this is obviously per real-time interval large enough to give stable numbers, i.e. at least a week. It most certainly is _not_ per hour of labor. Even suggesting this means you have not understood anything at all. My very point is that the productivity per hour is dependent on hours worked overall per day/week and that the total sum per week decreases from a certain point of hour worked onward that is around 30 h/week.
If you have
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Don't lie. You just think "productivity" is a fancier synonym of "output".
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Here is a hint: The productivity in the given setting _is_ the output because the input is fixed. It is the 168h a single worker has in a week. What is not fixed is the ratio of time spent working to time spent not working. But that is not the "input" in the base formula for productivity here. It is an utilization factor. As we are only asking after the peak dependent on the utilization factor, we do not care about constants. (Warning! Advanced idea!) I am not really surprised you cannot do such an elementa
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This article will be flooded by angry replies from americans...
Actually, angry replies from American management.
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Fixed that for you.
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Right, why work hard when you can phony up taxes on US companies, and steal money made on other people's hard work?
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This only applies to mental work, where you have to spend a lot of time thinking about problems and solutions.
I assume a job that has to be staffed 24 hours a day is either menial labor like a cashier, or is a job like fire fighting where the vast majority of the time they are on the clock they aren't actually "working", but instead are there as they may need to do their jobs at a moment's notice.
Glitch in the Matrix? (Score:2)
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UBI (Score:4, Interesting)
I know UBI is a hot and popular topic on /.
A shorter work week, more vacation and an earlier retirement are much more practical ways to accommodate the loss of jobs to automation.
Re:UBI (Score:4, Insightful)
UBI is in part a reaction to the right screeching about employer's rights to expect long hours, low pay, and unpaid vacation only when approved in triplicate.
UBI = fine, let the market decide, but the labor side won't be bent over a barrel when it does.
The capitol class hates it because they know that with the threat of homelessness and starvation removed, wages will drift up to the natural value of labor.
Re:UBI (Score:5, Insightful)
The capitol class hates it because they know that with the threat of homelessness and starvation removed, wages will drift up to the natural value of labor.
This. There was a private conversion between CEOs recently in my area, told to me by my boss who was there. One guy complained loudly about not being able to find trained workers. Another CEO calmly corrected him saying that he would have no trouble at all finding them if he paid them proper salaries.
The brilliance of UBI is in this one thing: It removes fear of survival as a factor in wage negotiations. It allows people to walk away from jobs that are in the "are you kidding me?" category.
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The market is still skewed towards low pay, that's why corporations are posting record profits and pay isn't going up.
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No, you completely misunderstood the anecdote. If you were right, that slave-wage-paying CEO would've never thought he can get away with it, he wouldn't have tried. The fact that he is surprised about not being able to get qualified workers for a ridiculous salary is the point of the story. He should have the idea of paying a proper salary by himself, but he didn't. Because the job market does not work. Too many jobs pay pathetic salaries but people are still forced to take them because the alternative is w
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Actually, not like this. As 30h/week workers are significantly more productive overall than those working more, this makes the problem worse. If we go to, say 20h/week, work, then the positive effect on the job-market will be there.
What A Coinkydink! (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, hey!
It looks like you've dropped below 40 hours! That's great, it means we no longer have to offer you insurance, or a 401K, or matching?
Wow, this is a great idea!
--- Every CEO in America
I call BS (obvious) (Score:1)
Having built my own startups in the past, there aren't enough hours in the day to get everything done. If you're in a stagnating business then sure, switch to a 4 day work week while people like me leave you behind.
32 Hours On Average (Score:2)
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no, the idea is four 10 hour days
same pay
same work
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Nope, they say 32 hours.
Which is not unusual, because in many places, 37.5 hour workweeks are common (7.5h/day), or 35 hour workweeks (7h/day) is the standard. Many of those countries do allow 40 hour workweeks as a maximum (often because the laws state overtime must be paid after that).
And yes, in my previous jobs (usually as an intern) I worked 37.5 hours and 35 hours and even OT work (on request).
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yes 37.5 is actually where I work too, 8 hours - half hour given break = 7.5
For decades the talk was of putting that into four days.
The caveat to it being.... (Score:2)
Uh huh (Score:2)
I have to be quick, I have to be focused if I want to have my free Friday.
So basically a quota system. Next comes the part where your boss steadily increases the quota, making sure you NEVER get your free Friday.
Anecdotal evidence (Score:1)
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There are some advanced management techniques available that enable businesses to operate without having all the people there at all times.
personal experience (Score:3)
I actually did this years ago, and it was a dramatic improvement for me, both personally and professionally. I could afford to give up the pay and needed more time for my personal life, so it was an easy decision to make, and I would do it again if I could (right now I can't, but I'm hoping for another opportunity in the future).
People dramatically overestimate the amount of work being done in the hours beyond employees "want to be here" time. Fridays especially are days in which very little gets done in many companies. When I was working 4 days a week, I got maybe 90-95% of the work of a full work-week done, not 80% as you'd expect. And I did that feeling much more relaxed, not more hurried. And I could do a lot more on weekends. And I had more time to relax whenever weekends weren't perfect. You know, sometimes shit happens on a weekend, and it ruins your whole weekend. With 3 days instead of 2, there's always at least one day left you can enjoy.
My personal experience says that a 32-hour week is vastly superior to a 40-hour week in all respects. Moving everyone to a 32-hour week with only 10% reduction in salary would be an optimal benefit to society, and everybody would profit. Employees would get more money per hour, companies would get more work done per currency unit, everyone would be less stressed, stress is a major health factor, so healthcare costs would drop - I see not one reason why we aren't doing it. Well, stupidity, like most things in the world today, but aside from that?
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Some people complain about all the gun–foot problems associated with C++ not having a garbage collector, but then they blithely introduce the word "everyone" after a gerund or the word "if", as if that's not far more dangerous than dereferencing an unchecked pointer (many of these seem to regard the class of algorithms known as "collision detection" as having originated in the arcade era of t
Ideal work week (Score:4, Interesting)
Why stop at 4? (Score:2)
Clearly, if 5 days are better than 6, and 4 days are better than 5, why stop there? How about a 0 day work week! We'd all have so little stress, we'd get everything done in a snap!
Like cutting taxes raises revenue (Score:2)
And we see how well THAT worked!
https://www.forbes.com/sites/c... [forbes.com]