German Firms' 4-Day Workweek Trial Slashes Stress, Keeps Productivity High (dw.com) 72
A six-month German pilot of a four-day workweek across 45 companies demonstrated that most employees experienced reduced stress and maintained productivity, with some companies adopting optimized processes and digital tools to enhance efficiency. The report says 70% of the firms plan to continue the model. DW News reports: Earlier this year, some 45 German firms launched a 4-day workweek project to find out if such a fundamental change to how we work can achieve positive results for employers and employees. For six months, and closely watched by researchers from Munster University in Germany, the volunteer companies allowed their employees to work fewer hours without reducing their salaries. The pilot run was initiated by Berlin-based management consultancy, Intraprenor, in collaboration with the nonprofit organization 4 Day Week Global (4DWG). [...]
Julia Backmann, the scientific lead of the pilot study, says employees generally felt better with fewer hours and remained just as productive as they were with a five-day week, and, in some cases, were even more productive. Participants reported significant improvements in mental and physical health, she told DW, and showed less stress and burnout symptoms, as confirmed by data from smartwatches tracking daily stress minutes. According to Backmann's findings, two out of three employees reported fewer distractions because processes were optimized. Over half of the companies redesigned their meetings to make them less frequent and shorter, while one in four companies adopted new digital tools to boost efficiency. "The potential of shorter working hours seems to be stifled by complex processes, too many meetings, and low digitalization," said Carsten Meier from Intraprenor.
The study has also shown that participants were more physically active during the 4-day workweek, and they slept an average of 38 minutes more per week than those in the five-day control group. However, monthly sick days only dropped slightly, a statistically insignificant difference compared to the same period a year ago. Marika Platz from Munster University, who analyzed the data, said she was surprised at the number of sick days because similar studies in other countries showed a significant reduction. Another surprise, she told DW, was the lack of environmental benefits from reduced working hours during the German test as other countries reported a positive impact from offices that could be shut down completely for one day, and fewer commutes to work that resulted in higher energy savings. The reason for this was probably that some German employees took advantage of the long weekends to travel, she said, which reduced any potential energy savings. Study director Backmann stressed that the study was not about advocating for a blanket rollout of the 4-day workweek across all sectors, but rather exploring "an innovative work-time model and its effects."
Carsten Meier from the Intraprenor consultancy added that the positive results of the trial cannot be "automatically translated" into similar gains for every company in Germany.
Julia Backmann, the scientific lead of the pilot study, says employees generally felt better with fewer hours and remained just as productive as they were with a five-day week, and, in some cases, were even more productive. Participants reported significant improvements in mental and physical health, she told DW, and showed less stress and burnout symptoms, as confirmed by data from smartwatches tracking daily stress minutes. According to Backmann's findings, two out of three employees reported fewer distractions because processes were optimized. Over half of the companies redesigned their meetings to make them less frequent and shorter, while one in four companies adopted new digital tools to boost efficiency. "The potential of shorter working hours seems to be stifled by complex processes, too many meetings, and low digitalization," said Carsten Meier from Intraprenor.
The study has also shown that participants were more physically active during the 4-day workweek, and they slept an average of 38 minutes more per week than those in the five-day control group. However, monthly sick days only dropped slightly, a statistically insignificant difference compared to the same period a year ago. Marika Platz from Munster University, who analyzed the data, said she was surprised at the number of sick days because similar studies in other countries showed a significant reduction. Another surprise, she told DW, was the lack of environmental benefits from reduced working hours during the German test as other countries reported a positive impact from offices that could be shut down completely for one day, and fewer commutes to work that resulted in higher energy savings. The reason for this was probably that some German employees took advantage of the long weekends to travel, she said, which reduced any potential energy savings. Study director Backmann stressed that the study was not about advocating for a blanket rollout of the 4-day workweek across all sectors, but rather exploring "an innovative work-time model and its effects."
Carsten Meier from the Intraprenor consultancy added that the positive results of the trial cannot be "automatically translated" into similar gains for every company in Germany.
Too soon to tell (Score:3, Interesting)
A six month test while closely monitored for performance changes... is not indicative of reality.
Do it for a few years without closely monitoring everyone, and then measure the productivity change. If it holds up over time, without someone looking over their shoulders constantly, then it is real.
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Fri meetings moritoriums are similar (Score:4, Interesting)
I was thinking something similar. There's an excitement that comes with getting the benefit of a 4-day work week that is surely going to have employees putting in a bit of extra effort to ensure they don't lose it.
I worked at a company previously where Fri meetings were loosely forbidden, except for emergencies. People got their shit done M-Thu to ensure they didn't have to sit in a stupid meeting on Friday. So long as some people are working on Fri, give your employees Fri off. Remind them that it's a privilege for high productivity and if they fall behind, they're expected to get stuff done on Fri.
Really, I think in the near future with the demographics collapse, most places are going to experiment with new varieties of work arrangements, like half time or reduced time. A LOT of people would love to work a job with 60% of the commitment and 80% of the pay, for example...and that would save money for the companies, who often don't need a full time resource. Since many estimates think most markets are going to run short of qualified workers, we're going to have to figure out ways to accommodate more people as well as motivate them to delay their retirement.
Anyone who has any real experience knows that people that brag about working 60h a week are full of shit and spending most of that time wasting time. Longer hours stop leading to more output at some point, especially if your job requires thought or creativity.
Really, this is a perfect carrot and stick approach....meet your goals and you have Fri off. If things aren't working out and deadlines are missed, come in on Fri. If I were the manager, I would make the day off team by team...if one guy on your team is too far behind, everyone comes in on Fri...make the team's output everyone's responsibility. I had a boss that did that (we all arrive and leave together)...we had to stop once we grew past 6 people, but it made a very close knit and collaborative team. If I finished early, I helped everyone on my team so I can get out of the office faster.
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Anyone who has any real experience knows that people that brag about working 60h a week are full of shit and spending most of that time wasting time. Longer hours stop leading to more output at some point, especially if your job requires thought or creativity.
I have someone on my team like this, constantly working long hours over and above everyone else on the team. It's largely the company's fault by not bothering to hire replacements as people left the company or do adequate training, leaving them the only person remaining who largely knows a lot of the underlying processes.
The problem is they're so overworked, being pulled by a number of departments for their expertise, they look for any excuse to slack off! Asking them a simple question which would normall
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You're working regularly with this person and you're still not aware whether it's a male or a female?
Perhaps that person takes so long to explain things because he or she uses small words so you can keep up.
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You're working regularly with this person and you're still not aware whether it's a male or a female?
I know their gender but I was deliberately being obtuse for two main reasons:
1) I write a number of emails daily to a diverse group of individuals, some of whom use they / them pronouns so I was taking the opportunity to practice.
2) I didn't want gendered stereotypes getting in the way of the importance of the message.
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Okay but first things first. You have to find reasonably sized companies that will suspend performance monitoring for a few years on their employees. Good luck with that.
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suspend performance monitoring for a few years on their employees.
They don't have to suspend monitoring. They just need to do it for more than six months to see if the gains persist when the novelty and excitement wear off, and they need to avoid turning measurements into targets.
Goodhart's law [wikipedia.org]: "When a measurement becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measurement."
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Do it for a few years without closely monitoring everyone, and then measure the productivity change.
Let's use the word "productivity" correctly. Productivity is output per hour worked. What employers will want is the same output in four days instead of five. That's a 25% productivity boost.
If the German workers produced 80% as much while working 80% of the hours, it'd be fair to pay them 80% of their original wage.
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Already been done in the UK. It works.
A 4 day work week should be a major goal for European governments.
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A 4 day work week should be a major goal for European governments.
Why does it need to be a goal of governments?
If a four-day workweek can be implemented without a loss of production, then profit-seeking capitalists will leap at the chance.
Since that's not happening, despite part-time working hours being around for centuries, I'm skeptical that the effect is real.
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Because profit seeking capitalists have proven time and time again that they think you being at your desk is the same thing as productivity.
We had to fight for the 5 day working week and governments had to legislate for things like maximum working hours and minimum wage. It's something capitalism can't solve, quite the opposite in fact.
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Nonsense.
28 million Americans work less than 40 hours per week.
Capitalists have no aversion to employing people for less than full-time.
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Just because some people do it doesn't mean that employers didn't demand far more from other people when they had the opportunity to exploit them. There used to be lots of badly paid jobs demanding well over 40 hours a week in the UK, until they were banned.
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Nonsense.
28 million Americans work less than 40 hours per week.
Capitalists have no aversion to employing people for less than full-time.
And how many of those people working less than 40 hours a week do so of their own volition, vs a company trying to reduce employee hours in order to classify workers as part time so that they don't have to provide the same level of benefits?
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If a four-day workweek can be implemented without a loss of production, then profit-seeking capitalists will leap at the chance.
No, they won't, because that's not how capitalism works.
The capitalist will see their employees doing five days work in four on one side with shareholders screaming for ever higher profits on the other and will make a business decision to have their employees go back to working five days while producing six days worth of work for the same pay - they get the benefit of higher productivity and the profits from that, pleasing shareholders, while you just get more work.
Why does it need to be a goal of governments?
Capitalists will do everything they can to
Interesting, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Much like with UBI trials, there is an inherent fault in these studies because the employees know that it's just an experiment.
The only way to know if this, and UBI, can actually work in a "real world" scenario, is to try them in a real world scenario with no strings attached.
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I agree one reasonably expect that UBI "getting paid for doing nothing" wouldn't last. But 4 day workweek "getting paid for doing a little less" can be durable depending how agreeable is the company leadership. Wikpiedia cites several companies to apply a 4 day workweek law enacted in France in 1996: insurer Macif, agrifood companies Fleury Michon and Mamie Nova; cultural magazine Télérama. The law was repelled in 1998, but these companies chose to continue giving the same conditions to their emp
You misunderstand UBI - it's not money for nothing (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree one reasonably expect that UBI "getting paid for doing nothing" wouldn't last. But 4 day workweek "getting paid for doing a little less" can be durable depending how agreeable is the company leadership.
UBI isn't about money for nothing. UBI is about ensuring everyone has a base level of income. The goal is not for people to sit on their ass, but to be able to have a living wage and equally importantly be vibrant participants in the economy, even if they're not a superstar. UBI is an inevitability...maybe not today, but someday. The goal of technology is to automate work and do things with machines that used to require a human....someday they will succeed. Someday there will be more people than jobs...then what?...well...you can be cold-hearted and say "fuck em...let them starve"...but then who's going to buy your goods and services?
UBI is meant to supplement income for most folks at the bottom...without the bureaucracy of welfare or the stigma. Most would hate life on UBI alone...that's the goal...to make it barely beable...so most would work full time...just feel more freedom to take a sick day or maybe spend a few years being a stay at home mom to raise their kids....as well as lift a lot of people out of poverty, reduce crime, etc.
I'm a huge fan of UBI...as a guy with a good job selling goods and services to people, I need healthy customers. If my countrymen are mostly poor...then so soon shall I be because no no one will buy my employer's goods and services. I'll pay more taxes, but watch crime go down, all my stock investments go up, and notice my employer making greater and greater profits which will either lead to direct raises and bonuses for me or indirect ones in my stock portfolio. I want UBI because I am hard working!
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to make it barely beable...so most would work full time
What about that inevitable time when there are more people than jobs? The majority suffer in a miserable barely tolerable existence while the few fortunate enough to have a job can find some happiness and peace? Sounds like a just slightly better dystopia than just letting them starve.
what about parttime work or retirement? (Score:2)
to make it barely beable...so most would work full time
What about that inevitable time when there are more people than jobs? The majority suffer in a miserable barely tolerable existence while the few fortunate enough to have a job can find some happiness and peace? Sounds like a just slightly better dystopia than just letting them starve.
UBI would likely encourage retirement and part-time work, so there are scenarios where it will help the job situation. Also, remember many want to stay at home and raise their kids, but just can't afford to make ends meet with 1 income....UBI could allow that. However, if we truly are in a state where there's just no work for people to do...well, we have to completely rethink society...the logical thing would be to give everyone a living wage if we were in a post-scarcity scenario. I don't think we'll g
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Now we see if we can get there, or if the oligarchs insist on squeezing everyone else until they have no option but to storm the gates and drag the rich out into the streets.
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These are real-world scenarios.
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These are real-world scenarios.
Don't say that to the people sticking their fingers in their ears and saying, "LA LA LA CAN'T HEAR YOU" anytime allowing employees a little more free time is mentioned as a net positive.
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No idea whether these people have lives so empty that work is all they have or whether they have some other defect.
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No idea whether these people have lives so empty that work is all they have or whether they have some other defect.
They don't want anyone poorer than them to get anything they had to work for because they think that represents a theft from them, while they are ignoring the wealthy having orders of magnitude more that they didn't work for. It can only be prosperity theology, as only religious thinking is this daft. They are worshiping success.
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How pathetic. But does make some sense in a messed up way.
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Not true. They ran the numbets in Switzerland (one of the most expensive countries on the planet) and they work out even for "reasonably comfortable". The Big Lie of the UBI opponents is that many people would stop working. All indications are that is not true. And that is why you run experiments to find out more.
Re:Interesting, but... (Score:4, Informative)
Only anecdotal, but I had the opportunity to take the hours of a five day, 40-hour work week and put them in over four days. It was without any doubt the most productive, happiest time I've ever spent on the job. Every week had a three day weekend, and that was frickin' bliss. Performance evaluations on those of us involved in the experiment were unequivocal. The extra couple of hours from Monday to Thursday meant zero. They had no impact whatsoever on my home life.
Our trial was so successful they made the option available to everybody whose job allowed it. This was before cell phones and the internet, so there was less flexibility for some people.
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I had a job back in the 80s where I normally worked 44hrs over 4 day with 3 consecutive days off.
Was great while it lasted but a recession put an end to that.
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take the hours of a five day, 40-hour work week and put them in over four days.
Interesting, but not related. This trial is about working fewer hours per week for the same pay, not the same number of hours in fewer days per week.
Umlauts are a problem. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Umlauts are a problem. (Score:4, Interesting)
/. struggles to render accents (e.g. Münster) if you post UTF-8, so well done for configuring your browser.
Americans though seem to be allergic to accents. I lived in China for a while, and many American sources drop the accents from Pinyin, making it impossible to correctly pronounce things. I visited Turkey in the summer, or should I say Türkiye? Same problem: many guides and maps online have no accents, missing cedillas, umlauts and breves, which reduces the 29 letter alphabet significantly. This completely changes pronunciation and guarantees you either sound like an idiot or can't be understood.
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But a learner of the langua
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For the examples I gave, I can't speak for Turkish. Maybe for native speakers it's the same as Greek and they can get away with skipping the accents. But for Chinese as tonal language, you have to get the tones right or you say something completely different, and the accents in Pinyin tell you which tone to use. And even when knowing the correct tones, it can still be very hard to pronounce things properly.
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Chinese is a bit odd because there are numerous homophones. Even with tones marked, pinyin can be ambiguous if you only have a small amount of text. Written Chinese is less ambiguous, because many characters have a phonetic part and a disambiguating part (although there's more ambiguity in simplified Chinese than traditional Chinese). If you have a complete sentence in pinyin, you can usually work out what it means properly with or without the tones marked.
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Americans though seem to be allergic to accents.
I think at least part of it is that because we don't use punctuation like this in the English speaking world most of us have no idea how to enter it when using a keyboard. While I know I could look up how online I have absolutely no idea how to type a character with an umlaut off the top of my head for instance. You could even tell me how right now and I will probably have forgotten by the time it actually came in handy not because of any willfulness on my part but because knowing how to type these characte
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No, no, no, it's Munster University https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] .
Such a surprise (Score:3)
Overworking your people is bad for productivity. Of course, the "slave holder" mind-set employers are too stupid to see that.
Soon in the US (Score:5, Funny)
Meanwhile, in the US soon to have a 7 day workweek (none of which is overtime) to make up for all the immigrants we are about to send back.
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Ah yes, the hazards of Exempt status.
On the other hand, how many of those immigrants were properly classed as exempt employees?
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If that's true, then wages should go up to compete for the workers we do have. Goods and services will also raise in price to cover the higher wages and of course you will pay more taxes on higher wages. Sounds like a win win win if you ask me.
People with actual skills will still be able to take weekends off. Have no doubt.
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Right, because you cut grass or do roofing for a living? Clean hotel rooms? Pick beets?
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At least he's not putting kids in cages like Obama did.
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The US gov't has basically lost track of ~300k kids from the torrent of illegals during Biden's 'open border' ... don't give much of a shit about them, then?
Yes, illegal's US-born babies are US citizens, but that doesn't prevent the US gov't from deporting the parents.
If they're not shit-parents, they'll take their little US citizen with them - or are you saying the child being useless to get 'free US residence' for the parents, they won't care about it?
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You aren't sending any immigrants anywhere. Not unless you're going to have gangs walking the streets rounding anyone up who "looks wrong".
How do you find "undocumented" immigrants? They're the opposite of findable - they live in the shadows because they can't participate in proper society, on account of not having the right paperwork. The best you can hope for is to catch some people smugglers with a bus full of future migrants and then "send them back", where at the moment you tend to put them through som
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nah that only affects women, they are already used to working more for less.
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now do it for hours of sleep
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It's a generally applicable rule. You can s/work week/hours of sleep/g and it will still apply.
I see our slashdot mods have never taken a real CS math course so they mod down a math joke. No education , no sense of humor. So sad. Lol
Flawed data from a skewed test? (Score:2)
From the article:
A closer look at the design of the study, however, might raise some doubt about how useful the findings are.
Two companies voluntarily dropped out in the course of the six months, and two others had to be excluded from the evaluation. Of the remaining 41 participating companies, only about a third reduced weekly working hours by an entire day.
Around 20% reduced hours by between 11% and 19% per day, while about half cut work time by less than 10%, or roughly four hours per week. So, in total
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Even the summary says it wouldn't work for every sector of the economy, but at the same time, I know for a fact I've worked at multiple companies where I was neither given nor allowed to find for myself a total of more than 1 day of work every week, and I was actually instructed directly that at all other times for the other 32 hours my job was to just "look busy."
College schedules prove it works (Score:3)
I studied (machining, welding), volunteered then worked for my local community college. Staff love the mostly four-day work weeks that make working there comfy. As a student I preferred to work harder for four days and didn't mind staying late because four day weeks made that painless.
Why not do this? (Score:3)
According to TFA:
That's great! Now how about doing the same optimization and keep the 40 hour week so everyone can get a 20% pay raise?
This sounds suspiciously like finding a $20 bill on the sidewalk. We all know that's impossible because someone would have already picked it up. Although here's a version of that old saw as told by a polysci/economist geek:
Two economists are walking down the street. They see a $20 on the sidewalk.
"Pick it up," says the first, "you saw it before I did."
"I can't," the second replies, "it can't exist. In an efficient market, someone would have already picked it up."
Stunned the first decides to not argue and pockets the $20.
"See!" says the second, "I told you there aren't any $20s lying on sidewalks!"
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It's funny how easily questions are answered and concerns addressed when one reads the entire summary. Productivity isn't staying high only because meeting times were reduced, workers working shorter weeks are using their time more productively as well. These gains are being realized because of less hours worked by the employees.
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Productivity isn't staying high only because meeting times were reduced, workers working shorter weeks are using their time more productively as well. These gains are being realized because of less hours worked by the employees.
I did read the summary. What I wonder is, if they could use their time 25% more efficiently, why not keep working a 40 hour week at the new efficiency level and get 25% more done, thus earning a 25% higher wage? I'd take that deal in a heartbeat: less boring meetings more pay, win win! Is there something about having focused meetings which can only be done four days a week?
I don't know about you but my management has been harping on "use meeting time efficiently" for years. We've been automating processes w
Sick days (Score:2)
Maybe people in other countries were taking more sick days as recovery/recharge days and the Germans were only taking sick days when actually sick, which presumably wouldn't change much?
Personal data point (Score:2)
This is just anecdotal evidence:
I am working in sales, so my metrics are very clear: how many Euros do I pull in.
When I went to a 4-day-week three years ago, all my numbers went up and stayed there since.
I took a 20% hit on my base salary, but the higher commission compensated it.
I claim ... (Score:2)
I claim "Hawthorne effect" here.
1 - Participants knew they were being studied
2 - There was (seemingly) good management rather than shitty, and
3 - Participants (may have) wanted the experiment to succeed.
There was a Dilbert cartoon (before Scott Adams revealed his true colours) that was Alice boasting she's negotiated to have a 50% work week. Wally asked if if she agreed to come in in case of emergencies, "Yes", to which Dilbert announced her that she's just agreed to a 50% pay cut. And Alice having a surpri
Conservative Dogma may be wrong (Score:1)
Hawthorne (Score:2)
If you have ever taken management 101 (I know, not on /.),
you will realize that this is most probably due to the Hawthorne effect.
Which - for the rest of you - notes that performance will improve if somebody
like a researcher is taking a strong interest in how you do your work.
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I believe this is also known as the "wiring room experiments"? ...Where making the lights brighter increased productivity, and making the lights dimmer increased productivity.
VW has an answer (Score:1)
Soon VW will be implementing a new 0-day work week for some of their factory workers, but contrary to the article there will be a productivity hit.
Claim contrary to reality (Score:2)