What I don't see from this article which I would think is an important data point: are they making the same pay as if they worked 8 hours or are they getting paid less?
I don't see how you can say they cost less without that data point.
Additionally, the health care difference would only make them cheaper for the employer (at least in the US) if the insurance companies gave discounts for working 6 hour days. If the 6 hour day people and the 8 hour day people are in the same pool it wouldn't actually save the company money (just the insurance companies)
Just a note that for this study, the government ultimately pays the salaries and for the sick leave - so reducing the sick leave would reduce cost.
[ed: additionally the the government also pays unemployment benefits, so if there was a surplus of nurses, that might activate some people that were unemployed as well]
The nurses who took 6 hour workdays took roughly the same number of sick days two years later as they did at the start. Technically they took 5% fewer days, and perhaps that's statistically significant, but it's not (for lack of a better word) interesting.
The control group is interesting! Why did a group of nurses taking a normal schedule suddenly have such a huge increase in sick days? I get the feeling that something else affected these results that we're not seeing here. I'm skeptical that the 6-hour workday explains this. Can anyone with more experience in the medical industry chime in to say if it's normal for the number of sick days a nurse takes to increase that much over 2 years (for an 8-hour workday)?
People on hackernews are always skeptical and I usually hate that. I'd like to start a trend of being appreciative. This study took two years to complete! It's hard to foresee things happening that could make the data look strange like this. Maybe they should have taken more information, so they could see which trait in the control group had the highest correlation with increased sick days. But I can't say with certainty that I would have thought to do that. Interesting study, at the very least it's an indicator that there's something interesting going on here worth investigating :).
I agree with what you say until you imply skepticism is bad, or that skepticism is at odds with appreciation. I can appreciate and be thankful for research even if I don't trust it or have further questions.
Is it really fair to interpret the parent comment to say "you cannot appreciate or be thankful for research if you have further questions"? Or was this just super deadpan and I got wooshed :)
It's not the skepticism. It's the lack of perspective. You can be perfectly balanced and skeptical, but your readers will not necessarily take away your perspective if you don't provide some amount of contrast/consider different opinions. If you only post skepticism, readers will just always be salty -- and it really sets the tone of discussion for the future.
Makes me wonder if the nurses in the control group were around the nurses working fewer hours or if they otherwise knew each other (unclear to me from the article).
It could just be that the nurses working the extra hours were annoyed that the others were not and so took more days off telling themselves they deserved it since they were working more hours anyway.
It seems to me that an intelligent health insurance company may try and meter how many hours on average that the employees work and charge a premium for putting health risks onto the workers. eg: If on average workers are putting 50hr weeks, then the pool is riskier than they work 30hrs per week on average.
Agree. Unfortunately the moment one insurance company, but not all, starts doing this, companies will flock to those who don't "penalise" premiums for overworking employees. This is the cynical in me speaking.
But it would be collectively good for them, so if enough band together, they can lobby to put the practice into law in some way, or just the 3 biggest insurance companies can agree between themselves to use that pricing scheme. I don't think that's the same as conspiring to keep prices high, which is usually looked down upon.
I don't see how this follows. I thought up a simple mental model of how it could be implemented and I don't see why companies would flock to the insurance companies with no differentiation between hours worked.
Let's simplify and suppose currently all employees are working 40 hours per week and the cost to provide health insurance to them is H.
If it's indeed the case that workers working 30 hours per week have better health outcomes (and thus, lower health costs and lower costs to the person insuring them) then the cost to insure a 30-hour-per-week employee is L, where L < H.
So the first insurance company to capitalize on this fact would set up a two tiered system where it provides health insurance to the 40-hours-per-week employees at H, and health insurance to the 30-hours-per-week employees at some P where L < P < H. They would make a short run profit if P > L. Finally, I don't see how it would induce any "flocking" away from the insurance company doing this by companies that continue to do the 40-hour-week thing. They keep getting the old rate, H, especially if we're only talking about the short-run, first mover scenario as you brought up.
For all of these work reduction policies (6 hour work days, ten hour work days with three day weekends), couldn't organizations simply retain the five day work weeks with eight-hour work days, simply by staggering shifts accordingly? Granted, hand-off will become critical, but I don't think that's an insurmountable issue if processes are adjusted accordingly. This is dependent on specific industries, of course.
I doubt the $1.3m extra per year in investment would break even. Guessing they have ~85 employees at 6 hrs. They would have to save ~$15k per year each which doesn't seem to be supported.
This was my guess based on having recently read "The Rise and Fall of American Growth" when this study first dropped. [1] The argument he makes in the book is that a big part of the productivity jump we saw in the middle of the last century wasn't entirely due to the stimulus of WWII as most people assume, but was a synergy of that plus the reduction of workplace injuries, etc, related to the 40 hour work week.
Was frustrated at the time that they seemed to be jumping to conclusions so quickly regarding something that could be transformative to society.
Having recently finished The Rise and Fall of American Growth myself, I reached the opposite conclusion.
Yes, the decrease from 12+ -> 8 hour workdays helped health and thus productivity and growth as the author persuasively states. But in the final few chapters which look forward rather than back in time, it was my interpretation that the author sees trends in declining hours & labor force participation as headwinds to TFP growth.
It is naturally more inefficient to have more shifts and thus more people commuting, etc. The diminishing health returns from 8 - > 6 hour work days not being enough to make up for this loss in efficiency.
I'm sure the nature of the industry makes the largest difference on the effectiveness of a 6-hour workday. I willing to bet that jobs that rely heavily on critical thinking (like software engineers) would do better to switch.
Is there any company that has a six hour day? Not a contractor or contracting agency, but a regular white-collar business that has full-time employees.
Unfortunately, until we see a company be successful while breaking the rules (not eight hour days, no open workspaces, etc), the world will continue the same. Maybe when we HNers start a company or startup we should actually do what we post about constantly.
I believe that eight hours is too much. Working eight hours a day (plus commute, however short it may be) leaves you little time for leisure when you add the chores of daily life. I rarely care about how the company is affected, so I am glad studies like these exist.
My company has a six hour day since its inception in 2003. We are more than 12 people and we always thought that a eight hour day doesn't add to the productivity. We have an employee who wants to work eight hours and he brings some kind of development support so that works in this context.
There are days where people work longer hours because of a deadline but this is very rare and we always optimized to taking care of our team health. Also, our headquarters are in Buenos Aires, Argentina where a whole team working 6 hours per day is unusual.
I believe that Amazon advertises a job on the HN Who is Hiring that is 30 hours a week. Although I don't know if it is broken down to 6 hours a day five days a week.
You'll find a lot of part-time workers that work 30-35 hours/week, including in IT, because that is the most they can work without being entitled to benefits. The difference in the nature of that work and the benefits may hide any significant differences due to total hours.
There are also plenty of companies where the employees only work a few hours per day but are in the office for 8-10 hours. Take Google, for example. It's fairly easy between gym, meals, massage, sports league, etc to only actually have 30 hours/week allocated for work, even though a person is in the office for 8-9 hours. However, it may be a huge psychological difference to be trying to fill your work day vs. having full control over time.
> There are also plenty of companies where the employees only work a few hours per day but are in the office for 8-10 hours.
I think that pretty much describes every company that's primarily composed of white-collar jobs. Realistically, a company is only going to get ~4 hours a day of actual productivity from an employee at the office.
Or maybe a number ever closer to the Office Space number. I think I recall the main character saying that once all of the distractions, needless interactions with other employees, and 'spacing out' (I took that as low quality sleep with eyes open) were removed only about an hour of actual, real, work was being done.
Particularly for what are really creative arts, a more relaxed day and better quality of life /outside/ of work are probably important positively correlated factors in performance.
A lot of (many?) big companies have a 30 hour week option for white collar employees. The 30 hour option comes with a proportional reduction in pay. Of course, most are still regular full time employees.
The last two places I worked as a software engineer (both big American corps) had some 30 hour a week employees. I'd say less than 15%. Neither employer really advertised it though both had well defined and written corporate structure/policies/benefits in place for it.
This is something that's actually in the process of happening at my workplace. The CEO is trying to reduce our shifts by half, because there isn't enough work for us to do. (He's a poor CEO, we have a terrible reputation throughout the city, and very few people will bother to do business with us.) The manager is fighting it, because if they cut our shifts by half we still pay the same for commuting, so he'll lose most of his staff in the first few days and be stuck with a bunch of untrained new recruits.
I think it would make more sense to try this out on something where the output of the labour is not directly tied to the hours put in. For example in a tax agency, or other welfare agency that we have plenty of in Sweden. Even though there might be interesting findings from lower sick days, happier employees and better quality of the output (happier patients etc), I think it's far more interesting to see this in fields where the output might stay constant even with fewer hours worked. Essentially raising the hourly wage.
I think there are likely many organizational and societal benefits here not listed in the OP article. Many of the comments here seem overly focused a simplistic costs_savings = hours_saved - days_off equation.
Wildly speculative examples (for further research, if you will):
* As quality of care increases, healthcare costs diminish (actually mentioned in the article)
* Workers with free time are more likely to be informed citizens resulting in better policy -- yuge, broad benefits. Spreads the happiness.
* Workers with more time are more raise children that will contribute more to GDP (because, e.g., they have time to help with homework -- I'm not even kidding)
* Healthier workers remain in the workforce longer (adding more to GDP before drawing retirement)
* Healthier workers cost less to maintain (because they're healthier).
* Etc.
Do I know any of these are true? No. But I do know that this is a complex system. Measuring a couple things and thinking you have an answer seems silly to me.
I like your point. But I will like to advance it further. Even if it is reduction in productivity -even after factoring everything-, is production maximization our ultimate social goal?
I though that we established capitalism because allows us to find good ways of producing what we need, so people can be healthier, more educated, happier, and - in general - to improve the citizens well being. But the goal is not to increase production at any cost, but to increase well being. Capitalism is a means to a purpose, Capitalism is not the purpose itself.
So, as you say, to know the economic benefit is difficult. So if we are not sure, applying the measure has other benefits that can make worth it.
Good! The authors of the article should invest in a startup or buy an existing business so they can implement these principles. They can make a fortune and show society what's what.
38 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 83.6 ms ] threadI don't see how you can say they cost less without that data point.
Additionally, the health care difference would only make them cheaper for the employer (at least in the US) if the insurance companies gave discounts for working 6 hour days. If the 6 hour day people and the 8 hour day people are in the same pool it wouldn't actually save the company money (just the insurance companies)
[ed: additionally the the government also pays unemployment benefits, so if there was a surplus of nurses, that might activate some people that were unemployed as well]
https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/i_t8UFPOJVk...
The nurses who took 6 hour workdays took roughly the same number of sick days two years later as they did at the start. Technically they took 5% fewer days, and perhaps that's statistically significant, but it's not (for lack of a better word) interesting.
The control group is interesting! Why did a group of nurses taking a normal schedule suddenly have such a huge increase in sick days? I get the feeling that something else affected these results that we're not seeing here. I'm skeptical that the 6-hour workday explains this. Can anyone with more experience in the medical industry chime in to say if it's normal for the number of sick days a nurse takes to increase that much over 2 years (for an 8-hour workday)?
People on hackernews are always skeptical and I usually hate that. I'd like to start a trend of being appreciative. This study took two years to complete! It's hard to foresee things happening that could make the data look strange like this. Maybe they should have taken more information, so they could see which trait in the control group had the highest correlation with increased sick days. But I can't say with certainty that I would have thought to do that. Interesting study, at the very least it's an indicator that there's something interesting going on here worth investigating :).
It could just be that the nurses working the extra hours were annoyed that the others were not and so took more days off telling themselves they deserved it since they were working more hours anyway.
Let's simplify and suppose currently all employees are working 40 hours per week and the cost to provide health insurance to them is H.
If it's indeed the case that workers working 30 hours per week have better health outcomes (and thus, lower health costs and lower costs to the person insuring them) then the cost to insure a 30-hour-per-week employee is L, where L < H.
So the first insurance company to capitalize on this fact would set up a two tiered system where it provides health insurance to the 40-hours-per-week employees at H, and health insurance to the 30-hours-per-week employees at some P where L < P < H. They would make a short run profit if P > L. Finally, I don't see how it would induce any "flocking" away from the insurance company doing this by companies that continue to do the 40-hour-week thing. They keep getting the old rate, H, especially if we're only talking about the short-run, first mover scenario as you brought up.
Was frustrated at the time that they seemed to be jumping to conclusions so quickly regarding something that could be transformative to society.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13320511
Yes, the decrease from 12+ -> 8 hour workdays helped health and thus productivity and growth as the author persuasively states. But in the final few chapters which look forward rather than back in time, it was my interpretation that the author sees trends in declining hours & labor force participation as headwinds to TFP growth.
It is naturally more inefficient to have more shifts and thus more people commuting, etc. The diminishing health returns from 8 - > 6 hour work days not being enough to make up for this loss in efficiency.
Unfortunately, until we see a company be successful while breaking the rules (not eight hour days, no open workspaces, etc), the world will continue the same. Maybe when we HNers start a company or startup we should actually do what we post about constantly.
I believe that eight hours is too much. Working eight hours a day (plus commute, however short it may be) leaves you little time for leisure when you add the chores of daily life. I rarely care about how the company is affected, so I am glad studies like these exist.
There are days where people work longer hours because of a deadline but this is very rare and we always optimized to taking care of our team health. Also, our headquarters are in Buenos Aires, Argentina where a whole team working 6 hours per day is unusual.
I know other companies here that have optional flexible hours like http://www.7puentes.com, a data science company.
You'll find a lot of part-time workers that work 30-35 hours/week, including in IT, because that is the most they can work without being entitled to benefits. The difference in the nature of that work and the benefits may hide any significant differences due to total hours.
There are also plenty of companies where the employees only work a few hours per day but are in the office for 8-10 hours. Take Google, for example. It's fairly easy between gym, meals, massage, sports league, etc to only actually have 30 hours/week allocated for work, even though a person is in the office for 8-9 hours. However, it may be a huge psychological difference to be trying to fill your work day vs. having full control over time.
I think that pretty much describes every company that's primarily composed of white-collar jobs. Realistically, a company is only going to get ~4 hours a day of actual productivity from an employee at the office.
Particularly for what are really creative arts, a more relaxed day and better quality of life /outside/ of work are probably important positively correlated factors in performance.
My current employer doesn't offer it.
I think there are likely many organizational and societal benefits here not listed in the OP article. Many of the comments here seem overly focused a simplistic costs_savings = hours_saved - days_off equation.
Wildly speculative examples (for further research, if you will): * As quality of care increases, healthcare costs diminish (actually mentioned in the article) * Workers with free time are more likely to be informed citizens resulting in better policy -- yuge, broad benefits. Spreads the happiness. * Workers with more time are more raise children that will contribute more to GDP (because, e.g., they have time to help with homework -- I'm not even kidding) * Healthier workers remain in the workforce longer (adding more to GDP before drawing retirement) * Healthier workers cost less to maintain (because they're healthier). * Etc.
Do I know any of these are true? No. But I do know that this is a complex system. Measuring a couple things and thinking you have an answer seems silly to me.
I though that we established capitalism because allows us to find good ways of producing what we need, so people can be healthier, more educated, happier, and - in general - to improve the citizens well being. But the goal is not to increase production at any cost, but to increase well being. Capitalism is a means to a purpose, Capitalism is not the purpose itself.
So, as you say, to know the economic benefit is difficult. So if we are not sure, applying the measure has other benefits that can make worth it.