Anyone done this kind of four day week? Presumably one can't let everyone work Monday - Thursday and all have Friday off, or business comes to a complete halt on (all) Fridays every week which I'm guessing isn't really part of the plan.
Does it typically mean people have their four working days randomly allocated? Does that change in some kind of cycle? If so, is that not somewhat disruptive if - say - a couple people are working together on something but one of them is off Monday and the other on Tuesday, they won't be able to work together until Wednesday?
How could weekends possibly work? Society would come to a complete halt on Saturday and Sunday! For religious reasons we can all accept Sundays off, but Saturdays? Madness!
I think your problem is thinking of this council as a "business".
If a local council was a business there would be a fire in the basement one Sunday morning.
Follow on - I do a "kind of" 4 day work week at full pay. four full days then 2 hours of wash up on the Friday. Its highly sector dependant to make it work, couldn't possibly work for everyone if we had SLA's to meet.
> If a local council was a business there would be a fire in the basement one Sunday morning.
Sorry I've read this sentence a couple times and I cannot discern the meaning. Perhaps it is a British expression I do not know. Can you elaborate? Why would there be a fire in the basement? Why on one Sunday morning? Why once?
Because that's the best time to burn it down for the insurance money with minimal human cost.
My point is its not a business, it doesn't have to make money and if it was held up to the standards of a commercial enterprise you'd have no better solution then to burn it down.
This is in response to OP's idea that you need to fulfil some kind of service requirement, or even run an effective service at all.
> I think your problem is thinking of this council as a "business"
I wasn't aware I had a problem :) I've been reading about trials of four day weeks for a while[0]. Strangely (or not so strangely) stories like these are always suspiciously light on specifics(!)
From [0]: "The trial is based on the 100:80:100 model – 100% of pay for 80% of the time, in exchange for a commitment to maintain 100% productivity"
It talks about "an extra day off", but doesn't mention the word Friday. So how do the extra days off get allocated?
"We’ll be analysing how employees respond to having an extra day off, in terms of stress and burnout, job and life satisfaction, health, sleep, energy use, travel and many other aspects of life"
That article claims a fish and chip shop is participating. If you have retail staff working - say - four days per week instead of five, you obviously need more recruit and pay for additional staff to cover the lost day, or your shop loses an additional day's trading each week.
Are they hoping to cook and sell more fish per hour to cover this additional cost due to staff productivity increases? Or convince all customers to purchase the same overall amount of fish and chips each week but to do it over fewer days?
Must confess I've never considered how to increase productivity in a fish and chip shop :)
My company is on a four-day week. We work Monday to Thursday and just close on Fridays. We're transitioning to a three-day week (dropping Mondays) in January.
We're a small software firm, so this obviously may be less feasible for a City Council.
> My company is on a four-day week. We work Monday to Thursday and just close on Fridays. We're transitioning to a three-day week (dropping Mondays) in January
Wow, sounds good. Are there reductions in pay associated with the change?
No, but we are moving from a 10:00-16:00 workday to 09:00-17:00, so we're theoretically going to end up working 21 hours rather than 20 per week. There's no clocking in/out, so I think it'll work itself out.
Good few folks in my company here in Germany do it, it's pretty common. But it's 80% time for 80% pay. I don't have any metrics in terms of productivity, but my personal impression (coming from freelance life before this) is that the corporate world is so incredibly unproductive and inefficient, you can pretty easily remove 1 - 2 days from the working week and remain as productive.
We're a small B2B automation systems integrator... We do simply let everyone work tens on Monday-Thursday and not come in on any Friday from June to September.
Business does come to a complete halt on Fridays every week, we just schedule service work, installs, meetings, vendor shipments, etc. for Monday-Thursday.
You might be surprised to learn that the sky does not fall down. Sure, if a customer has a disastrous issue on a Friday, I'll typically get called to remote in and help fix it, but that happens maybe once a month? And if it takes until Monday to resolve the issue, the world does not come to an end.
> You might be surprised to learn that the sky does not fall down.
I seem to have stepped on toes with my question, that really wasn't my intention. I'm currently self employed so can work as much or as little as I like, but that has pretty direct consequences for me!
> Business does come to a complete halt on Fridays every week [..] Sure, if a customer has a disastrous issue on a Friday, I'll typically get called to remote in and help fix it, but that happens maybe once a month?
So, does the business answer the phones and emails on Fridays for support calls? What about sales calls?
A colleague in a former workplace tried to quit and was persuaded to stay by the offer of a four day week on the same salary (talented guy, difficult and expensive to replace). From what I could tell the result was that he was highly motivated, continued to be very productive and of course was much happier. I think he took Mondays off, and would use the extra day to go on longer trips at the weekend (often surfing iirc) that he wouldn't have otherwise been able to. I really envied him :)
I'm not sure if I'd gone with that given that there are a number of statutory holidays on Monday: if you take Fridays off then there'd be times when you only have three-day weeks.
Where I'm at we have Victoria Day, Civic/Simcoe Day, Labour Day, Thanksgiving:
Ah yeah but I can't remember the exact details, could be that he stacked an extra day onto his weekend in those cases. Thinking about it though, even if he "lost" a public holiday that's still a really nice amount of free time all things considered :D
That sort of thing is very country-specific - in the UK, for example, all bank holidays (except 25-26 December), are set by law on Monday or Friday. That's not the case in most European countries.
I took Wednesdays off for about 5 months once to burn PTO (the accrual policy was changing, and I would have been over the cap at the end of the year). That wasn't systemic, most of my colleagues either took more vacations before the change or planned to take some bigger blocks.
It was nice to have a day off in the middle of the week, although I had some occasional meetings, I needed to take, which was bleh. It was also super easy to schedule interviews when I was recruited by a former coworker. Unfortunately, I didn't end up fully using my FMLA newborn leave, because it needed to be used in week long chunks and I had planned to burn PTO first, and use the FMLA weeks later, but I switched jobs instead (and went back to a 5 day week)
I did many years of 4 day work weeks, although I was hourly (and doing a "less skilled" labour type job). It was pretty much a 24/7 type operation, so everyone would have four days of work in a row, but would be evenly distributed throughout the week. Everyone loved it. It was 10 hour days (40 hours a week) vs a normal shift which would be 8 hours (but 5 days a week). That extra day off a week is totally worth the extra 2 hours a day.
Why is paying people for working a day less great? I think most residents would prefer to see their bins emptied more frequently than have council workers get a day off while being paid for it.
Well to be fair Glasgow City Council will still be able to collect the same amount of council tax regardless of how well the provide services. It's easy to do a four day week if there is no relation between performance and income.
Not that great. UK is facing a cost of living crisis caused by too much government spending and in particular governments paying people to not work.
There's a second issue because it's Glasgow. For Scotland to become viably independent it needs to wean itself off English subsidies. This sort of thing is the opposite and reinforces the general impression that the Scots aren't serious about independence. They can't afford even their current levels of spending on their own. Really is not affordable even with the rest of the UK involved, but especially not alone.
The title for this article is misleading. It only says they've agreed to a study to investigate it. There's a world of difference between that and actually approving a 4-day week for all.
> Doesn't this mean the Glasgow City Council is overstaffed and should layoff 20% of their workers?
Only if you think 100:100:100 for 40 hours a week is possible / realistic. Are you honestly operating at 100% effectiveness for every hour you work all week?
No, I'm certainly not operating at 100% for 40 hours. Maybe 25 good hours. I wonder how many hours Glascow City Council is hard at it currently? Maybe they could go down to a half a workday per week with no noticeable loss of productivity.
So we think staff will work 100% for 4 days? Presumably the lost 20% is making tea, chatting to coworkers about sports, checking personal messages, pooping etc, seems unlikely that behaviour would change and productivity get to 100%. So 100:80:64 would be my guess as the outcome, a loss for tax payers.
The argument (and I’m not saying it is or isn’t backed by sufficient evidence because I don’t know) is that the lost 20% is because we are physiologically not capable of retaining mental focus for 8 hours a day for 5 days in a row. There is some evidence for an equivalent claim for physical labour, which is part of the reason we do 40 hour weeks rather than 70, though again I don’t know how good the evidence really is.
To put it another way, think of this as the mental equivalent to why we can’t run marathons at the pace we can do a 100m sprint.
This is pretty great, but I hope they use it to investigate whether it makes workers 20% more productive rather than as a way to possibly justify eliminating 20% of their staff. The only real news I've seen relating to Glasgow City Council recently [0] suggests they're relatively progressive so hopefully it's the former.
This is explained in the article. The intent is to evaluate 100:80:100, which is 100% pay for 80% of the hours in return for a commitment to maintain 100% productivity.
That seems pretty unlikely to happen. I guess they can actually measure productivity for some council activities (e.g. rate of processing planning applications) so we should get some interesting data.
I wonder how they hope to avoid the "guys if we all work really hard for this short study we get Fridays off forever!" effect.
I wish they would start those studies with private companies. I am not sure about what is the situation in Glasgow but here in Toronto and in Canada in general the situation with the government services in many areas is atrocious. They are already behind in so many areas and keep blaming everything on Covid despite the fact that nothing prevents them to do their work from home.
In any case those bloodsuckers should be working more, not less. Apology to those who actually work and strive to serve the people.
I hope they land on Mondays off, rather than Fridays. For us 5 day rubes, getting stuff done on Friday IMO helps keep our weekends less worrisome, and jobs under city council purview would be (I imagine) rare but important interactions for the average citizen.
I take Tuesdays off. It’s nice to come in Monday after the weekend and sort some things out, then have Tuesday off, then have three days together. Sometimes I switch it but four days together is a lot when you’re not used to it!
Well, this is not a downside for me as I never travel, and my schedule is fluid (I basically work alone) so in the rare event I travel, I can just shift the day off to Monday. Or just take Monday off, keep my normal Tuesday off, and have a nice loooong weekend.
My 4 day WW dream is 4 day weekends (Fri + Mon) off, alternating with a standard 2 day weekend.
But to your point, a 4DWW does have to mean any give office is open only 4 days. It, at least in theory, only means less ppl available on any given day. That said, I'd prefer to see more stores and services - gov or not - open later on Thur so I can get done what needs to get done with adding friction to a day off.
Great. Another benefit for the salaried over the hourly. I couldn't find a solid answer, but I very much doubt that this pronouncement comes with a 20% raise for everyone paid by the hour.
Exactly. They don't have hourly workers. Neither do Amazon nor Uber. So they can grant all sorts of holidays to "all employees", which really just means the managers.
A 4-day week applicable only to office-working executives and managers is no victory for labor. Imho it is more a failure.
That would be a 4x10 which isn't the only option for a 4 day work week. TFA describes the council seeking a 20% reduction in hours worked at the same pay not a crunch of the same hours into a 20% smaller timespan.
I don't think so. I think this is an actual reduction in the amount of time spent at work, hence the promise to maintain productivity. I think this is a three-day weekend every weekend.
The linked article's title is actually "Glasgow council four-day week on full pay moves closer after study agreed" which is what this should be changed to.
I suspect the adage about "a measure which becomes a target ceases to become a good measure" applies here
Part of the reason most workers work a set number of hours rather than negotiating piecework or payment delivered on achieving KPIs or set objectives, after all, is that organizations seldom have a concrete idea of what output they expect over a period of time. (And some of the objectives that are clearly defined and stable over time like "drive this bus route" or "answer calls during this period" actually collapse quite well into working hours)
For things like this (whether they "approved" it or are just investigating it or whatever), how does the ability of the government to legislate and regulate intersect with the rights of people to do as they please?
For example, if I make and sell widgets (i.e. I own a "company" of one), and I wanna work 6 days a week, can the government prevent me from doing that? If someone wants to work with me (i.e. join my "company") and I don't want them to (i.e. I won't hire them) if they're not also working 6 days a week like I am, can the government prevent me from refusing them?
I guess I'm asking why a city council is investigating this rather than companies themselves. Or rather than regulating, are they going to offer tax breaks to incentivize companies to adopt a four-day workweek? I'm just confused about what interest they have in doing this.
Disclaimer: I'm a fucking idiot and I have no idea what I'm talking about, just asking questions because I'm clueless.
As others have pointed out - it’s the city of Glasgow trialing this work week.
That said, in most (all?) countries, workplace is a regulated relationship. That means there are labor laws and you as an employer of others have to follow them. Even as an employer of self, some laws still apply. In some places you cannot require 6 days a week, in others you can but must pay overtime. As a society we agree on certain concessions with our rights in order to protect others. If you don’t like the concessions a given society has made, look for one that meets your values better.
British Councils aren't like US States if that's what you're thinking - they're just local administrative systems. They manage your trash collection - they aren't legislating or regulating anything to anyone.
> are they going to offer tax breaks to incentivize companies to adopt a four-day workweek?
I'm going to assume you're asking if they'll offset any losses that occur as a result of employees only being 80% as productive.
You may be surprised to discover that studies overwhelmingly demonstrate that productivity is higher across 4 days than across 5 days. That's right, higher output in less time, all thanks to employees being better rested and coming to work in a better mental state.
Courtesy of the taxpayer. This is why we need less government, not more. These jobs are already useless, now to add insult to injury, they’re giving themselves all sorts of nice benefits while their constituents starve (YOY inflation is 10% in GB).
If the results of the study is negative, what are the odds that we'd have a nicely upvoted follow-up post here spreading those results for all to read? I'd guess virtually zero.
77 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadDoes it typically mean people have their four working days randomly allocated? Does that change in some kind of cycle? If so, is that not somewhat disruptive if - say - a couple people are working together on something but one of them is off Monday and the other on Tuesday, they won't be able to work together until Wednesday?
What you've described isn't far from reality.
If a local council was a business there would be a fire in the basement one Sunday morning.
Follow on - I do a "kind of" 4 day work week at full pay. four full days then 2 hours of wash up on the Friday. Its highly sector dependant to make it work, couldn't possibly work for everyone if we had SLA's to meet.
Sorry I've read this sentence a couple times and I cannot discern the meaning. Perhaps it is a British expression I do not know. Can you elaborate? Why would there be a fire in the basement? Why on one Sunday morning? Why once?
My point is its not a business, it doesn't have to make money and if it was held up to the standards of a commercial enterprise you'd have no better solution then to burn it down.
This is in response to OP's idea that you need to fulfil some kind of service requirement, or even run an effective service at all.
I wasn't aware I had a problem :) I've been reading about trials of four day weeks for a while[0]. Strangely (or not so strangely) stories like these are always suspiciously light on specifics(!)
From [0]: "The trial is based on the 100:80:100 model – 100% of pay for 80% of the time, in exchange for a commitment to maintain 100% productivity"
It talks about "an extra day off", but doesn't mention the word Friday. So how do the extra days off get allocated?
"We’ll be analysing how employees respond to having an extra day off, in terms of stress and burnout, job and life satisfaction, health, sleep, energy use, travel and many other aspects of life"
That article claims a fish and chip shop is participating. If you have retail staff working - say - four days per week instead of five, you obviously need more recruit and pay for additional staff to cover the lost day, or your shop loses an additional day's trading each week.
Are they hoping to cook and sell more fish per hour to cover this additional cost due to staff productivity increases? Or convince all customers to purchase the same overall amount of fish and chips each week but to do it over fewer days?
Must confess I've never considered how to increase productivity in a fish and chip shop :)
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jun/06/thousands-w...
We're a small software firm, so this obviously may be less feasible for a City Council.
Wow, sounds good. Are there reductions in pay associated with the change?
Business does come to a complete halt on Fridays every week, we just schedule service work, installs, meetings, vendor shipments, etc. for Monday-Thursday.
You might be surprised to learn that the sky does not fall down. Sure, if a customer has a disastrous issue on a Friday, I'll typically get called to remote in and help fix it, but that happens maybe once a month? And if it takes until Monday to resolve the issue, the world does not come to an end.
I seem to have stepped on toes with my question, that really wasn't my intention. I'm currently self employed so can work as much or as little as I like, but that has pretty direct consequences for me!
> Business does come to a complete halt on Fridays every week [..] Sure, if a customer has a disastrous issue on a Friday, I'll typically get called to remote in and help fix it, but that happens maybe once a month?
So, does the business answer the phones and emails on Fridays for support calls? What about sales calls?
I'm not sure if I'd gone with that given that there are a number of statutory holidays on Monday: if you take Fridays off then there'd be times when you only have three-day weeks.
Where I'm at we have Victoria Day, Civic/Simcoe Day, Labour Day, Thanksgiving:
* https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/public-...
Throw in Family Day for Ontario.
Plenty of floating days as well of course (July 1, December 25).
It was nice to have a day off in the middle of the week, although I had some occasional meetings, I needed to take, which was bleh. It was also super easy to schedule interviews when I was recruited by a former coworker. Unfortunately, I didn't end up fully using my FMLA newborn leave, because it needed to be used in week long chunks and I had planned to burn PTO first, and use the FMLA weeks later, but I switched jobs instead (and went back to a 5 day week)
https://www.glasgowlive.co.uk/news/glasgows-rat-problem-made...
> Staff have little enough work to do that they can reduce their work week by 20%
Overstaffing / underfunding, two sides of the same coin.
There's a second issue because it's Glasgow. For Scotland to become viably independent it needs to wean itself off English subsidies. This sort of thing is the opposite and reinforces the general impression that the Scots aren't serious about independence. They can't afford even their current levels of spending on their own. Really is not affordable even with the rest of the UK involved, but especially not alone.
https://4dayweek.io/companies
I do see your point though - it could've been a bit clearer
Council workers are a separate group of people from the councillors who made the decision.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(Submitted title was "Glasgow City Council approves 4-day week on full pay".)
100% pay, 80% hours, 100% productivity.
> Doesn't this mean the Glasgow City Council is overstaffed and should layoff 20% of their workers?
Only if you think 100:100:100 for 40 hours a week is possible / realistic. Are you honestly operating at 100% effectiveness for every hour you work all week?
To put it another way, think of this as the mental equivalent to why we can’t run marathons at the pace we can do a 100m sprint.
[0] - https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/20183796.queens-jubilee-...
if they have any spare funds, they will find a way to spend them
it's wonderful to not be bound by the profitability rigidities
I wonder how they hope to avoid the "guys if we all work really hard for this short study we get Fridays off forever!" effect.
In any case those bloodsuckers should be working more, not less. Apology to those who actually work and strive to serve the people.
Would not Thursday just come to “feel” like Friday?
That feeling MUST come on the day called Friday, though.
There’s a nascent religious movement here if you want it enough. “Fellowship to keep Friday feeling like Friday”
But to your point, a 4DWW does have to mean any give office is open only 4 days. It, at least in theory, only means less ppl available on any given day. That said, I'd prefer to see more stores and services - gov or not - open later on Thur so I can get done what needs to get done with adding friction to a day off.
A 4-day week applicable only to office-working executives and managers is no victory for labor. Imho it is more a failure.
I don't know about Uber, but Amazon has tons of hourly workers - over 750k in fact.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/14/amazon-to-hire-125000-employ...
Does anyone know how the baseline "productivity" will be measured?
And what happens to workers that do not meet the productivity? Do they go back to the 5-day week?
Part of the reason most workers work a set number of hours rather than negotiating piecework or payment delivered on achieving KPIs or set objectives, after all, is that organizations seldom have a concrete idea of what output they expect over a period of time. (And some of the objectives that are clearly defined and stable over time like "drive this bus route" or "answer calls during this period" actually collapse quite well into working hours)
For example, if I make and sell widgets (i.e. I own a "company" of one), and I wanna work 6 days a week, can the government prevent me from doing that? If someone wants to work with me (i.e. join my "company") and I don't want them to (i.e. I won't hire them) if they're not also working 6 days a week like I am, can the government prevent me from refusing them?
I guess I'm asking why a city council is investigating this rather than companies themselves. Or rather than regulating, are they going to offer tax breaks to incentivize companies to adopt a four-day workweek? I'm just confused about what interest they have in doing this.
Disclaimer: I'm a fucking idiot and I have no idea what I'm talking about, just asking questions because I'm clueless.
That said, in most (all?) countries, workplace is a regulated relationship. That means there are labor laws and you as an employer of others have to follow them. Even as an employer of self, some laws still apply. In some places you cannot require 6 days a week, in others you can but must pay overtime. As a society we agree on certain concessions with our rights in order to protect others. If you don’t like the concessions a given society has made, look for one that meets your values better.
I'm going to assume you're asking if they'll offset any losses that occur as a result of employees only being 80% as productive.
You may be surprised to discover that studies overwhelmingly demonstrate that productivity is higher across 4 days than across 5 days. That's right, higher output in less time, all thanks to employees being better rested and coming to work in a better mental state.