I'd be interested in a study that looked at 5x6 or something similar. Sure there's 1 less day to the weekend but those shorter work days allow you to do more after work.
That sounds like a recipe for working more hours and severely curtailing being able to do activities with other people.
My main objection to the 4-day workweek is it optimizes for people who want a shorter workweek with a possible tradeoff of curtailing the ability to take big chunks of time.
Yes. Because people end up working extra hours on the days they're working, especially if they have a commute, and they just have the overhead of getting settled in the now 6-day workday. Furthermore, weekends are the time a lot of people get together for activities.
I think its 6 hours for 5 days a day not 5 hours for 6 days a week. I agree with your point that when people do work on a day its easy coerces them work longer hours that day.
I think you are correct. I was thrown off by the one less weekend day but I think that was relative to a 4-day work week--not the status quo. I'd still rather than the 4-day week and/or just more vacation days in general.
I think they were contrasting the number of days in the weekend to the other possible reduced hours proposal: 4 days, 8 hours (so 3 day weekends), and suggesting 5 days, 6 hours (2 day weekends, one less than the alternative).
Different priorities for different people, I don't mind doing a few hours but really value having time to exercise, cook, and have general free time. I don't think 10 hour days would leave me with much time to do the things I want every day.
I agree, everyone will have different priorities. A ten hour day still leaves me around six hours of awake time, so I could fit everything else I wanted into that time and then enjoy the heck out of the four completely open days I had left.
I don't have a study, but an anecdote: for the last 18 months or so, I've worked 32 hours a week. Originally, I thought I would work 4x8, but as time went on, I really enjoy working 5 or 6 or 7 hours a day, depending on my desire and the work needing to be done.
It's really nice to be able to not set an alarm and just wake up and work whenever you're ready or be able to take an afternoon off and take the kids to the park if you feel like it.
> That was all while companies reported revenue largely stayed the same during the trial period last year and even grew compared with the same six months a year earlier, according to findings released this week.
It’s really too soon to tell the results. As long as you don’t shut down, most companies’ revenue is affected more by what they did in the medium term past than the recent past.
Are there any metrics of productivity that companies could track which would be forward indicators rather than lagging indicators?
I know people who are happy working for 80h a week when work has purpose. I know people who work 4 days a week and they hate their job and are unhappy. I think hours don't matter, you should give freedom to your employees and make sure they enjoy and find purpose in work they do.
Doing the dishes has a purpose, but I still don't want to spend 80 hours a week doing them, especially not at the rates it would pay. Lots of meaningful work is also quite hard work that has an upper limit even if it is purposeful.
I worry about publication bias with these studies.
If a researcher finds the counter-intuitive results that working less leads to equivalent or better outcomes, it will be a headline.
If a researcher finds that working less leads to getting less work done, who would publish it? It won't get media headlines, but even scientific journals will not accept the results.
What? No you don't. Each individual firm uses their own metrics to decide these things. How would one even measure or quantify a "bad thing to humanity"?
Context is important. What's being discussed is general work week trials, and the idea that nobody would publish a paper that demonstrates working less = decline in work done.
Individual firm metrics are useless to even bring up here.
(Almost) No one would argue that working less for the same exact output is worse than working more. That flies in the face of the most basic ideas in economics.
The question is finding the balance, work that produces productive things people value. And it turns out, free market economic systems are pretty good at democratically converging on answer.
Furthermore, there absolutely are jobs where people will get more work done in five days than in four. Lots of people would prefer to work four days but there is pretty obviously not a universal rule that they'll get as much work done.
We're in the same boat now with in-office vs. work-from-home studies.
Though I'd argue there's also a bias in that there are likely very few researchers choosing to hypothesize the five day work week is more productive, structuring the study to confirm that, and executing the study.
> but even scientific journals will not accept the results.
What? What are you talking about? Why would a scientific journal not accept it, if it's a properly done study that contradicts recent results?
Furthermore, there are plenty of "water is wet" studies that get published all the time—some of which are confirming things we "know", but don't have solid scientific data on, others of which are doing replications of existing studies. (I suppose you probably wouldn't get much traction with studies that rehash very old, many-times-replicated results...)
I don't think scientific journals work the way you think they do.
Yea, thats why proving that a 4 day week doesn't impact "revenue growth" is important. It removes an argument companies can have against legislature to push it, or employee demands.
Even something simple like google giving out free food increased employee happiness which translated to revenue growth from better workers. So it's not obvious that a 4 day week can't work, and at some companies a 4 day week could probably.
What I see from people I know at different companies is that Friday--and especially Friday afternoon--has sort of gotten normalized as a sort of wind down into the weekend day. Minimal number of meetings. People catch up on some reading. Stuff like that. People aren't fully off in general but they're cleaning up from the week, getting organized for the next week, and maybe closing their computer early.
So, while most companies aren't on a 4-day workweek, a fair number have at least some percentage of employees who are on sort of an informal 4+ schedule.
Even 10 years ago, while working at an online marketing agency, we started “happy hour” every Friday around 1pm. Many people unofficially left the office at noon. This was just considered “casual fridays” which sort of translated to “work if you want”.
Now I work for a company that doesn’t have official 4 day weeks but it’s well known you can tell your manager you won’t be working most fridays and so long as your productivity is reasonable, managers are happy to oblige. So it’s “4 day workweek if you want it”
I think ya, a lot more people work 4 days per week than any data collection would suggest
I work at a full remote company in a similar situation. On the record, yes we work Friday, but it’s silently accepted you don’t make sweeeping changes to our products and organize intense meetings on Friday. And if you take a half day, nobody will judge you as long as you’re Not blocking anything important
One thing that I've experienced is making Friday a "non essential work" work day. Its a day to do small tasks that have piled up over the week, do some clean up, and otherwise try and figure out what the next week looks like.
What made this really work IMO is that if someone needed to sync on something or get a context download Fridays became the day to do it because no one would have an excuse to not do some knowledge sharing. Toss in grabbing lunch and coffee with other coworkers and it ends up being a great way to build company cohesion and foster cross-team/org relationships.
And, if you decide to leave after lunch to play tennis no one is going to give you the side eye.
> What I see from people I know at different companies is that Friday--and especially Friday afternoon--has sort of gotten normalized as a sort of wind down into the weekend day.
The question is, if you had a 4-day work-week, would Thursdays then become normalized as the day people wind down?
Congrats, you have mastered applying the slippery slope fallacy like a true capitalist. I will now offer you an executive position, where you will mostly schmooz and travel, please continue to question the worker's motivations and incentives relentlessly during your time here.
That is not a slippery slope fallacy. It would be a fallacy if gp then concluded that 4-day workweek would end up in 0-day workweek.
It is entirely reasonable to expect people might be more lax on the last day of the week, defeating the argument that we might as well have Friday's off because noone's working hard anyway.
The crux of it is that we’ve gotten so much more productive in the last four decades and most of the gains (at least in the US) are going to the wealthiest who own the vast majority of securities.
Could the 3 day week be next? Maybe! Let’s try the 4 day work day first so labor can get some of those gains by way of work life balance. Otherwise, this power balance shift will occur naturally as the developed world ages and the share of productive workers shrinks year after year (slowly some places, faster others).
Monday off makes a lot of sense, as "observed" holidays (ones that fall on a weekend but are given a by-convention weekday off, by some businesses and, usually, schools) are often Mondays.
> Monday off makes a lot of sense, as "observed" holidays (ones that fall on a weekend but are given a by-convention weekday off, by some businesses and, usually, schools) are often Mondays.
And this is why this year I chose Friday as my day off.
edit: @yamtaddle: to be clear, I am on a 4-day workweek and I am paid for 4 days. I have to be really disciplined in shutting off work computer on Thursday (still working on that). No children for the moment, but it's clear to me I would choose a Monday off if that was the case.
Totally agree for more time off for parents and children.
Heh—I mean, a lot of workplaces don't give those observed days off, but schools do, so it'd be convenient for parents if they were also off on those days, and it might make it an easier sell to businesses.
i created this propaganda site to try to help formalize informal fridays -- with the ultimate goal of making them go away completely -- i.e. a 4-day work week:
IMO, there's a big difference between 4+ and a formal 4 day policy.
In a formal 4 day policy I can be fully offline, fully disconnected, free from guilt or feeling bad about not actually working.
So while it might sound like 4+ and 4 are close, I don't personally think they're all that close. I am the type of person though who generally works through Friday solidly, because I'm expected to, even though other people take that time much more lax.
There is clearly a difference. But it's also the case that informal "wind-down Fridays" at many companies is a much lower bar than a formal 4-day workweek but both companies and people differ.
My cynical view is that those people were happier because they were in a privileged position while the rest of society still functioned regular hours.
Make 4dww universal then ask them again after every service they use start taking 20% longer, being 20% more expensive, their favourite restaurants closing down from the lack of staff, longer lines everywhere from the increased demand for leisure and reduced supply.
Price discovery. It's basic supply and demand. How can you cut short the supply and don't expect an increase in prices? Only if you assume a correspondent decrease in demand - again, as I said, not totally obvious to me. If anything, more free time would lead to more demand for services.
All this 4 day workweek hullabaloo really cements the entitlement of modern capitalist grievance discourse. Of course this won't affect restaurant workers, nurses, retail employees, deliverypeople, sanitation workers, migrant farmers, or any blue collar work that can just shut off 3 days a week and not cause any issues. Before you decide whether you deserve a 4 day work week, think about whether the people who wait on you daily deserve a 6 day work week.
It seems silly to make this argument specifically regarding time when we've structured our society in such a way that certain people's time and labor is more valuable than other peoples'. Why not apply this logic to say restaurant workers, nurses, retail employees etc. deserve to make as much money as software engineers?
Not that I'd disagree with that. Personally, I think it's absurd that someone writing JavaScript for an advertising company for a few hours a day should make more money than a nurse.
Nurses make a lot of money, especially the more specialized and senior ones. CRNAs make more than most software developers. Just about any NP will make over $100k/yr. It's kind of weird to group them together with the retail employee making $9/hr folding shirts or the server making $3.75/hr plus tips at some dive in the middle of nowhere.
We do this weird thing in the US where you are tied so intrinsically to what you do for a living that it's become taboo to say the objectively true (and I would argue, very obvious) thing that some jobs are worth more than others. It's not a bad thing that one person gets paid $200k/yr to type JS into a computer and someone else gets paid $9/hr to fold clothes at Boscov's. It's because anyone can walk in off the street and start folding clothes with no training. That isn't making any comment on the people behind those jobs, just the jobs themselves.
This is what shifts were invented for. It has nothing to do with being able to shut something off—factories run 24/7 without working anyone 168 hours a week.
Sure. I've known nurses that worked 3-day weeks and nurses that worked one week on and one week off.
I don't feel they're especially "entitled."
The argument that one group should suffer because other groups do is a strange one to me. I don't see software engineers asking that we guarantee that other professions work worse hours than we do.
I worked at a startup that did a four day work week. It was awesome for the most part. The problem is, they would rely heavily on the four day work week to be able to pay less in salary, which is completely fair and very worth it to a lot of people. The issue came in when they pretty much explicitly told people they were expected to work on Fridays anyway, defeating the benefit of the four day work week, but allowing them to keep salaries lower and put "four day work week" on job listings.
They've threatened to get rid of it multiple times, claiming it's still a trial period (over a year of having it), which is fine, but they don't mention that it's a trial at all to new hires. I know a lot of the company that would leave in a heart beat if they got rid of it since it was a such a big part of why they chose the job.
I left, got a more interesting job that paid a lot more and they kept trying to get my to stay by referencing the unlimited PTO they gave me but I didn't use (less than a week taken in two years) and the four day work week that I hadn't taken advantage of since I joined. Needless to say, I got a big raise and I work the same amount that I did before.
An extra day off is absolutely additional compensation and is worth a significant amount. It's just that in my (small sample size and limited) experience, it's used as a crutch and there were pretty much expectations that you work on that extra day, negating the time off. I hope most other four day work week companies don't do this and I just had a bad draw, but that's my anecdotal experience.
Sounds like that was simply not actually a 4-day workweek company! My experience working 4-day workweeks (Thursday evening desktop goes off, corp phone gets left at desk) is brilliant, especially mixed with full remote, I would likely give up more than 20% of my salary to have this permanent 3-day weekend! (Shh, don't tell HR)
Well it's good to hear that it's done properly else where! I absolutely agree with the salary difference. I'm early enough in my career (no spouse or children either) that I'm willing to spend more time for more compensation, but I can see myself valuing that extra day off way more in the future as well.
Honestly I think I may be even slightly more productive, but whatever, I make more than I can spend, I don't think any amount of money would make me work 5 days/week (I mean that quite literally, unless it was maybe for a couple months, and in the 1e6 ballpark, my time on earth is just too valuable to me).
I'm guessing this comment is along the lines of "companies don't pay for healthcare in Europe, so this doesn't apply", but there are other sources of overhead. Anything that is not a profit center is a cost center; buying you your workstation and software, having HR around to resolve disputes between employees, etc. Those things still happen in Europe.
I tried multiple times at multiple companies to negotiate an additional month off per year in exchange for a 15% decrease in compensation. I pointed out that giving me 8% of a year off for a 15% decrease in compensation was a pretty good deal. Nobody ever bit, unfortunately. Not even any counters.
Not stupid at all, it sounds wacky. It goes hand in hand with my four day work week really requiring Friday work. At this place, it was frowned upon and straight up said during a company all hands meeting or two that taking time off was heavily discouraged at a time when the company needed as much productivity as possible.
We offered unlimited PTO, which I've found to just be a way to sound really great but in reality they can block PTO if it's over a given amount and look down on you for taking that PTO. It's never an explicit "you will not get a promotion", but you'll get less opportunities, potential for promotion, and such as you're not seen as a "team player" like they bring up during the all hands. It's a crappy thing.
Should I have just taken my time off anyway? Maybe. Working somewhere where you have an actual set amount of PTO has never brought that negative stigma with it. I'm not surprised if this isn't common for unlimited PTO companies, but I've read that the reason companies offer it is because employees take less time off on average.
This sounds like a very bad implementation of 4-day work week and is not representative of my 4-day work week arrangements at my current and previous employers. It's a shame this comment is top of the comments because 4-day work weeks are so gosh darn amazing for employees (and probably employers too!)
Slightly off topic but do unlimited PTO plans compensate employees if they don’t take a certain threshold of time off? If not, unlimited PTO just sounds like a scheme to penny pinch employees.
This is exactly the problem with unlimited PTO. It makes employees to feel guilty about taking time off and allows employers to avoid paying out unused time off when they leave.
I'm not sure it is. For a lot of people here, an ostensible 8-hour workday and an ostensible-10 hour workday are probably not a lot different especially if they're working remote/hybrid.
They really are if you have kids. I basically wouldn't get to see them during those 4 days.
Also, 10 hours really is more than I can consistently do. I'm tired by the end of an 8 hour day. I can do longer days when necessary, but my productivity is not going to be as high if it's every day.
It's so strange to me how opposed to 4 day work week most of the comments here on HN are. It seems like the main grievance people have is how businesses will be affected (despite the study showing negligible or positive impact), while downplaying or ignoring the huge quality of life improvements reported. A business is just a lifeless entity with very little meaning, while your time is the single most meaningful thing to you. Why on earth wouldn't you be singing the positives of this study?
Because you can find a study saying almost anything today. We live in an information rich world. It causes people to favor their anecdotes more.
My question is, are a lot of the 'benefits' simply because people are contrasting it to a 5 day work week? Much of the logic i'm seeing about 4 day work weeks could be applied to a 3 day work week once people get used to 4 days. I'm not seeing anything unique about 4 days that makes it objectively superior.
The main argument I see is less work=greater morale, so lets work less!
Less work leading to greater morale with negligible impact on productivity highly suggests that the extra workday is bullshit and should be done away with.
Maybe that's also true of three days? I'm all for trying it. If it isn't, fine, that's a good argument not to do it.
Could it be not because its the 5th day, but because its the 'final stretch' to the weekend and would therefore apply to any final day of any workweek? In my experience, i've seen the same behavior before holiday weekends. Should workweeks be 3 days on this evidence? Should workweeks be dictated by productivity on the final day? Why? Is 50% productivity better than 0? Should the only important consideration about a company be morale? Should morale be directly tied to quarterly earnings? Why or why not?
Dude, the whole point of this thread is that we literally tested this and reduction to a 4-day from a 5-day was shown to have a negligible impact on productivity!
It's like you're arguing from some other reality, what the actual fuck!?
There's innumerable market sectors where 4 day work weeks wouldn't work. It's proof of how half baked the idea is that it wasn't even addressed. It makes the broadest generalizations with no hedging.
> Because you can find a study saying almost anything today.
That's a strawman argument for this study, which is not anecdotal but a large scale study with a statistically significant cohort.
> Much of the logic i'm seeing about 4 day work weeks could be applied to a 3 day work week once people get used to 4 days.
How do you know until you try? What makes 5 days the optimal number? It's just some historical compromise we settled on with no scientific support, which is the aim of studies like the one in the article.
> The main argument I see is less work=greater morale, so lets work less!
The argument is less time at work = (greater morale + similar/better business outcomes)
>That's a strawman argument for this study, which is not anecdotal but a large scale study with a statistically significant cohort.
I never said it was anecdotal. Quite the opposite. Do you know what p hacking is? The number of methods to distort data without detection is too many to count. It's just a fact of life if you're exposed to enough studies on nearly any subject. Appeals to authority are just that.
>How do you know until you try? What makes 5 days the optimal number? It's just some historical compromise we settled on with no scientific support, which is the aim of studies like the one in the article.
Why not 6? Or 8? Or 2? 1? Define scientific support in this context. Going with a blanket approach to say 4 days a week should be the norm for every industry is quite unscientific. 4 day work weeks for any on call industry would be absurd.
>The argument is less time at work = (greater morale + similar/better business outcomes)
Then why aren't the businesses that already employ it outcompeting fortune 500 companies? Why isn't there clear evidence in the business themselves (being more competitive in their fields)? Why is it only the studies that come up with these results?
Yes, I work in statistics. P-hacking can be detected and should be exposed during proper peer review and by providing underlying data and methods for reproducibility. It would be nonsensical to throw out the entire scientific process and discredit all statistical studies because p-hacking can be done.
> Why not 6? Or 8? Or 2? 1?
Sure, let's try them all. But maybe not 8, because unless you're the Beatles that isn't going to happen.
> 4 day work weeks for any on call industry would be absurd.
Shifts exist for this reason. Nobody is on call 24/7.
> Why isn't there clear evidence in the business themselves?
The study itself showed the business benefits themselves are small. Probably smaller than time variability within a business or across many businesses. The point of the study was not to show business improved but to show that the business outcomes remain similar while employee satisfaction improved. Why wouldn't you want to live in a society where people are happier and business continues as usual?
I think that overall these are good numbers, but I have to push back on the claims about the 4-day workweek improving employee retention. I'd guess that the benefit is due to the fact that the competing offers would force you to go back to 5-day-weeks.
i.e., in a world where everybody had 4-day work weeks, we wouldn't necessarily see less job-hopping.
I'm curious if anybody knows of any 'practical guides' to the four day work week, or toolsets that can help traditional organizations make four day work week a reality. We hear about the 4DWW so often now, but I'd love to actually see how it's done - to be able to bring some suggestions to leadership at my company on how we could actually do that without doing a top-down audit of the company. Of course lots of things are going to be unique per org, but are there any "If you do this, do this instead" that can make the transition easier, or indeed even a feasible thing to broach with coworkers and executives?
Between this and the major push to work from home, it's almost as if people in tech and similar industries are willingly sprinting into replaceability and driving salaries down.
While remote work and four-day work weeks are awesome, these will absolutely incentivize leaders of big companies to find cheaper labor in other countries that are plenty fine with working a full five-day work week. This is great for lifting a lot of people and countries out of poverty but doesn't help the family of four paying down a huge mortgage.
Some leaders will (smartly) realize that it makes no sense to pay employees less just because they are available remotely for fewer hours of the week, but big companies run everything and crush views like this eventually.
Interestingly, I think this will nullify the remote work movement while permanently decreasing average compensation.
If a four day workweek is better and leads to better outcomes, I cannot help but wonder why there are virtually zero companies implementing it.
This would seem particularly effective for hourly employees, where you could supposedly expect to get 90-100% of the same work output, only pay 80% for it, and not change the timeframe on which it's delivered. It would be a huge competitive advantage given how big of an expense payroll is.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] threadMy main objection to the 4-day workweek is it optimizes for people who want a shorter workweek with a possible tradeoff of curtailing the ability to take big chunks of time.
I think its 6 hours for 5 days a day not 5 hours for 6 days a week. I agree with your point that when people do work on a day its easy coerces them work longer hours that day.
It appears you read it as 6 workdays for 5 hours each.
It's possible they're misunderstanding how 5x6 is intended to work, but they are the ones who introduced it to the thread.
It's really nice to be able to not set an alarm and just wake up and work whenever you're ready or be able to take an afternoon off and take the kids to the park if you feel like it.
It’s really too soon to tell the results. As long as you don’t shut down, most companies’ revenue is affected more by what they did in the medium term past than the recent past.
Are there any metrics of productivity that companies could track which would be forward indicators rather than lagging indicators?
So you think the article's mistaken that these workers are happier with reduced hours?
I don't doubt that there are people who are happy working 80h at something they love, but most people are not like that.
If a researcher finds the counter-intuitive results that working less leads to equivalent or better outcomes, it will be a headline.
If a researcher finds that working less leads to getting less work done, who would publish it? It won't get media headlines, but even scientific journals will not accept the results.
Individual firm metrics are useless to even bring up here.
The question is finding the balance, work that produces productive things people value. And it turns out, free market economic systems are pretty good at democratically converging on answer.
Though I'd argue there's also a bias in that there are likely very few researchers choosing to hypothesize the five day work week is more productive, structuring the study to confirm that, and executing the study.
The incentives are all in the other direction.
What? What are you talking about? Why would a scientific journal not accept it, if it's a properly done study that contradicts recent results?
Furthermore, there are plenty of "water is wet" studies that get published all the time—some of which are confirming things we "know", but don't have solid scientific data on, others of which are doing replications of existing studies. (I suppose you probably wouldn't get much traction with studies that rehash very old, many-times-replicated results...)
I don't think scientific journals work the way you think they do.
It's romantic to think they coexist, but in a practical sense they don't intersect at the optimal solution
If you can’t be a good example, you’ll just have to be a terrible warning.
Even something simple like google giving out free food increased employee happiness which translated to revenue growth from better workers. So it's not obvious that a 4 day week can't work, and at some companies a 4 day week could probably.
So, while most companies aren't on a 4-day workweek, a fair number have at least some percentage of employees who are on sort of an informal 4+ schedule.
Now I work for a company that doesn’t have official 4 day weeks but it’s well known you can tell your manager you won’t be working most fridays and so long as your productivity is reasonable, managers are happy to oblige. So it’s “4 day workweek if you want it”
I think ya, a lot more people work 4 days per week than any data collection would suggest
What made this really work IMO is that if someone needed to sync on something or get a context download Fridays became the day to do it because no one would have an excuse to not do some knowledge sharing. Toss in grabbing lunch and coffee with other coworkers and it ends up being a great way to build company cohesion and foster cross-team/org relationships.
And, if you decide to leave after lunch to play tennis no one is going to give you the side eye.
The question is, if you had a 4-day work-week, would Thursdays then become normalized as the day people wind down?
It is entirely reasonable to expect people might be more lax on the last day of the week, defeating the argument that we might as well have Friday's off because noone's working hard anyway.
Could the 3 day week be next? Maybe! Let’s try the 4 day work day first so labor can get some of those gains by way of work life balance. Otherwise, this power balance shift will occur naturally as the developed world ages and the share of productive workers shrinks year after year (slowly some places, faster others).
https://www.statista.com/chart/23410/inequality-in-productiv...
https://www.statista.com/chart/18458/working-age-population-...
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/18/the-wealthiest-10percent-of-...
People work too much --> people slack off at the end of the work week
People work less --> people are less burnt out --> less reason to slack off
Somehow, this getting rolled up into
Thursday is the "new" end of the week --> people will slack off on Thursday
ignores the underlying change and incentives entirely!
And this is why this year I chose Friday as my day off.
edit: @yamtaddle: to be clear, I am on a 4-day workweek and I am paid for 4 days. I have to be really disciplined in shutting off work computer on Thursday (still working on that). No children for the moment, but it's clear to me I would choose a Monday off if that was the case.
Totally agree for more time off for parents and children.
[EDIT] But I do get your point :-)
https://nomeetingsfriday.com/
In a formal 4 day policy I can be fully offline, fully disconnected, free from guilt or feeling bad about not actually working.
So while it might sound like 4+ and 4 are close, I don't personally think they're all that close. I am the type of person though who generally works through Friday solidly, because I'm expected to, even though other people take that time much more lax.
Make 4dww universal then ask them again after every service they use start taking 20% longer, being 20% more expensive, their favourite restaurants closing down from the lack of staff, longer lines everywhere from the increased demand for leisure and reduced supply.
It could work but it's far from obvious to me.
Your words, not mine.
Or are you saying that shorter work weeks will be an excuse to price gouge? That's valid. Any change seems to be an excuse to price gouge.
Price discovery. It's basic supply and demand. How can you cut short the supply and don't expect an increase in prices? Only if you assume a correspondent decrease in demand - again, as I said, not totally obvious to me. If anything, more free time would lead to more demand for services.
Not that I'd disagree with that. Personally, I think it's absurd that someone writing JavaScript for an advertising company for a few hours a day should make more money than a nurse.
We do this weird thing in the US where you are tied so intrinsically to what you do for a living that it's become taboo to say the objectively true (and I would argue, very obvious) thing that some jobs are worth more than others. It's not a bad thing that one person gets paid $200k/yr to type JS into a computer and someone else gets paid $9/hr to fold clothes at Boscov's. It's because anyone can walk in off the street and start folding clothes with no training. That isn't making any comment on the people behind those jobs, just the jobs themselves.
I don't feel they're especially "entitled."
The argument that one group should suffer because other groups do is a strange one to me. I don't see software engineers asking that we guarantee that other professions work worse hours than we do.
They've threatened to get rid of it multiple times, claiming it's still a trial period (over a year of having it), which is fine, but they don't mention that it's a trial at all to new hires. I know a lot of the company that would leave in a heart beat if they got rid of it since it was a such a big part of why they chose the job.
I left, got a more interesting job that paid a lot more and they kept trying to get my to stay by referencing the unlimited PTO they gave me but I didn't use (less than a week taken in two years) and the four day work week that I hadn't taken advantage of since I joined. Needless to say, I got a big raise and I work the same amount that I did before.
An extra day off is absolutely additional compensation and is worth a significant amount. It's just that in my (small sample size and limited) experience, it's used as a crutch and there were pretty much expectations that you work on that extra day, negating the time off. I hope most other four day work week companies don't do this and I just had a bad draw, but that's my anecdotal experience.
We offered unlimited PTO, which I've found to just be a way to sound really great but in reality they can block PTO if it's over a given amount and look down on you for taking that PTO. It's never an explicit "you will not get a promotion", but you'll get less opportunities, potential for promotion, and such as you're not seen as a "team player" like they bring up during the all hands. It's a crappy thing.
Should I have just taken my time off anyway? Maybe. Working somewhere where you have an actual set amount of PTO has never brought that negative stigma with it. I'm not surprised if this isn't common for unlimited PTO companies, but I've read that the reason companies offer it is because employees take less time off on average.
A shift from a 40hr, 5 day workweek to a 32hr, 4 day workweek is utterly different than a 40/5 to 40/4 shift.
Also, 10 hours really is more than I can consistently do. I'm tired by the end of an 8 hour day. I can do longer days when necessary, but my productivity is not going to be as high if it's every day.
My question is, are a lot of the 'benefits' simply because people are contrasting it to a 5 day work week? Much of the logic i'm seeing about 4 day work weeks could be applied to a 3 day work week once people get used to 4 days. I'm not seeing anything unique about 4 days that makes it objectively superior.
The main argument I see is less work=greater morale, so lets work less!
Maybe that's also true of three days? I'm all for trying it. If it isn't, fine, that's a good argument not to do it.
Could it be not because its the 5th day, but because its the 'final stretch' to the weekend and would therefore apply to any final day of any workweek? In my experience, i've seen the same behavior before holiday weekends. Should workweeks be 3 days on this evidence? Should workweeks be dictated by productivity on the final day? Why? Is 50% productivity better than 0? Should the only important consideration about a company be morale? Should morale be directly tied to quarterly earnings? Why or why not?
It's like you're arguing from some other reality, what the actual fuck!?
That's a strawman argument for this study, which is not anecdotal but a large scale study with a statistically significant cohort.
> Much of the logic i'm seeing about 4 day work weeks could be applied to a 3 day work week once people get used to 4 days.
How do you know until you try? What makes 5 days the optimal number? It's just some historical compromise we settled on with no scientific support, which is the aim of studies like the one in the article.
> The main argument I see is less work=greater morale, so lets work less!
The argument is less time at work = (greater morale + similar/better business outcomes)
I never said it was anecdotal. Quite the opposite. Do you know what p hacking is? The number of methods to distort data without detection is too many to count. It's just a fact of life if you're exposed to enough studies on nearly any subject. Appeals to authority are just that.
>How do you know until you try? What makes 5 days the optimal number? It's just some historical compromise we settled on with no scientific support, which is the aim of studies like the one in the article.
Why not 6? Or 8? Or 2? 1? Define scientific support in this context. Going with a blanket approach to say 4 days a week should be the norm for every industry is quite unscientific. 4 day work weeks for any on call industry would be absurd.
>The argument is less time at work = (greater morale + similar/better business outcomes)
Then why aren't the businesses that already employ it outcompeting fortune 500 companies? Why isn't there clear evidence in the business themselves (being more competitive in their fields)? Why is it only the studies that come up with these results?
Yes, I work in statistics. P-hacking can be detected and should be exposed during proper peer review and by providing underlying data and methods for reproducibility. It would be nonsensical to throw out the entire scientific process and discredit all statistical studies because p-hacking can be done.
> Why not 6? Or 8? Or 2? 1?
Sure, let's try them all. But maybe not 8, because unless you're the Beatles that isn't going to happen.
> 4 day work weeks for any on call industry would be absurd.
Shifts exist for this reason. Nobody is on call 24/7.
> Why isn't there clear evidence in the business themselves?
The study itself showed the business benefits themselves are small. Probably smaller than time variability within a business or across many businesses. The point of the study was not to show business improved but to show that the business outcomes remain similar while employee satisfaction improved. Why wouldn't you want to live in a society where people are happier and business continues as usual?
i.e., in a world where everybody had 4-day work weeks, we wouldn't necessarily see less job-hopping.
While remote work and four-day work weeks are awesome, these will absolutely incentivize leaders of big companies to find cheaper labor in other countries that are plenty fine with working a full five-day work week. This is great for lifting a lot of people and countries out of poverty but doesn't help the family of four paying down a huge mortgage.
Some leaders will (smartly) realize that it makes no sense to pay employees less just because they are available remotely for fewer hours of the week, but big companies run everything and crush views like this eventually.
Interestingly, I think this will nullify the remote work movement while permanently decreasing average compensation.
This would seem particularly effective for hourly employees, where you could supposedly expect to get 90-100% of the same work output, only pay 80% for it, and not change the timeframe on which it's delivered. It would be a huge competitive advantage given how big of an expense payroll is.