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How Does a 9/80 Work Schedule Work Out?
cellocgw writes "My company is in the process of implementing a version of '9/80,' a work schedule that squeezes 80 hours' labor time into 9 business days and provides every other Friday off. I was wondering how this has been implemented in other companies, and how it's worked out for other Slashdot readers. Is your system flexible? Do you find time to get personal stuff done during the week? Is Friday good for anything other than catching up on lost sleep? And perhaps most important, do your managers respect the off-Fridays, or do they pull people in on a regular basis to handle 'crises?'"
I interviewed at a large defense contractor, the office I interviewed at did a 9/80, it sounded great at the time and still does. As for lost sleep... seriously... you work 9-9-9-9-8, 9-9-9-9-off. I doubt the extra hour a day will kill you. If it does, just eat through lunch.
I've worked 9/80's for a couple of years. They're great! It's nice to have a weekday off because you can easily get through a weekend's errands in a day because of the lower crowds, and in my case, no kids to slow me.
As for management respecting the day -- that's like any off-day. You have to enforce it yourself. I've been asked to work on my 9/80 day, and never had a problem agreeing to it. I just swapped it for a different day. Management loved my flexibility (in when I took a day off).
I would always make plans well in advance and make sure that my supervisor knew not only that I had plans, but how much money I had invested in them. The implication was always there -- if your action deprives me of my ability to execute this plan, I am going to charge you the amount noted. I never had to play that card, but that's because I think the strategy worked to secure my days off, either when I had 9/80 or when I was simply planning vacation time.
I'm seriously considering to write into my next contract, language that requires them to make reasonable compensation for travel or entertainment that I have to forego at the company's insistence.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I once worked a job that was 3x12.5, and it was great! It was overnight, and the boss didn't mind if we slept during the downtimes. The staggered schedule also made it that we had a full 7 days straight off every third week (followed by 6x12.5 in 7 days, that was a bit of a killer). Though being overnight in made family life hell for 3 days, the time off more than made up for it.
It's better to burn out than to fade away
My employer offers optional 9/80 schedules. I estimate that 90% of the employees voluntarily choose 9/80. It is great to have at lest 26 three day weekends every year. When holidays fall on Monday, you may get a 4 day weekend.
The off-Friday is well respected by management. The managers generally don't come in either.
An off-Friday is a great time for banking, appointments, the start of vacation, volunteering in your kids' school, etc.
Most people who choose the 5/40 schedule do so because they need to be home early to meet kids at the school bus or because the spouse works a regular schedule and they want to match schedules.
Flexibility is always good. We have core hours from 10:00 to 3:00. Some people come in very early and leave at 3:00 to minimize the time kids are home alone. It can save a lot of child care costs. Others like me regularly come in at 10:00 and leave at 7:00.
I did both 4/40 and 9/80, and I tell you, the first extra hour isn't that noticeable, but going from 9 to 10 hours a day sucked. It means either you arrive at 6am so that you can leave at 5. If you can't get there until 9am, have fun working till 8pm...
I'm back to working 5/40 now, and do indeed miss the 9/80 schedule. One of the best things was the regular 4-day holiday weekends. The accounting calendar was usually arranged so that Fridays off fell before Monday holidays like Memorial Day, etc.
I can see the fnords!
I agree, 9/80 is great. I hired on with a company about a year ago that had just switched to the 9/80 system. There were some issues as everyone adjusted, but it's been great since. I like it so much, I'd view a typical 5/40 as a negative for any future employers.
I found that I didn't miss the extra hour during the week, and the Friday off is great for sleeping in, doctor appointments, or for random things that can't be done on the weekend.
My employer doesn't typically pull people in on the off Friday, but I imagine it happens every once in awhile. Although, I'm sure this varies greatly by company.
Overall, I'd say it's nothing to be scared of as long as the entire company embraces it. It's when portions of the employees are working regular weeks and some are on 9/80 that things tend to fall apart.
I'd rather have 4x9hour days, a 10% cut in pay, and 3 days off every week. (Hey, most of the last 10% is taxes anyway, right). If everyone did this, we could avoid tons of layoffs nationwide, lower energy costs (4 days commuting instead of 5), and 3-day weekends every week ...
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The only issue that has ever come up is:
1) When a customer comes in, and we have to come in on our day off
and
2) Because of the increased rest on a three-day weekend, people use less vacation time, resulting in the office being virtually deserted in December.
The company measures my performance by what I get done.
How we know is more important than what we know.
If you're hourly, you can often get away with a "40 hour" work week that lasts less than 45 hours. If you're salaried, whether in government or not, you will be expected to get your job done whether it takes 10 hours a week or 168 hours a week. If you don't get it done, in this economic environment they will find someone who will get it done.
That said, my wife works a 40 hour week that's supposed to be 4 days per week, 10 hours per day. Usually that translates to 8am to 7pm daily. She say's she'd never go back to 5x8.
Unfortunately we car pool to work, so I work 8 to 7 as well. And then I usually put in 4 or 5 hours on Friday, and a few hours each on Saturday and Sunday. The difference.... You guessed it. She's in an hourly position that isn't exempt from overtime rules. I'm in a salaried position that is exempt from overtime rules. And to top it off, she makes about 20% more than I do because she is in an industry that competes to get workers. I'm in an industry that has more workers than it can afford.
All in all 4-5x9 probably works OK, and if you're in an urban area, it's 10% less time that you'll sit in traffic. Maybe more because you either be commuting early or late. If the extra hour in the work day is cutting into your sleep, your commute is way too long. If it's cutting into your TV watching, then get TiVo and watch on your new day off.
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From a non-scientific poll we conducted as undergraduates, we found some interesting results:
All of the science and engineering students we asked said the next sheet should go over. All of them. (About 14 people.)
The art students' inclination (8 of 12 people) was to put it under, with the other four simply saying "whichever way it ends up - I don't even look."
Seriously...I just have to believe salary is for suckers. They expect you to work over if 'needed'...but, do they happily let you leave early when your work is done?
In a word, yes. I understand where you're coming from - managing your own time is a sweet gig. But don't be so quick to dismiss a salary scheme. When run properly, it can be pretty decent. At my office when there's not much going on, not a lot of people work 40 hr weeks. When it's crunch time, you're going to see a lot of people putting in 60 on a regular basis. Pretty similar to what you described, actually. Work gets done on time, and nobody bats an eye if you work an entire week of half days. It's all in how you execute the salary scheme. I could see it being abused, for sure, but when it's not abused, it's a nice ride.
This seems to be a very American (and Japanese) phenomenon. In Europe, it wouldn't even be legal to offer only 10 days of vacation time in many countries (possibly all of them, these days). Here in the UK, for someone working in a typical developer or sysadmin role in IT, I'd say somewhere around 25 days +/- 2 is fairly typical, plus the 8 public holidays (which is fewer than most other European countries get).
Some employers do say you lose whatever vacation allowance you don't use by the end of each year, but in reality only the kind of poor managers and die-hard workaholics who think employees who don't take vacations are more productive seem to fail to use up their allowances under these circumstances. IME, it's fairly typical for decent employers to set a cap of, say, 5 days rolling over: this avoids long-term employees building up a huge vacation allowance, but allows some flexibility and avoids everyone taking off half of December and leaving the office near-empty just to use up all their remaining leave.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
why is "more money for more work" such a taboo? really?
Sorry. I paid my dues in construction and an iron foundry before getting a cushy tech job. Although oddly I find my software engineering job much more stressful.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Actually, I arranged a similar thing after the birth of my baby. It was brilliant. I changed jobs for other reasons and had to go back to the normal schedule. I miss my every other Friday off. Sometimes, I took my daughter out of day care and spent the day with her. Sometimes, I sent her to day care like normal and got chores done so that my husband and I could both have more time with our daughter on the weekend.
You already have a lot of people on this thread boasting about how many hours they work. Whatever. I have generally worked 40 hour weeks (or 80 hours every two weeks) my entire career, and I have advanced up the ladder just fine, thank you. I always get good performance reviews and good raises. Working hard and getting a lot done does not require insane work hours, and I have rarely met anyone who could remain productive for all of the insane hours they "worked". Personally, I find I can sustain crazy hours for about two weeks, and I'll do that if I think whatever crisis needs handling is worth it.
Good luck- the system will work for you if you let it.
Worse still, your employer probably isn't getting much for all your effort. I just finished a 12-month run of pretty consistent 70-hour weeks with the occasional 80- or 90-hour marathon thrown in for fun, including a (record, for me) run of 49 consecutive days worked. I was probably getting only about 1/3 as much work done per hour as I might when properly rested and working 45-50 hours a week.
Of course, I knew this at the time, too - the problem was that the alternative was taking a couple days off, which would mean that instead of getting (1/3) * (14/9) * 2 days' worth of work done in that time, I'd get nothing done. That would of course mean that when I got back I'd still have all the work that needed doing before, plus two more days' worth, and an extra 2 days' worth of schedule pressure added as well. While the first day back might be ok, I'd need to work extra hours to start catching up, and after another 12-14 hour day or two I'd be right back where I started: unproductive and working way too much, but even farther behind. It's really a Hobson's choice at that point.
Anyone can work extra time to get past a crisis or a single near-term deadline. But the constantly intensifying pressure of a looming but obviously unachievable deadline really makes scheduling your work a vicious circle. No matter how hard you work, the deadline will just keep getting pushed farther out, and there is no work schedule that would allow you to meet it. But you have to try, so you work more but get less done, and the pressure ratchets up another notch! Ugh. All you can really do is make whatever progress you can, try to stay sane, and look for any possible opportunity to dump work on others (who btw are probably just as loaded down as you are).
If you're in this spot, you have to really want to do whatever you're doing. If you don't, you should be looking for a new job and/or trying to get yourself onto the next RIF list. It doesn't really matter that "you have a family to feed" or whatever else you're telling yourself. As the parent said, you don't have any quality of life. You're just going to have to learn to get by on whatever pay is available to someone with your skills and experience willing to work hard 40-50 hours a week. That might mean less "stuff" in your life. So be it. Of course, the problem is that there are very few jobs available at all that don't require long hours; I blame the high fixed costs of hiring and compensating most developed-world workers. At many companies, these fixed costs are over 50% of total compensation cost. If employers stopped offering these large fixed-cost benefit packages, they could afford to hire enough workers to get the job done (and as a side benefit, their employees would be free to choose how to spend their money). Instead, they have an incentive to understaff and get more hours out of existing workers, amortizing all those fixed costs over a larger amount of work. And with a generally weak labour market - though frankly not nearly as bad as in 2001-2003 - they can really put the screws to you right now. A job that offers at least somewhat interesting work and mostly requires 40-50 hours a week is an absolute treasure, whatever it pays.