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How the Six-Hour Workday Actually Saves Money (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: In February, after almost two years worth of six-hour workdays, nurses at the Svartedalens elderly care facility in Gothenburg, Sweden went back to eight hour shifts -- despite recently published research showing the benefits of the shortened workdays. The City of Gothenburg didn't extend the experiment in part because funding ran out. It cost about 12 million krona ($1.3 million) to hire the 17 extra staff members needed to fill the gaps created by shorter work hours. The city had only budgeted for two years, and legislators said it would be too expensive to implement the project across the entire municipality. So, for now, the project has come to an end. Yet, there are longer term savings the study didn't take into account. Working shorter hours resulted in healthier workers, researcher Bengt Lorentzon found in a new paper. "They were less tired, less sick, had more energy coming home and more time to do activities," said Lorentzon. Specifically, the nurses took fewer sick days than they did when working longer, eight hour days. They also took fewer sick days than nurses in the control group. In fact, they took fewer sick days than nurses across the entire city of Gothenburg.
Were those sick days saved enough to hire the extra nurses?
Shees guise, why is it so hard to do math? You're sitting on the numbers. Do something useful already.
Companies needn't care about employees to see the potential in this. If the amount of money the company saves out in terms of sick leave, insurance premiums is more than the amount of money needed to hire more workers and reduce the length of the workday, this may make sense anyway.
I'm guessing they took fewer sick days, not because they were healthier, but because they now actually had time to run errands at places that are only open while they're normally at work. Don't need to take any "sick" days to get shit done.
Their plan saved money - but they couldn't afford it, so went back to the "more expensive" ways.
Sure, they took fewer sick days. How many fewer? 4.7% fewer.
And they had to hire 17 new nurses to cover for the shortened shifts. Considering there were only 70 nurses originally, that's a 25% increase in costs for a savings of 4.7%.
Whee.
This is not cost effective because it COSTS MORE MONEY. It provides very little by way of tangible benefits - notice that there was no report that the workers are actually healthier, just that they are less likely to phone in sick (they want to continue the study for another 10-15 years because they are sure that eventually some health benefits will show up). However, it increases costs by at least 25%.
The headline is a lie; it ain't financially worth it. If a company wants to spend more money making their employees happy, more power to 'em. But stop pretending that there's a mystical "savings!" offsetting the costs anywhere. It just doesn't exist.
...it couldn't pay for itself. If this was actually saving money they'd still be doing it. BeauHD lets some of the most retarded shit through.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.