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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.
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," ...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
If shortening the workday to six hours saves money, just think how much would be saved by shortening it to four hours!
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.
My employment contracts for 10+ years have prohibited me from working more than 40 hours per week or outside regular business hours. That's for IT support. Prior to that I worked 60+ hours a week as a video game tester.
Extrapolation of these results predicts that employees who work a 0 hour week will never take any sick days and will be extremely happy.
As a person in retirement, I can vouch for these results.
A. Tell me about the time they had to do laundry, clean the house, shop for food etc.. Tend to their personal needs: Haircuts, trim nails, go to doctors, etc.. All in one day eh? Time to relax.. none.. B. Also, the more days people work, equals less of a chance other people will get a job.
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.
I have a hard time understanding how it cost more. Those nurse should be taking a 25% pay cut, which should directly be applied to the replacement. Holidays / sick leave cost would also be proportionnally reduced, only the fixed cost not being affected (employer provided clothing / training ?). How did they manage to fuck it up ?
From TFA:
Overall, they took 4.7 percent fewer sick days over the period of the experiment
So, assuming a 24 hour day, they increased their base payroll cost by 33% while saving 4.7% on sick days. While I would certainly rather work fewer hours, this experiment actually shows that it doesn't come anywhere close to saving money for the facility or even breaking even.
.. at-least not according to the fucking summary.
The headline claims it did but the summary say they couldn't afford to keep on doing it and then mention some benefits which .. it would seem wasn't enough to compensate for the 25% loss of work-time.
So... Why the stupid headline? Because it's sensational even though wrong?
Alternative fact?
Maybe Bloomberg hold the same quality as Swedish main-stream media and go with the no-work-worker political-view of it all; no work but all benefits of work for everyone!
Possibly, but there's another effect that might apply that would also poison the results. Employees tend to value any change that makes them feel their company is trying to make things better for them, regardless of the direction of the change as long as it's not obviously bad.
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The sick days part may be a red herring depending on how they're handled in the company. If you have a company where fucks arn't given either way, and an employee has no incentive to *not* call in sick, then that's not going to mean much. What an employee does at home isn't the company's concern (unless you do something so profoundly embarrassing that their reputation is threatened just by association).
The real question is... What about overall productivity? It's clearly more expensive because, at least as far as shiftwork goes, you need to hire additional people to cover the gap. If the cost of hiring those additional people is greater the money saved by the less sick days, you may have happier employees but you've incurred additional cost burden that will be hard for the purse-string holders to swallow.
If you have a typical office job that doesn't do shifts, then you still need to demonstrate that people are overall more productive with a 6 hour day than an 8. Whether that's through reduced vacation time, or increased output, it still ultimately becomes a purse-string issue, which is basically what happened with this particular study.
At least in the short term, the costs of the reduced hours outweighed the benefits, and as long as overall health is externalized (ie: the company doesn't incur a direct cost if the employee is less healthy than they otherwise could be), it's hard to justify the change.
This is the kind of thing that either needs to be legislated (if there is political will to do so), or some other factor needs to come into play, such as insurance companies dropping premiums because of reduced claims. Or maybe make up the productivity fall by less vacation time because people don't find it so necessary to get away from it all and unwind.
The original reason was to beat rush hour traffic. Now that rush hour starts at 6 AM it's kinda moot.
But I find most people don't show up until 9. So by getting there at 7 AM I get 3/4 of my work done in those 2 hours. After that it's meetings, random BS with co-workers (water cooler talk), and dealing with micro-managing PHBs.
It's annoying a lot of people think I'm a slacker for leaving at 3:30, but hey, I've done my 8 and I'm out.
Leaving at 1:30 would make my life a whole lot better, with pretty much 0 impact on my productivity. Hell, I'd skip lunch for those hours.
4 day work week, no change in hours worked. Commute time reduced 20%. One whole additional day to do errands, etc.. Disadvantage: more difficult to arrange for child care in families with no spare adult.
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If you born as Japanese, you have to work 8hours(base)+3~7hours(overwork without pay), 6 days per week.
While other countries' visa requirement are hard to pass, most of us are stuck here to become a "robot" for employer.
look at celebrities and the very rich. Hell, look at our president, who's 70 and ran a presidential campaign. Human beings weren't meant to toil endlessly. We spent thousands of years in short bursts of activity followed by hours down. It's not surprising that modern living with it's 8-12 hour days kills us.
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If they worked 25% less for the same yearly pay, then it's a 33% pay rise. Going back to 8 hours a day is even better!
What is this 6 or 8 day nursing workday? Everywhere here is forced *12* hour workdays for nursing and nursing assistant staff. Makes for LONG days, and worn-out staff. But guarantees overtime and more days off. It is also FAR easier for management to perform staffing (requires fewer people, less slots to fill, fewer people to hire/train/inservice/license/review).
One needs to also remember that this is not like office work. Healthcare facilities are 24x7. 8 hour healthcare shifts are typically 7-3, 3-11, and 11-7. So both 2nd and 3rd shift have night hours, making it hard to find people willing. And those 8 hour shifts are typically only 7.5 hour (because of 30 min unpaid dinner/lunch/breakfast) so they don't get a full 40 hours.
Why should society [that is you and me for those of you born into a socialist state] bear the cost of paying nurses for 8 hours of work, when they're only on the clock for 6 hours?
Why not doctors? Or janitors? Or dare I say, programmers?!
The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money...
What the fuck is so hard about maths, according to the article and summary it DIDN'T save money at all, it cost a shitload of money, yes it had some health and few sick day benefits but these did not offset the actual cost of hiring the extra staff.
What about general economic effects this has. When more people are required to be hired, unemployment falls. This spreads the wealth to a greater population causing those people to also spend more. Also when people have more time off, they normally spend money on entertainment... Think about it, what do most people do on the weekends... They take their dates to the movies, buy video games, go to parks, buy food, spend money.
If anything; a mandate saying that all employees only work 32 hrs a week would save any economy.
...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.
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I will be out of the office this week.
It's NOT the governments business to control how businesses work. THAT is up to the business. If they overwork their employees. they won't be able to fill the jobs.
My previous job was working in a major US office for a European company. I still have some grudges against my former employer so I don't like to name them or the country they operated out of because I don't want to take the chance of them getting any publicity. They have major sales problems in North America because nobody has ever heard of them and frankly, they deserve it. However, I will say that the country our HQ operated in was rather infamous for having 7 hour work days so you can probably make a good guess as to which major EU country this was.
So anyway, one time I got sent overseas to HQ and got to meet a bunch of my colleagues who I had only talked to on the phone before. Although their country officially had 7 hour work days. they were usually at work 9 to 10 hours a day. I asked them why. They all said that their management got really upset if they left after those 7 hours so they stayed at work a few extra hours a day and basically did nothing in those extra hours because that shut up management. So I can tell you that even if the law says you can only work 6-7 hours, there are probably going to be places where people are going to be forced to work more anyway off the books.
They ran out of subsidies to continue a pilot program that allegedly "saves money"? Makes sense.
golly gee - some touchy-feely money was saved? Or was real money saved?
If you can't put it into numbers - it didn't happen. I'm pretty sure that's like totally a rule of science.