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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.
Insurance premiums are a factor of how many insurance claims are made. If the number of claims made goes down, premiums will also go down.
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.
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.
This is a city in Sweden, so it's safe to assume that health insurance comes from the national health insurance program, the city would not be buying private coverage for their employees. Thus, even if it the 6 hour days save money overall for the government at all levels, it costs the city money they don't have.
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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.
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.
I'm guessing that saving 4.7% on sick days does not translate to just 4.7% saving in payroll expenses. Imagine all employees so sick they are taking 50% days off. Depending on the exact pattern, it stands to reason that when they are not out sick they are not terribly productive either, being just barely well enough they can show up at work and be miserable.
And vice versa, employees taking 0% sick days might be so full of energy, healthy and enthusiastic that they are productive all the time. And that would be just a factory job kind of thing calculation. Most jobs require some creative decision making, however small. The less well the employee feels, the more likely he is to decide to e.g. refactor in a wrong way some huge class and thus make a lot of problems down the road for everyone.
I believe there is a sweet spot of productivity for in terms of the *average* number of hours a day, and based on my own experience I don't believe it's 8.
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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I really, really do not understand what you are trying to say. Who gives a crap about whether or not companies care about workers, that's what unions are for. Workers caring about workers, if it makes sense for workers, they form a union and force the sensible requirement, end of story. Bosses when left out of control with ruthlessly exploit workers, even when it results in losses because it feeds their egos. Don't thinks so, then what about all the sexual harrasment cases, where bosses target workers, in attempts to force sexual compliance even though that stupidity risks the entire company and put the wealth of investors under direct threat, think about, risk everything just for the ego rush of forcing a worker to masturbate them, how pathetic.
Six hour work day is better for workers, than fuck em, force a six hour work day for workers, fuck begging for anything. Threats of robots and outsourcing labour, fine, that's what unions are for, block the robots and oursourcing by blocking the product. Stop fucking begging and start making demands, that's what equal access to democracy is all about. Being insanely greed and rich does not entitled you to one iota of extra access to democracy, where your vote equals the vote of millions of others, that is corruption.
Six hour work day makes sense, than fight for it at every level, at the work place and at the voting booth and well and truly before the voting booth because it is often too late by then. Make sure that the best people are selected to run in the first place.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
This is a city in Sweden, so it's safe to assume that health insurance comes from the national health insurance program, the city would not be buying private coverage for their employees. Thus, even if it the 6 hour days save money overall for the government at all levels, it costs the city money they don't have.
This is only half correct. First, in Sweden, employees salaries are paid by the employer (i.e. the city) for the first 14 days of every sickness period. Secondly, while Sweden has a national health care system, it's largely financed on the local level and by local taxes.
Stephan
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.
Of course, you also have to look at productivity. In many places the last hour or two of any given shift are basically spent running the clock out. In many cases, even if the workers don't intend to do that. They've simply run out of productive energy. If, instead, you're running 4 shifts you may well get 33% more work done.
...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.