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New Zealand Firm's Four-Day Week an 'Unmitigated Success' (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The New Zealand company behind a landmark trial of a four-day working week has concluded it an unmitigated success, with 78% of employees feeling they were able to successfully manage their work-life balance, an increase of 24 percentage points. Two-hundred-and-forty staff at Perpetual Guardian, a company which manages trusts, wills and estate planning, trialled a four-day working week over March and April, working four, eight-hour days but getting paid for five. Jarrod Haar, professor of human resource management at Auckland University of Technology, found job and life satisfaction increased on all levels across the home and work front, with employees performing better in their jobs and enjoying them more than before the experiment. Work-life balance, which reflected how well respondents felt they could successfully manage their work and non-work roles, increased by 24%. In November last year just over half (54%) of staff felt they could effectively balance their work and home commitments, while after the trial this number jumped to 78%. Staff stress levels decreased by 7 percentage points across the board as a result of the trial, while stimulation, commitment and a sense of empowerment at work all improved significantly, with overall life satisfaction increasing by 5 percentage points.
Just ask my brother-in-law: he works no days a week and reports it an unmitigated success. Zero stress as well!
Get back to work! Those sheep won't shag themselves!
Yeah, next we should try a three-day week. Then imagine how much better a two-day week will be! When we get to zero, the work-life balance will be perfect!
I hope this firm's 4-day work week is an unmitigated success, but this story misses the most important metrics for measuring the success: increased worker productivity, increased retention, various recruitment KPIs, etc. These are the metrics which can show that this plan will work for a larger number of companies. If the only thing that happens is happier employees, it is a failed experiment. Just give every employee a million dollars if you only care about happy employees. If you want to find a way to improve employee well-being while running a sustainable successful business, then you need to real metrics for success.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
The question is what is your sense of self, and the culture of this.
In America after asking your name, you want to know what job does the person do, where do they work.
It is how Americans define their place in the world. This is also why Americans don't take as much vacation time, because what they do on vacation doesn't define who they are, they are just not getting work done and things are piling up.
Other cultures don't have the same sense of self. Some people will define themselves by religion, or age, number of children, where they live, what their hobbies are....
I am unsure if the 4 day a week would work in America, not because loss productivity, as we will slack off as much, but because we even as the low level worker would feel uneasy having an always 3 day work week, where we could be working.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
In America, we do not strive to have a better life. We feel that at as long as we work as close to death as possible without actually dying, that is just good enough. Politicians should never, ever, tell a corporation what to do or how to treat their employees, since the employees should just be grateful they have a job in the first place.
This mentality is why America is the greatest country on earth. Our hard work has resulted in a strong government, powerful military, world-class health care, an education system second to none, the best infrastructure anyone has ever seen, and with everyone working so hard crime is at an all time low.
I mean really, what relevant data point does America NOT excel in relative to any other country?
It turns out if you don't OVERwork people, they're much more productive in their working hours. So the same amount of work gets done AND there's less stress and better employee satisfaction. Anything over 50 hours is terminally stupid, the diminishing returns hit the point of counterproductivity. Worse, it takes months to recover from a prolonged "crunch time" overwork level.
Wonder if modern workplace, with so much interfacing with others by email and meetings, requires so much focus and switching, that your brain seriously needs the break.
Ideally, we'd build is machines to automate the vast majority of unlikable work away, and live off of the created wealth, doing completely away with the conecpts of /having to/ work (let alone just to live) aswell as profit (as opposed to income actually earned with work).
At that ideal point, free-market capitalism and communism would be the same thing (unless you define them differently than I do, of course).
The onl hindrance to that, is of course, that the current leech (aka for-profit) economy would have to perish, and nobody could just amass money and hence the power to ruin the freedom of the market (e.g. via a lobbyist puppet "government") off of the work of others.
So they will drive their literal human livestock towards believing they hate it or that it is impossible.
I'm German; excuse the crass viewpoint and negativity (from a US standpoint). I do not mean anyone any harm or devaluing with it. Even my "worst enemies" shall not be harmed (according to their definition of harm). I just say outright what I experience, and conclude, based on that.
Most people would love to work four days a week, or even three days a week. Their experience of life would be totally different - if you work only three days a week, you get four days off - more days off than days at work.
But just WHY are most of us working so hard nowadays, when we have computers doing things that required huge teams of workers just thirty years ago? And when we have petrol delivering more energy than we could have imagined, per capita, a few hundred years ago? Because of the JEW - who controls the banking system, and thus controls you. But hey, leap to the Jews' defence and carry on being a slave, and enslave your own children - anything rather than THINK and QUESTION, right?
A 4 x 8 hour schedule. I work 32 hours a week and could never go back. My day off is Wednesday, a tactical decision which preserves most if not all holidays, and more importantly gives me a maximum of 2 consecutive days of work. Highly recommended if you can pull it off.
For some time now, I have a "full time job" that I do four days a week and I am treated as a full-time employee, and I do some work for a nonprofit on the fifth day. I have to agree that I feel my work performance is not worse and I am much happier about the job as well. In many jobs, condensing the work from five to four days helps focus and removes slack...
I think the study misses the point. Most people would expect that a group that was "working four, eight-hour days [per week] but getting paid for five" would have more success balancing work and life than when they worked five, eight-hour days per week. The real news would be if the company was able to have productivity high enough under this arrangement to stay in business. Were the employees 25% more productive?
I'm all for work life balance, but I believe that its established fact that any change brings improvement that decays over time.. turning the lights up works.. but turning them down also works to improve productivity and well-being.
It will be interesting to see how to sustain this were it to become the norm, and not not viewed as a real benefit (almost a gift) from the employer; especially the paid day off every week. I think the interpretation of what that benefit really means could change..
This is a crucial question because shorter workweeks are one of the common suggestions floating around in reference to what to do about the impending need to deal with the ramifications of AI, automation, and the industrial revolution currently underway.
Is it just me or does the article summary seem like it's only qualifying a "success" as "something the employee likes"? News flash: if you allow people to work less but pay them as if they worked more, they're going to like it. This comes as a surprise to no one. I'm an employee and I'd call it an "unmitigated success" if I could get paid to work four eight-hour days but get paid for five days.
But this is only half the equation. The true measure of "unmitigated success" would be if the company also saw some tangible benefit or, at the very worst, saw no productivity losses due to the truncated hours. The article says employees worked with the company to "plan" so that no productivity would be lost but, unlike the meticulous metrics on "work life balance", it doesn't state whether this was actually achieved.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Psychology is bunk.
All this tells us is that some people answered some questions differently when they worked less.
When psychology gets its act together, makes its experiments reproducible, and stops peddling shite as science, maybe it will be possible to attach meaning to those answers.
But right now, they might as well use astrology.
"...trialled a four-day working week over March and April, working four, eight-hour days but getting paid for five."
Yeah, no shit they're happier. You know what would make them even happier with an even better work/life balance? Get this...work three days a week and get paid for five! The experiment, if you can call it that, was pointless and proved nothing except that people would rather work less than more. I could have told you that. For free, too!
If they can show that the employee's productivity as a whole has increased enough to compensate for their effective 25% wage increase (or at least a substantial part of it), then fine. Good for them, even. But unless that happens, this is yet another socialist pipe dream of "work less, get paid more", which has yet to work out in the real world. Now, to be fair, they do recognize this and are seeking ways such that this does not adversely impact productivity (e.g. automating manual processes etc), but why not just do that anyway and improve the organization's efficiency and competitiveness?
How could more than 20% of people not manage their "work life balance" and that be a success?
How could an entire country have the same work schedule?
So, does this really mean that the company just didn't need as much labor as it had, so it is reducing the amount of hours worked?
As automation increases, you need less labor. I guess that can be spun as "we're not making you work as much!"
Or am I being too cynical?
> I am as cynical as they come but how is this a failed experiment if you lose nothing but have happier employees?
That's a VERY big assumption. You lose 20% of time they were working, so about 20% of their productivity, unless you have evidence otherwise. The article mentions no such evidence.
Competitive pressures may well mean that leads to losing the company, by delivering 20% less value to customers. Studies show it takes people some time to get back into what they were doing, they don't come in Monday morning and reset their brains to remember everything they were thinking on Friday. Rather, they have to spend time re-reading things they read on Friday, getting back into the groove.
> Also think about this: The work that took five days previously now gets done in four.
What makes you think that? I see no such claim in the article. The article only says that people like having time off - duh. Well, they like certain things about it. Most people don't actually choose part-time work because part-time work means part-time production, and therefore part-time pay. Most people want full-time pay, so they choose to work full-time.
If workers were just as productive, that would be a very interesting result, but the article doesn't claim that.
"I am as cynical as they come but how is this a failed experiment if you lose nothing but have happier employees?"
You're assuming they got 5 days of work done in 4 which I don't see written anywhere in the summary or in the linked to Guardian article. If they did do this then you're correct but what the parent is getting at is that if productivity didn't rise enough to make up for the missed day or at least come close to that then this experiment might be considered a failure.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
Next year the company will experiment with a work week of three days, with the workers being paid for five days. Management predicts that the workers will be even happier. So do I.
There is always a downside, which in this case is that the company needs to make sure they have coverage for every day and hour that they are open, so this will only work where they can maintain that coverage.
The other downside, is that a management type is likely to see that if you could have gotten all your work done in less time, you were just slacking before, and they should have just reduced staffing.
In the US at least, I've never worked at a company that wasn't operating on just a little less than minimal staffing, ensuring that everyone was slightly overworked all of the time. If that isn't the case, the company just hasn't been rightsized yet.
I worked at a helpdesk back in 1999 and had racked up a ton of overtime.
Got sat down by the Manager because they finally noticed what this was going to cost them....
They wanted me to take a leave of absence to cover the time.
I offered to work 10:00 to 16:00 Tuesday to Friday for as many hours I had to cover.....
Best three months of my life!!!
I barely took breaks or lunch.
I found it easier to get there early and would get ribbed because I was never in a hurry to leave (more so than usual).
I take three day week ends at least once a month now and sometimes work late so I can come in later in the morning. My wife has confirm I've been a happier camper ever since then.
End of Line.
Heralds in the clip from Office Space about doing nothing
https://youtu.be/4lmW2tZP2kU
... But what about in 6 months, when 4 days a week becomes the new normal? People are bound to start slacking off again when the 'testing' phase is behind them, simply because it's human nature to prefer being lazy over being tired.
You missed the part where they said employee performance also improved - which is what the company paying them undoubtedly cares about. If you can pay your employees the same amount, they do more/better work, morale improves, AND they get an extra day off every week to focus on their own life, then everybody wins.
Maybe you could maintain/improve performance further with a three-day week, but I suspect the combination of the larger increase in per-hour productivity required, in combination with the smaller incremental reduction in stress, would make that difficult. Though it might well be worth investigating, in smaller increments to try to find the optimal "sweet spot". Perhaps 3 10-hour days, or 4 7-hour days or something would yield even greater productivity.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It is really a good thing that American CEOs are now working 50 days per week.
"In between 1978 and 2014, inflation-adjusted CEO pay increased by almost 1,000%, according to a report released on Sunday by the Economic Policy Institute. Meanwhile, typical workers in the U.S. saw a pay raise of just 11% during that same period."
http://fortune.com/2015/06/22/ceo-vs-worker-pay/
I am sure and so far the comments agree is that many people will not believe it.
They have been told so many times that if you work hard, you willbecome rich. Hard working is doing everything for the company. It means that you need to do a lot of hours, otherwise you do not work hard and do not deserver anything.
If that has been told your your whole life, it is very hard to understand that other ways are possible. But just try to understand that there are many people who work to live and not live to work.
That if you come in as the first person in the office and leave as the last day in day out, they will keep an eye on you, because you will be the first to crack down when the situation at home, that you are running away from, escalates.
Nobody here blinks if you say "To travel and have fun with my family." instead of "Be a higher up in this company." if they ask where you see yourself in 10 yeard during an interview. I have refused people a job because they said that, because I knew he was lying or he would be expecting unrealistic behaviour from me and others around him.
But perhaps you still do not believ or understand it. Here a different explanation. When you try to solve a difficult problem. Be it debugging a program or fighting a boss to get to a next level in a game, the advice you might have heard or taken or experience is to 'sleep on it'.
The next day you do it with ease. This is what is going on. You take a break for a period, let your brain defragment itself as if it ran Windows95 and it goes a lot smoother. That is what free time does to you.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
and it says they wanted "not to negatively impact productivity", the experiment was an "unmitigated success".
They did the same work in less time and are all happier as a consequence.
id est, making people work long hours is good for one thing and one thing only: to be an arsehole. Fuck you, arseholes.
I take every other Monday off and just play with my kids. It's referred to as 9in10 or "Daddy day".
I have done this in a few companies.
It has great social and well being benefits. It's regular, so everyone plans around it. It save travel time and CO2 emissions etc.
If you stagger it 50:50 across your teams you have full customer coverage.
I can also get all my "jobs" done on this day, so I don't have to schedule other things on work days (Eye tests, car checks etc)
Oh, and did I mention I get to play with my kids!!!!
> designing how the four-day week would be managed so as not to negatively impact productivity."
They designed it with the hope of not negatively impacting productivity. I wrote a cover page hoping to get a CISO job. I'm not a CISO. The article gives multiple numbers measuring that employees liked it, but not a single number suggesting that productivity, even per-hour productivity, wasn't reduced. The author knows to give measurements to prove a point, and gives no measurements to indicate workers got the same amount of work done.
Either the article sucks (completely forgetting to include key information) or it's designed to mislead.
I'm also reminded of some of the studies that ended the "scientific management" fad of the 1980s. In the eighties, we found out that switching to an open office increases productivity. And that switching to cubicles increases productivity. And switching to private offices increases productivity. What we learned is that switching things up helps for a while. It doesn't matter much what the change is, change promoted as being better reinvigorates people for a little while.
> reducing or eliminating non-work-related internet usage
Now that would be an interesting thing to measure. The IT department could tell you of non-work-related internet usage ACTUALLY changed, and give you a pretty decent measure of how much it changed. Over the course of six months to a year, you could figure out which works better for most people:
A. Continue to fart around on the internet (Slashdot) while at your desk
B. Do not get on Slashdot while at work, and instead go home earlier.
That would be an interesting experiment.
People only had to work for 4 days, but they still got paid for 5.
I'd be thrilled too if I got a 25% raise and an extra day off every week.
besides any measurable metrics. Who pays for this, when employee salary costs suddenly jump 20%???
I'd be willing to work 3 days a week and get paid for 5. I'd even cut that back to 1 if asked.
Work is disappearing. No point in keeping around bullshit jobs. Reducing time of presence probably improves bottom line because people feel like they're doing something useful in their time rather than just sitting around waiting for the hours to pass. If I were to start a company, I'd have 6 hour days and 35 days of vacation. C level execs would be allowed to do 50 hour weeks but only for a max of 12 weeks per year. ... And I probably would basically get rid of offices. Like these two companies.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Tell us of your MILLION$ (of lies) "phantasies" https://tech.slashdot.org/comm...
* You admit IMPERSONATING ME https://tech.slashdot.org/comm... + STALKING me by UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous!
(You impersonating me proves you wish you were me & imitation is the sincerest form of flattery - but you = poor imitation. Your STALKING me by UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous proves you FEAR me also)
APK
P.S.= Want to IMPERSONATE me? Do something GOOD as I have that even registered /.ers LIKE & USE e.g. https://tech.slashdot.org/comm... instead... apk
In other words a company that can afford to work 4 days out of 7, 9 to 5. How does this translate to companies working in infrastructure, or things that actually need to compete in a global scale.
We got Sundays off.
Only 78%? What the heck is wrong with those other 22% who said, naw we prefer working one more day? They must be descendants of the 1 out of 5 dentists who didn't recommend sugarless gum.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
What you've said is true, nearly half of our time isn't really productive. Which means we need more productive time, not less.
This week, I had mandatory compliance training for FCPA, sexual harassment, discrimination, and another one. I had several hours of required meetings, and another few hours dicking with the VPN and crap so I could work.
Suppose the compliance-related training was 6 hours.
Required meetings are 3 hours.
Dealing with infrastructure, regular password changes, and crap is two hours. That's 11 hours of required bullshit. From a 40 hour work week, that leaves 29 hours for productive work plus going to the bathroom, sick days, etc. 25% of the time is mandatory bullshit.
Now we subtract an 8 hour day, making it a 32 hour week. We STILL have those 11 hours of compliance training and crap. Now the mandatory bullshit is 33% of the work week instead of 25%, and we have only 21 hours left for productive work, plus going to the bathroom, sick days, etc.
You're right in what you said - meetings, training, etc take up a lot of time. Getting rid of them might help. So long as we have mandatory compliance training and such, fewer hours cuts disproportionately into the productive time since regulators still want you to have your three hours of LGBT sensitivity training or whatever.
Obviously, that does NOT mean we should all work 60 hours. Being exhausted is not good. Avoiding exhaustion doesn't mean we should all work 10 hours per week, either. That would give us only enough time for mandatory bullshit, and leave zero hours for productive work. There's a right number, where working longer has you too exhausted to think, and working less leaves you little time to be productive, especially relative to the amount of less productive crap that's required in a business.
Thought this post was written in irony, but apparently not per the last paragraph. A reply: America fails to come close to most other developed nations by most measures of public health (http://www.oecd.org/els/health-systems/health-data.htm) except one: per capita cost (https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=SHA) where we certainly exceed all others.
Now, folks, if you were making a product that sells for, say 20% more than any of your competitors, but was rated around 30th in most measures of quality, how well do you think that product would sell?
Oh wait, we have the "greatest health care system in the world." [Bob Dole, Republican candidate for President.]
The solution to my question is that none of the folks leading us down the glorious garden path of untrammeled free marketism give a shit about "public" health.
4 days at 9 hours seems like it produces an hour and a half per day of lower productivity.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
People enjoyed working 4 days, and getting paid for 5. Who would have thought?
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(See subject)
APK sighting confirmed.
(See Subject)
Hi APK!
I'm guessing your self-employment doesn't cover health insurance, else you'd have taken your anti-psychotics today.
Aim for a higher career than spamming Slashdot.
ZIP
The reason we are debating this is because scientific management was considered a fad. It turned into evidence based management--which is only practiced by a slim minority of people and is rarely mandated as corporate policy. Why? Because then the sociopaths couldn't run roughshod over everyone with their Richard III bullshit.
We still live in an age ruled by superstition and magical thinking. It is the preferred mode of sociopaths.
Sociopath == someone who wants to be a manger (sit around barking orders, gets pissed off if he has to do something)
Leader == someone who organizes because no one else is (gets his hands dirty and makes sure everyone else is happy and marching toward the goal)
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Projecting your homosexual desires onto me != effective (as I'm not homosexual @ all). Grow up BOY...
* Time to turn on a tune for the day in CROSS-EYED MARY https://www.youtube.com/watch?... by Jethro Tull (classic).
APK
P.S.=> "WHO WOULD BE A POOR MAN, A BEGGAR MAN, A THIEF (if he had a RICHMAN in his hand)?... & WHO WOULD STEAL THE CANDY FROM A LAUGHIN' BABIES' MOUTH (if he could take it from the MONEYMAN)??"... apk
Don't put words in my mouth I don't say: You impersonate me as you did above in this thread https://news.slashdot.org/comm... & say what you did now? LOL - F-you!
* YOU & "YOUR KIND" = WASTES OF LIFE "ne'er-do-wells" (unquestionably so) & you doing that crap != "work"... it's BITCH tactics, nothing more (making you MY bitch).
APK
P.S.=> I sure "got to you" @ some point though, obviously (truth & fact I used on YOU are like that aren't they? Yes, judging by the results of you 'freaking out', lmao)!
Thus - YOU now DANCE on MY puppet strings I have you strung up & OUT on, bitch, lol... apk
How many times do you plan on posting this spam?
Let the whole world see APK make an ass of himself!
I give you what "your kind" (lol) wants since you project it. I'm always of service to others they appreciate https://tech.slashdot.org/comm...
* "BUTT" (pun intended, lol) YOU ARE NOT...
APK
P.S.=> You PUNY trolling JEALOUS "Lil' Jowie" (lmao, I LOVE calling you that - it fits you)... apk
The suits now see that they are getting just about as much work done in 4 days as they were in 5.....time to lay off %20 of the workers!!
Personally, I work to live. If I could live a fairly comfortable life, like I do now, without working, I would quit my job tomorrow. The only reason I put up with the bullshit I do, day after day, is that it gets me a nice house and a nice car, the ability to travel and eat at restaurants, and all the other nice things money can buy (including a lack of financial anxiety). If I could have all that, with less of the daily bullshit, it would be great. I'd probably even give up a bit in order to work less. It's not laziness. It's the recognition that I want more out of life than being someone's employee.
I understand that our Capitalist and monetary systems require us all to stay on the hamster wheel. That's a whole other discussion.
The systems really aren't a whole other discussion though, right? Take away all those systems, take away society and give yourself a flourishing tropical island paradise all to yourself. Even with those kind of ideal conditions, you are still stuck as an employee, this time an employee for yourself and/or mother nature. If you want clothes still, your going to have to collect and process the raw materials and make them into the clothing you want. That's a lot of work. Food, shelter and any tools to make that easier are all going to require work.
You can't just say you want more out of life than being an employee, without acknowledging the fact that at fundamental level, the basic necessities of life take work to produce. In fact, they take an incredible amount of work to produce. The owning of stupidly comfortable clothing, weather proof homes with hot/cold running water, food(let alone imported food) is an historically ludicrous level of wealth. It's hardly fundamentally obvious that the work we have to put in to acquire and maintain such a lifestyle is unreasonably tailored against us.
Other than a few jobs long ago, where I punched a clock, There has always been an expectation of working extra hours and some work on the weekend. While people talk about 9 to 5, 5 days a week, the reality is [before]7 to 5, and about four hours, either Saturday or Sunday. It normally comes out to about 60 hours per week.
I put in my hours at my work desk. I constantly hear from my colleagues that I should just take the work home and finish it there. I sometimes suspect that they don't really understand that, even if it is taken home, it is still work.
So, for American workers, eight hours a day, five days a week would be an improvement.
Our team tracked the amount of time we spend on "administrata", which we defined as essentially:
Our own meetings
stuff that government or corporate expects us to do, but doesn't improve our productivity
Note that *useful* training isn't included.
That's actually our largest category, where we spend the night most time. We spend more time on that stuff than on things that have direct benefit to the customer, or on investments in our productivity, such as improving our tooling and systems.
We were able to reduce it by maybe 20%, which was good. It's still the largest chunk of our time, though. We can't reduce it much further because a lot of the stuff is either directly required by government, or is indirectly required by government, where the corporate bosses have flexibility in how they address requirements or can decide how much legal risk to take. Either way, they have driven by laws and regulations. Further action on reducing this wasted time will largely have to wait until November, election time.
over half (54%) of staff felt they could effectively balance their work and home commitments
Wait for children to have a four days week, and that improvement will vanish.
It was just "too, Too, TOO EASY..." to run you DRY of your "downmodpoints" you abuse on me that you farm via sockpuppets, lol!
* YOU LOSE fool...
APK
P.S.=> ... As always vs. "yours truly" - makes me LMAO @ U every single time (you're too STUPID to get the better of me)... apk
I ran you DRY of your "downmodpoints" you abuse on meafter you farm them via multiple sockpuppets so face facts: You're TOO STUPID to EVER get the better of me dimwit.
APK
P.S.=> Do-Nothing "ne'er-do-well" MINDLESS Dildos like you are far too easy to outwit, outthink & outsmart... apk
i.e. a 25 per cent hourly wage increase. Who's paying for this 25 per cent increase? Someone is paying for it, and if productivity didn't increase (reading the article evinces nothing in that vein) by 25 per cent, then either shareholders (lower profits) or customers (higher prices) are paying for it.