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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!
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
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.
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?
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.
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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.
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.
Or we Americans might increasingly seek to identify ourselves by healthier traits than what we do to pay the bills. After all, most people don't work a job because they want to work a job (even if they like their job), they do so because it's a necessity for having what they need and/or want and doing what they want to do with their lives.
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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!
At that point you wouldn't be working. Work-Life balance not found. But sure, I'd love a three or two day work week, if I could still maintain my comfortable lifestyle. Why wouldn't we want that?
I must say, it's impressive how conditioned we are to work. Our society's needs are over-filled. We produce too much, and throw away a lot of it. Automation is getting to the point where we could all work less, have more leisure time, and still have all the products we need. Yet when we hear stories like this one, in which people are working less and reporting measurable benefits, the reaction of many is to scoff at it. Why? Do we feel so trapped in our 40+ hour week lives that we resent the people making an improvement? Do we think the only thing of value in our lives is the work we do?
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. I'm just remarking on the negative reactions of many to the idea that working less would be nice.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
You're confusing America with Japan.
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There are plenty of studies already, including from Ford's own studies that led to the standard 40 hour work week, that peak productivity is reached around 30 hours per week.
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.
But then you'd have less value to society. As long as we're capitalistic-focused, your value in society is in what you produce and what you consume. Do less of either, and you're a less valuable person to society.
Combine that with a puritanical mindset that god rewards the just and punishes the unjust, and you've got the wonderful world-view of working you described. It's going to be very hard to overcome that in a majority of the population, which would be necessary to make the societal shift to working less.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
You laugh, but I work at a major university that goes to a Mon-Thur (4x10) schedule during the summer and it seems to cause people to focus and get shit done. I think spoke to my attorney, and she's gone to a 3x10 hour week at her firm and she said productivity is through the roof. And yes, she still pays them benefits.
... 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.
Well, if four days is a bad idea, why not a six day week? What makes five days the perfect amount of time to work for all jobs?
The answer is that there is no optimal number that's right for all jobs. If you're a dairy farmer the cows have to be milked seven days a week. If you're a paper pusher, that next piece of paper can usually wait longer than a cow.
My own observations of desk workers is that the longer they spend at the desk, the larger proportion of time they spend at non-productive tasks. I've known people who habitually put in sixty hours a week who never are working very hard. Is the long week the cause of low work intensity, or vice versa? I'd say both: it's a vicious circle.
If you made no other changes, reducing a desk worker's week from five days to four would make him less productive, but probably not 20% less productive. But an intelligent plan wouldn't leave things to chance; you'd set a pace of work that is sustainable for four days but not for five. You'd disallow a lot of time-wasting activities that are tolerated now because the work week has plenty of hours in it.
Would that work for every job? Of course not. But there's no reason to think that five eight hour days is optimal for every job or person either.
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But then you'd have less value to society. As long as we're capitalistic-focused, your value in society is in what you produce and what you consume. Do less of either, and you're a less valuable person to society.
A major point of this company's change to a 32-hour work week is that overall performance improved. So by working 4 days per week instead of 5, these people are producing more. Pure capitalist ideology should dictate that many more companies make the same change.
Capitalism has nothing to do with societal values of persons.
But then again, our economies (I'm Dutch, I suppose you're from the U.S.) are not capitalist - too much regulation for that, for better or worse, and too many (near) monopolies. And in both our societies, the people that work the most are definitely not the ones considered most valuable. Quite the opposite. It seems those that are valued the most produce the least or are sometimes even counter-productive. They often have the most wealth 'though...
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.
But then you'd have less value to society. As long as we're capitalistic-focused, your value in society is in what you produce and what you consume. Do less of either, and you're a less valuable person to society.
Actually, that’s not true. At some point, you’re working too much to consume things. Having more time off means you can travel and consume goods and services all over the world. Admittedly, a single day won’t do that, but it still means you have more time to consume.
Also, you’re incorrectly assuming that the product of your work is the most valuable output that you can produce. For most of us in software, our work will become less valuable over time as technology changes, and will slowly be replaced by someone else’s work. So if we have any creative hobbies that could produce something that has lasting value, such as music, art, poetry, or prose, then our potential value to society is being squandered by spending all day five days per week working in our primary jobs, and we would contribute more to society by working less so we can work more, so to speak.
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Why should your value to society be judged on whether or not you're someone else's employee? If I had a whole day to do anything I wanted, I'd write more, releasing more stories for people to read. I'd do more freelance, still making web sites/applications, but as my own employee. I'd do more with my kids, raising them to be even better members of society. I'd spend more time with my wife, perhaps "consuming" more during days out together. I might even try making my own little company if I had a good enough idea for one. My value to society shouldn't be judged on whether I'm currently at work or in a store buying something.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
> 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.
There's also variations within each job. I'm a web developer. There are weeks when I could work three days of 8 hours each and finish all of my projects. Then there are weeks when I could work five 10 hour days and STILL not keep up.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
You have discovered the reason yourself: Conditioning
The population is conditioned to believe that they need to work to death and to hate and attack anyone who offer an alternative solution. And the conditioning is so strong that I just need to write a small number of "trigger words" here to immediately attract enraged comments and hate for no apparent reason.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
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!
Well actually, around here people like police, firefighters, certain public works employees work something like 3 on/3 off, 4 on/4 off with 12 hour shifts. Yes, when you are working you are working and not much else, but in the end, when you include vacation, stat holidays, etc, you have significantly more days off in the year than you have work days.
I'm sure it is not for everyone, but all the people I know who do this love it.
I could live with a 0 day work week. Provided the money is ok.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There does appear to be an optimum for most *people*. During WWII Britain discovered that there was no point in pushing people past 40 hours, you get less overall productivity and more mistakes. 40 hours was the optimum for a shortish term push for survival situation. The long term optimum seems to be somewhat less than 40 hours.
Your dairy farmer's operation would probably be more efficient if he hired someone to milk the cows a few days a week so he could take some time off.
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.
But then you'd have less value to society. As long as we're capitalistic-focused, your value in society is in what you produce and what you consume. Do less of either, and you're a less valuable person to society.
Combine that with a puritanical mindset that god rewards the just and punishes the unjust, and you've got the wonderful world-view of working you described. It's going to be very hard to overcome that in a majority of the population, which would be necessary to make the societal shift to working less.
Yeah, I can dig all that. It's kinda fucked up in my opinion; especially the idea that god is punishing or rewarding people. But it is the way it is, and I have found new peace in life by not resisting what is, or worrying about things I cannot/will not change.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
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.
You have discovered the reason yourself: Conditioning The population is conditioned to believe that they need to work to death and to hate and attack anyone who offer an alternative solution. And the conditioning is so strong that I just need to write a small number of "trigger words" here to immediately attract enraged comments and hate for no apparent reason.
Oh, yes, I'm well aware. The pro-capitalist propaganda has been quite effective, the the US at least. Work, work, work, you're lucky to even have a job, so shut up! People think wage-slavery is the only way it can be.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
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
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.
your definition of "nice" (as in nice house, nice car) are also societal programming as someone believing working is life. it's possible to quit way early if you are okay to cut your needs
Sure, but the point is that the work doesn't go away just because you do. You can't just milk the cows more efficiently because you feel better about your 'work/life' balance. The cows don't understand that. SOMEBODY has to be there to milk the damn cows. Paperwork, on the other hand, doesn't care.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
The problem is that they say that performance has improved. But by how much? If only by 5%, then what benefit is that? It'll mean that employees are effectively getting a 25% bonus and little to show for it; and labor is typically one of the most expensive parts of an operation. By bumping the costs by an additional 25% you, as an organization, are making yourself less competitive and more difficult to survive.
Another point worth mentioning. To quote the article "employeesâ(TM) motivation and commitment to work increased because they were included in the planning of the experiment, and played a key role in designing how the four-day week would be managed so as not to negatively impact productivity." So, wait. Did productivity increase, or just not decrease? As I'm sure you know (but perhaps the author did not), they're vastly different things. Without knowing what changed it's hard to know if this is a financially viable solution. The article then goes to say "Employees designed a number of innovations and initiatives to work in a more productive and efficient manner, from automating manual processes to reducing or eliminating non-work-related internet usage". But why don't they just do this anyway and make people more efficient? (as an aside, I'd argue that internet at work can be beneficial as it let's one rest their head so to speak. But obviously too much internet is wasteful. Not sure if there have been any studies on this...)
Lastly, pure capitalist ideology simply says "if you want to survive, be profitable". How or why is irrelevant. Increasing costs to an already expensive component of an organization does little to help the much-maligned "bottom line" and help you be competitive against those with cheaper labor.
Look, I can definitely appreciate the idea of "less work can increase productivity" (after all, people who work 80+hrs are probably only marginally more productive than those that work 40, while making everybody miserable at the same time), but to assume that simply cutting off a work day will somehow magically solve our work-life balance problem -- while maintaining productivity -- is just foolish.
"The fact is, the amount of time people spend working has been decreasing throughout history, it used to be permanent job trying to keep the tribe alive when there were things that could kill us around every tree and taking it in turns to watch over the sleeping tribe was important for survival. "
Just so you know, that is also propaganda.
The action packed animal attacks?
The moonlight runs for survival?
The filth covered grubbing in the ground for a tiny scrap of food?
That life style you see on TV and movies?
It is garbage.
https://bigthink.com/big-think-books/vicki-robin-joe-dominguez-your-money-or-your-life
Humans once worked just 3 hours a day. Now we're always working, but why?
Marshall Sahlins, author of Stone Age Economics, discovered that before Western influence changed daily life, Kung men, who live in the Kalahari, hunted from two to two and a half days a week, with an average workweek of fifteen hours. Women gathered for about the same period of time each week.
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html
According to Oxford Professor James E. Thorold Rogers[1], the medieval workday was not more than eight hours. The worker participating in the eight-hour movements of the late nineteenth century was "simply striving to recover what his ancestor worked by four or five centuries ago."
An important piece of evidence on the working day is that it was very unusual for servile laborers to be required to work a whole day for a lord. One day's work was considered half a day, and if a serf worked an entire day, this was counted as two "days-works."
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.
Working longer hours might produce more if you're working a manual labour job, but when the job is more mentally oriented, there is definitely a limit.
For example, as someone who solves a lot of technical problems, after 3-4 hours I definitely can't produce much of value towards a solution no matter how much I sit at a desk.
In fact, for many roles it makes sense to base salary more on tasks completed rather than hours worked. This already happens in the case of research academia, where rewards are based on papers, results, and grants, rather than hours worked.
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
It's important not to oversimplify, either by making one situation stand for all situations, or by making your example more straightforward than it really is.
I'm a city slicker, but even I know there's more to running a dairy than milking the cows. Hygiene is a big part of it: monitoring the health of the cows, keeping things clean and preventing contamination. It's not simply done or not done, it's very possible to do a bad job if you don't pay attention and put your best effort into it.
I think most jobs have those two components: the things that are either done or not done, and the things you can do a better or worse job of depending on your motivation levels. Fortunately a lot of things become easier with repetition. A master bricklayer can lay course after course on autopilot where for a beginner buttering each brick is a project in itself.
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But not always the same person. Assuming the farm has more than one member of staff, then it might be possible for different people to milk the cow on different days. That would enable people to have some days off!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Sure. People have heart attacks all the time too. That doesn't mean every paramedic has to work 24/7.
People are weird about jobs. As others have pointed out, most people have been indoctrinated with certain beliefs that are not only not true, but are actively counterproductive. Farmers seem to be especially bad. There's a reason farms are among the most unsafe workplaces that exist.
I agree completely. I have the same sort of job. I figure complicated shit out. Often it's procedural with lots of moving parts, sometimes it's policy and law, and sometimes it's some data analysis to support all of the above.
The issue isn't you or me - it's (US) society as a whole. Until half or more of the people think like we do, it's not going to change. It's Arbeit macht frei for the people of the US.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Not sure why I'd give a damn about how valuable I am to "society"?
I don't now, why would I give a thought if I didn't have to work?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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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"This is an oversimplification of course"
To the point of being absolute trash
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
If they're producing 5% more, than that's still more. I don't see how it's hurting you, the employer, or anyone else if they're spending less time doing it.
Perhaps it went up precisely because they spotted and worked around things that could have pulled it down?
Example, based loosely on real life. Dave works with customer X and Sally works with customer Y. They each know all about their own customer. Customer Y calls on Sally's day off. OMG, what do we do? You implement better record keeping and information sharing, that's what. Then when Dave quits to go to a commune in Vermont new dude Fred can pick his stuff up more easily.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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
Why should your value to society be judged on whether or not you're someone else's employee? If I had a whole day to do anything I wanted, I'd write more, releasing more stories for people to read. I'd do more freelance, still making web sites/applications, but as my own employee. I'd do more with my kids, raising them to be even better members of society. I'd spend more time with my wife, perhaps "consuming" more during days out together. I might even try making my own little company if I had a good enough idea for one. My value to society shouldn't be judged on whether I'm currently at work or in a store buying something.
Who said anything about should? The parent was merely explaining what IS.
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
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.
Case in point, look at the first comment by 110010001000 about his brother-in-law and how reducing the work week by one day is equivalent to someone who doesn't work at all.
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
Yes but you would be posting less on slashdot ;)
love is just extroverted narcissism
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.
Capitalism operates, underground, in any economic system. It's what keeps them all from starving. Nobody has ever been able to stop it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
as are socialists, for the exact same reason.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
As long as there is plenty of sex and drugs, I can do without the rock and roll. (Spinal Tap drummer).
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
A significant % of exempt employees aren't _working_ 8 hours/week. But they put in a ton of facetime.
If they were hourly, their bosses would manage them differently and they would have to game it very differently.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The goal of society is not justice or fair compensation or happiness or even fastest progress. The goal of society is maintenance of status quo. If you think I am talking about "state" you might be onto something
All other types of societies are utopias
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Capitalism does not value art. Considering the fact that as a programmer I earn more than doctors in public healthcare, one can say that capitalism doesn't value human lives other. One thing it does value, though, is ads.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Not true. Museums attract tourist dollars.
Well, it does, just not that much.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
Hate to tell you this but in communist countries, you didn't have any value if you weren't producing economic output. I'm not sure there are any socialist countries.
If you pay people $1000 to work 40 hours and they make $2000 revenue, and then you pay those same people $1000 to work 32 hours to make $2100, are you "less competitive"?