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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...
From TFA:
Helen Delaney, a senior lecturer at the University of Auckland Business School, said 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.
âoeEmployees 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,â said Delaney.
They started working more efficiently and they were suddenly able to keep efficiency higher because rest was longer is what I take from this.
I can't be the only one who feels like he's buried himself in mud like a tractor in a tractor pull contest on fridays. The mind wanders more and more.
Sure, Americans will point out that you can always fire people who spend time on the internet on company hours, but Americans have always been a pretty naive and unrealistic bunch. The only thing that mentality leads to is employee turnover.
When your brain is done, it's done. Unless you want to use amphetamines on a constant basis... oh, wait... I forgot the US is Adderall country.
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)
It claims to have "employees performing better in their jobs and enjoying them more than before the experiment." That at least suggests a per-hour productivity increase.
I'd like to know some real metrics, too. I want four 7-hour days, and have observed that office work is not time-productive: a lot happens in downtime, where employees wait for other work to be done, or think on things and rest their minds to improve problem-solving. This is the phenomena that you cannot do 10 hours of work by compacting it into 5 hours even though you only spent 4 of those 10 hours actually working.
Multi-tasking represents one approach: do something else while you can't simply move to the next step. Multi-tasking sacrifices some productivity when the delay is internal: if you're dealing with programmers, engineers, marketing, and other creative problem solvers, loading them with a different task disrupts their capacity to solve all tasks.
Leisure is an alternate approach: get up and leave. Come back to this later.
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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 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.
From the article: "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." (emphasis mine)
That sure looks like evidence from the article that productivity did not go down.
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.
The studies I've seen, mostly about programmers or engineers, said that it takes about 20 minutes to recover from an interruption. I haven't seen studies about how difficult it is to get started on Monday mornings, though I don't particular like Mondays myself. Aside from that, If you work 4 days straight, you still have exactly one recovery period per week. You're just recovering from 3 days away rather than 2.
> 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.
More quotes from the article:
"Helen Delaney, a senior lecturer at the University of Auckland Business School, said employees’ 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." (emphasis mine)
“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”
The summary doesn't talk about productivity, but the article implies in several ways that productivity was not negatively impacted.
- The Sigless Wonder
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 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.
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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.
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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.
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.
You're assuming they got 5 days of work done in 4 which I don't see written anywhere in the summary
Maybe try reading it again?
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.
Maybe try reading it again, and notice the article never backs up those claims. It gives plenty of details figures for stress and job satisfaction, but no figures for worker productivity. It may be an oversite, but considering the same author did give figures for a similar attempt by a Swedish company in an early article about the same topic (which were pretty negative) the only assumption I think is warranted is there are no figures to back up your assumptions.
The workers could have performed better in those 32 hours, but got less done than in 40 hours, and those summarized comments by the professor would still be accurate.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
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)
You lose 20% of time they were working, so about 20% of their productivity,
They lose 20% work time.
Not 20% productivity.
Productivity is the ratio between work done and time needed. And has nothing to do with time needed alone.
Simple example: you and I have to carry 100 buckets of water 4 stories upstairs. ... so you are less productive and even make *much* more money ... sad, isn't it?
You need 10 hours, I need 8. I'm 20% more productive. But we both do the same work.
Worst case: you get payed 11$/h and I only 10$/h
What is more sad is that idiots who have no clue are leading discussions like this ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
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