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Burnout, Stress Lead More Companies To Try a Four-Day Work Week (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Work four days a week, but get paid for five? It sounds too good to be true, but companies around the world that have cut their work week have found that it leads to higher productivity, more motivated staff and less burnout. "It is much healthier and we do a better job if we're not working crazy hours," said Jan Schulz-Hofen, founder of Berlin-based project management software company Planio, who introduced a four-day week to the company's 10-member staff earlier this year.
In New Zealand, trust company Perpetual Guardian reported a fall in stress and a jump in staff engagement after it tested a 32-hour week earlier this year. Even in Japan, the government is encouraging companies to allow Monday mornings off, although other schemes in the workaholic country to persuade employees to take it easy have had little effect. Britain's Trades Union Congress (TUC) is pushing for the whole country to move to a four-day week by the end of the century, a drive supported by the opposition Labour party. The TUC argues that a shorter week is a way for workers to share in the wealth generated by new technologies like machine learning and robotics, just as they won the right to the weekend off during the industrial revolution.
In New Zealand, trust company Perpetual Guardian reported a fall in stress and a jump in staff engagement after it tested a 32-hour week earlier this year. Even in Japan, the government is encouraging companies to allow Monday mornings off, although other schemes in the workaholic country to persuade employees to take it easy have had little effect. Britain's Trades Union Congress (TUC) is pushing for the whole country to move to a four-day week by the end of the century, a drive supported by the opposition Labour party. The TUC argues that a shorter week is a way for workers to share in the wealth generated by new technologies like machine learning and robotics, just as they won the right to the weekend off during the industrial revolution.
From personal experience: one employer offered a 4x10 week for better "work/life balance".
My local manager saw that and said, essentially, "oh, so you can work 10hr days. We need you in on Friday too."
Beware.
I would just like to work somewhere where they treat you like a person
They found a company in New Zealand that does this. And another in Germany. Must be a thing.
Same amount of work in fewer days. More burn out and more stress. The extra time for personal life will be spent recovering. Result = nett -ve impact of quality of life. :(
What good does having an extra day off if you're just going to be interrupted by the BOFH who refuses to follow any company policies and calls you on your personal line any time they want?
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
I work 10 months and get paid 13 months in government IT. Those paid federal holidays, PTO and Christmas bonus do add up.
you will work like a dog so the masters could rule the planet
4 longer days with more recess and more homework. Students seem to agree with me of course. Teachers haven't minded the idea but "how will the parents work" is the main issue.
Many companies are striving to relieve their employees of burnout and stress through "early retirement offers" and "layoffs" thus taking the "work" out of "work/life balance". It's great for the companies, but not so much for the former employees and the remaining employees who have to take up the slack.
...whether they want it or not -- so they can still be considered "part time," with no benefits.
We can hire more people, if we pay our current people less. We will wrap it up in work life balance bullshit.
So we are now trying to emulate France.
The 4x10 work week is great for people with low to moderate stress desk jobs. It's awesome because they work the same cycle of 1.5-3 high productivity hours each day and the rest filler, faffing, and socializing. The huge WLB benefit is having a weekday to deal with all the bullshit personal business which is not available after hours or on the weekend (e.g. every interaction with state and similar -- all the shit businesses working banker's hours).
It's an awful idea in healthcare, emergency services, and law enforcement; the same applies to 3x12/4x12 cycling hot in healthcare specifically. The only reason it's being pushed in those fields successfully is each one of those lacks oversight, accounting, and personal responsibility for mistakes up to and including death of those being served. And it's just piles of additional days off for those people who corner themselves (accident I swear) into as much overtime as the bosses will let them get away with.
Side note: these remarks apply to the US. I've heard the rest of the world is mostly more reasonable and people who work public service jobs are actually interested in public service rather than Cadillac pension plans.
And then there are the semi-retired people who take of a particular aspect of the business and nothing else
Of course I still have to call into late evening and early morning meetings to sync up with India, Asia, and Europe. And they're not on a 4x10 schedule.
It would be easier to make weeks 8 days long than it would be to change the 5x8 work schedule. Think of another planetary body from Greco-Roman myth to add an eight day. Sunday (Sun), Monday (Moon), Tuesday (Tyr / Mars), Wednesday (Woden / Odin / Mercury), Thursday (Thor / Jupiter), Friday (Frigg / Frija / Venus), Saturday (Saturn). Maybe name it for Hesperus, as a sort of second version of Wednesday. In Ptolemaic astronomy the eight celestial object are the fixed starts, so some name related to the word Stellar or Cosmos might be appropriate.
in the 20s, 30s 40s and even up till the 60s there was talk of less and less hours. And then it just stopped. 40 hours was "standard" with most doing 50+. Why the hell was it so easy to get the working class to work so hard for so little and just grin and bear it?
For the record, 86% of the manufacturing jobs lost were due to automation, not outsourcing. We're not being out-competed, there's just plain less work to do. And instead of working less we're all fighting among ourselves to see who gets to be the lucky guy that gets to do what little work is left.
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Where I work, around %5 of the people do the work, while the rest are dead weight. I've been a few places and this seems to be the norm; I wonder if employees are getting "burn out" because A) They're the deadweight who aren't going to do anything anyway or B) they're the ones running around doing all the work.
Idle thoughts. I'd like to see someone study this.
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This was true before the ACA as well.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
The 4x10 work week is great for people with low to moderate stress desk jobs
Not really. How many people want to in an office for 10 hrs, much less 8. I honestly check out around the 5-6 mark.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
How about instead of 4-8s or 4-10s, how about 5-6s.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
A company I worked at had a 9/80 schedule. you worked 9 hour days, got every other friday off and the friday on was a 1/2 day. It worked out really nicely easy to schedule all those errands that you normally have to fit in after or before work. Though I must say that the best contract I had was 4/32 and you could pick friday or monday as the day off it was amazing how refreshed you were at the start of each week after a 3 day weekend and it didn't hurt that I was also able to work from home a day each week as well.
Great advice there, unemployment line Shotgun.
You need the 6 hour workday. 5 days is okay, 4 is better. Gives a bit more time for conjugal visits at home
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
in the 20s, 30s 40s and even up till the 60s there was talk of less and less hours. And then it just stopped. 40 hours was "standard" with most doing 50+. Why the hell was it so easy to get the working class to work so hard for so little and just grin and bear it? For the record, 86% of the manufacturing jobs lost were due to automation, not outsourcing. We're not being out-competed, there's just plain less work to do. And instead of working less we're all fighting among ourselves to see who gets to be the lucky guy that gets to do what little work is left.
There's an unlimited amount of work to do. It's only limited if you want to live with a capped standard of living. The standard of living has drastically improved since the 1920s.
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4 hour workday?
Died with nuclear power...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The 4x10 work week is great for people with low to moderate stress desk jobs
Not really. How many people want to in an office for 10 hrs, much less 8. I honestly check out around the 5-6 mark.
I've only seen 4x10s in the trades, never in office work unless we were in the field directly supporting the tradesmen during heavy construction.
Cadillac pension plans.
so you plan to die young? thank goodness for the rest of us
Note that this article is about 4x8, not 4x10.
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The employer can then classify all those employees as not-full-time and then strip away all their benefits. Just think of all the money the company will save/make... Only paying 80% with not benefits, and demanding the employees still maintain productivity.
Fulfilled whole people have a tendency to want to make the world a better place. The problem is the obscenely rich got there by making the world a worse place. Certainly, you can see the bind they're in. Therefore, keeping the bulk of humanity crushed under an arbitrary boot remains their best system. Until the rest of us revolt, I suspect it will stay that way.
No, dumbass. The reason those jobs go to 12 hour shifts is that turnover is dangerous and expensive. A large fraction of health care errors occur across shift change.
Yeah, it improved so much that for the first time since years, the young generation has less sex than the old one. Improved my ass.
Because those who own the means of production don't want to share any more wealth than they have to.
These decisions aren't made out of a mutual desire to create a utopia. Its self-interest all the way down.
Giving you more time off does NOT help you afford your house, so it is absolutely NOT a way that you can share in the wealth of labor automation. This trend produces a near-future economy where everybody works two or three jobs that each require 20 hours a week, just to make ends meet.
Be that as it may, if you want more time off, you will have to either prove to the employers that THEY make more money that way, or you will have to legislate it. I suppose in theory you could socially-engineer that as the new normal, but I just don't see that happening.
Three quarters of the way down the page, mostly through comments about ten hour days, before I hit your post.
People really do have very fixed ideas about work.
It could still easily work in those other fields assuming good shift rotation.
This was true before the ACA as well.
Yes, it's a cumulative effect of requiring more benefits for full-time workers. The more you require, the more expensive you make giving somebody a full-time job, the fewer people have full-time jobs. If you want more people with full-time jobs, don't make it cheaper to have four people working part time than three people working full time.
And if you say your employee is a 'manager' then it's legal to pay no overtime allowance.
In many states, employers are required to pay workers overtime after 8 hours in a day. So even if the employer wants to offer 4x10 hours, they're forced to stick to 8 hour days to avoid increasing their payroll costs for the same number of hours worked.
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I worked 4x10's for years with Sat/Sun and Wed ( Yes, I intentionally picked Wednesday. Explanation below. ) off.
Means I worked two days ( Mon / Tue ) was off Wed, then worked two days ( Thu / Fri ) and off for the weekend.
No matter how shitty the day was, the worst case scenario I only had to tell myself " I only have one more day before I'm off ".
Was outstanding in that no one else is off on Wednesday, so guess what days I picked for all appointments, Doc visits, etc ?
I miss that shift . . . . .
Less human labor is needed to satisfy human needs, so a little human labor buys lots of robot labor. Work 6 month per year or 3 days a week or whatever. Or buy a self driving car that makes you money driving for Uber.
and you need three of these 30 hour jobs just to be able to afford the health insurance that you would otherwise have received with a single 40 hour per week benefited job.
"move to a four-day week by the end of the century" that's a ways away.
Have you considered that if the emergency services worker is not working 24/7/365 people die? Or that if.two emergencies happen at the same time in different places, people die?
Or maybe you should consider that there is already more than one cop, fireman and doctor in the world already, and they can figure out the average service level needed, or at least fundable.
When trade unions push for shorter working hours, it's usually so their members can do more overtime at time-and-a-half pay.
They specifically said 32 hour week.
J
I would think having more time off might translate into more time to shop. Good for the economy (not that I'm in favor of consumerism).
J
It's been demonstrated experimentally with lighting and temperature. Shorten the work week, and for a while, productivity will increase. Then return to normal. Extend the week but shorten the days, productivity will go up. Wait a month or two and return to a normal week, productivity will increase.
It was true before Obamacare, but has only become more prevalent since insurance costs are now 4 times the amount they were before Obamacare. So... Yea... Thanks Obamacare.
All that productivity went into the pockets of the 1%. Had it stayed with the workers, we'd be living large while working shorter work weeks. Look at what's happened over the last 35 or so years. Productivity up something like 140%. Median family income up 40%.
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Yes. It was in the summary.
I've in the past worked 3 x 12, common in the US medical wards. It was nice having 4 day weekends all the time. I've found that even those that just work 2 days a week, professors for example, still feel their week is full of work.
Left-handed sports players are often better. It's not because being left handed is better. It's because most opposing players will be right-handed, and hence a left-handed player has more experience against right-handed players, than right-handed players have experience against left-handed players.
It's called a "dominant minority", where the benefits of a mutation come from that mutation being a minority. And it's interesting because most advantages become majorities. But in a world where 50% of players are left-handed, there would be zero benefit in either direction.
We don't just work five-day weeks. We all work the same five-days every week. This means that during business hours, you can communicate with other businesses. This means suppliers, customers, affiliates, regulators. That's good for business.
Working only 4 of those 5 days is awesome when you're the only one in your circle doing it. During your business hours, you can still communicate with everyone, because they are working too. And on your day off, you can go shopping because everyone else is still working.
That's awesome.
But if everyone in your circle works 4 days instead of 5, you run into the very usual set of problems.
On your day off, everything is closed.
So you can't go shopping.
On your day on, you can't communicate with other businesses that have the day off.
So that screws every business schedule and deadline that you have.
I'm happy to work less. I'm happy to work more. The idea of a work-week is that we all work at the same time.
France had a 39-hour week, variously interpreted as eight-hour days and leave an hour early on Fridays, or 5 equal days of 7 hours 48 minutes, or (often) as "a minute here or there doesn't really matter, just work".
Almost 20 years ago France moved to 35 hours, with no change in monthly pay, recommending (I think it was a recommendation) that work days continue to be 8 hours but that employees be given whole days in proportion. The legislator (quite correctly IMHO) estimated that 48 minutes less per day would not have a real effect, being lost in overtime and "we don't count minutes". Since no general standard was enforced, this was variously applied as "one half day off every week", "one day off every two weeks", "two days off per month", and "we have an exemption so you continue working 39 hours but we'll have to pay you more". Also as "You will now work 35 hours for the same pay, this is marvelous country-wide social advancement that you should be very happy about, we're really sorry about the 32-hour week you had before but it's the law, you know", which caused some sour glares from postal workers.
20 years later, I don't know the exact results of the studies made (there have been lots), but it is sure that nobody is going back. Kids were already on 4 1/2 day school schedules, and parents are happy about spending more time with their kids (or paying less babysitting), other parents get time off when the kids are at school, and more simply people have gotten used to being able to take a day off now and then, to go to the doctor's or any other professional or shop not open on Saturdays, or just to do housework or work on a hobby.