More Companies Are Trying a Four-Day Work Week (reuters.com)

Companies around the world have cut their work week down to just four days and found that it leads to higher productivity, more motivated staff and less burnout. Reuters highlights some of those companies: "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. Lucie Greene, trends expert at consultancy J. Walter Thompson, said there was a growing backlash against overwork, underlined by a wave of criticism after Tesla boss Elon Musk tweeted that "nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week. People are starting to take a step back from the 24-hour digital life we have now and realize the mental health issues from being constantly connected to work," Greene said.

Schulz-Hofen, a 36-year-old software engineer, tested the four-day week on himself after realizing he needed to slow down following a decade of intense work launching Planio, whose tools allowed him to track his time in detail. "I didn't get less work done in four days than in five because in five days, you think you have more time, you take longer, you allow yourself to have more interruptions, you have your coffee a bit longer or chat with colleagues," Schulz-Hofen said. "I realized with four days, I have to be quick, I have to be focused if I want to have my free Friday." Schulz-Hofen and his team discussed various options before settling on everybody working Monday to Thursday. They rejected the idea of flexible hours because it adds administrative complexity, and were against a five-day week with shorter hours as it is too easy for overwork to creep back in.

Comments

Editors must be working 0 day weeks

[OrangeTide]

The stress must be getting to you. Because we've saw it only days ago.

Re: Editors must be working 0 day weeks

[Anonymous Coward]

As I keep saying with the surge in duplicate posts lately, the "editors" could easily quickly scan the RSS entires of the last 50 posts before submitting duplicates. It's ridiculous already.

Re: Editors must be working 0 day weeks

[muffen]

Editors need to cut down their work hours, they should try 4 days a week, I've read it's good!

More websites are trying recycled content

[Lije Baley]

"Read recycled news, it's good for website profitability and OK for you."

Prediction

[lucasnate1]

This article will be flooded by angry replies from americans, insisting that only inefficient companies work so, and that the only way for efficency, self fulfillment, and complete human salvation, is to work 12/5 or 12/7...

Re:Prediction

[OrangeTide]

if costly benefits like healthcare and retirement savings are foisted onto employers, then having fewer employees that do the work of two or three is a savings. And hard working employees are simple to replace because "right to work" laws means no notice, no severance, and no reasons need to be given for termination.

We operate a highly efficient serfdom, and it boggles my American brain that Europeans aren't doing the same.

Re:Prediction

[omnichad]

if costly benefits like healthcare and retirement savings are foisted onto employers

Almost everything like that ultimately come from the employer in the form of wages or benefits. Whether the consumer pays/saves out of pocket, they pay it through taxes, or they pay through employment in lieu of higher wages. The consumer has no other source of money for these expenses than their job.

Re:Prediction

[ShanghaiBill]

"right to work" laws means no notice, no severance, and no reasons need to be given for termination.

You are thinking of "At Will". "Right to Work" means something completely different: A ban on closed union shops.

With minor exemptions, "at will" is the law in all 50 states.

27 states have "right to work" laws.

At-will employment

Right to work

Re:Prediction

[rtb61]

Let's be blunt cowardice always finds excuses for lack of action, whilst proudly proclaiming how brave they are. So badly are they beaten, rather than fight for what they should be provided in exchange for them doing all the work, they would attack other workers who are getting too much or maybe, just maybe, that could be paid US government and Corporate propagandists, you know workers should beg for their jobs, worship their bosses and be grateful for the crumbs they receive and cowardice just laps that stuff up, like the obedient dog it is.

American the reason working conditions are shitty, America - The land of the free and the home of the brave, well not true at all, the land of the minimum wage serf and the home of anti-union cowards to afraid to fight for what is theirs by right, the complete opposite of what the USA was a century ago.

Re:Prediction

[gweihir]

I never got that. I mean it has been known for a long, long time from studies by Ford and others that mental workers have peak efficiency at 6h/day for 5 days/week and that working more _decreases_ total (!) productivity. I guess there are so many americans that are virtue signalling by working (or claiming to work) much more that the sheer stupidity of doing so does not get through anymore.

So let me state this again: If you work 40h or more a week as a mental worker, then you are unproductive and self-destructive. If you work around 30h a week as mental worker, you are pretty much at peak overall (!) efficiently. And no, if you claim otherwise, then you are just uninformed. These facts are not up for dispute and they have not been up for dispute for a long time. The current experiments are just re-discovering known information.
 

Re:Prediction

[hdyoung]

I think you're being a tad harsh on the US. First, let me be the first to acknowledge that the US has PLENTY of problems. However, it also has one of the most dynamic, healthy, advanced economies on the planet. One of the richer ones per-capita also, though not #1. I'm firmly against forcing our system on others, but the truth is that our economic system could make a TON of other countries a LOT better off, if they would just swallow their pride and adopt it (looking at you, South America).

If the 4-day work week actually improves productivity and competitiveness, you'll see it adopted in the US fairly quickly.

With regards to unions - there are places that could benefit from more unionization, and there are other places where unions are absolutely strangling progress.

Re:Prediction

[Applehu Akbar]

This article will be flooded by angry replies from americans...

Actually, angry replies from American management.

Re:Prediction

[Brett Buck]

Right, why work hard when you can phony up taxes on US companies, and steal money made on other people's hard work?

Re:Prediction

[Tom]

Workers already reduce their effective work time to around this level.

They just don't do it by going home early. They do it by standing around the water cooler, by long bathroom breaks, smoking breaks, watching Netflix at their desk, by having unproductive meetings, or by padding the serious work with bullshit work.

Re:Prediction

[tquasar]

Arizona is (or was ) a right to work state. "Here are your working conditions and wage. Take it or leave it."

Re: Prediction

[lucasnate1]

In the country where I come from (Israel), part time employees get benefits as well. Not everybody are americans (and thank god for that).

Re:Prediction

[lucasnate1]

I know many workers who stay late doing nothing simply because management tends to appreciate workers who stay late, even if they don't do much.

Re:Prediction

[thegarbz]

What you're saying does not invalidate anything the GP said. In fact it reinforces it. Screwing the workers, poor holidays, long hours, and a culture of living to work is one of the reasons the economy is as dynamic, healthy and advanced as it is.

People often like to say: "We are the most efficient".
To which I reply: "Yeah but we are happy"

Re:Prediction

[DNS-and-BIND]

I love how you blame the American people instead of the bosses who force us to work these hours. Using SJW language no less. Yeah, you tell off those workers. Speak truth to the powerless!

Re:Prediction

[DNS-and-BIND]

Since when do you give a shit about the lives of American working class? They're a bunch of ignorant racist deplorables who watch NASCAR and drink lite beer. Why are you pretending to care about them? They're less intelligent than average. You hate stupid people!

Re:Prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

"Not number 1" = 19th in the world in terms of GDP/capita.

Comparing the US to south america's economic systems is a little rich, given that you guys have spent the last 70 years actively sabotaging them, up to and including arming violent military insurrections, bringing down governments, installing puppet leaders and assassinating foreign politicians who refuse to toe the line. Hardly a fair comparison.

America was founded on puritanical ideals, including the beliefs that hard work was virtuous and being idle was sinful. Annoyingly, although you appear to have mostly disregarded many of the other ideals that were quintessential to the foundation of your country (justice, peace, liberty), the idea that work has to be hard to be virtuous is hanging on in there.

Re:Prediction

[thegarbz]

Since when do you give a shit about the lives of American working class?

And yet 99% of my criticism of America is the way their policies act on their own people.

You hate stupid people!

Nope, I hate stupidity. There's a big difference. In general I don't hate people, and I certainly don't hate generic groups of people. But really you don't seem to know me at all if you think I hate stupid people, which is a shame. I thought we had "a thing" but clearly this relationship was one sided.

Re:Prediction

[gweihir]

True. If you work around 40h formally, then an efficient mental worker will waste around 2h/day to improve efficiency. If you work, say,60h, then this does not work anymore and your productivity will sink significantly under that of somebody working 30h (or being at work 40h while working 30h).

Re:Prediction

[gweihir]

The sheer overall stupidity of that is staggering. I know it does happen, but all it does is nicely illustrating the utter cluelessness of management.

Re:Prediction

[gweihir]

You think I do not speak to "the bosses" as well or that these limits do not apply to them? Whatever gave you that idea? Or do you not include "the bosses" in the "mental worker" category?

Also, I am not saying the "non-bosses" have the freedom to do something else. I do however notice that quite a few of the "non-bosses" defend working long hours and claim that this makes them more productive overall. And that is the thing I am talking about there: Lack of understanding. Understanding is a required component in addressing this problem. It seems to me the main reason so many people work so many hours in the US is that almost nobody understands that this is the wrong approach.

Of course, the stupidity is with those that cause the long working hours, whether it is "the bosses" or whether the workers are doing it to themselves. And, you know, from statements made, for example here, a lot of workers are actually doing it to themselves.

Re:Prediction

[gweihir]

As I said, the stupidity is staggering. "Work hours" are generally not an useful productivity metric. They are only an useful metric to determine how many hours are missing from your life. The whole approach is utterly broken for most (not all) situations and that needs to change.

Re: Prediction

[gweihir]

The only one saying anything about "no benefits" here is you. I am merely pointing out that the metric used is fundamentally broken and that you should stop defending it. Also, in the civilized world, you get benefits regardless of how long you work and things like health insurance are _not_ tied to your job (for obvious reasons).

Re:Prediction

[Kjella]

Almost everything like that ultimately come from the employer in the form of wages or benefits. Whether the consumer pays/saves out of pocket, they pay it through taxes, or they pay through employment in lieu of higher wages. The consumer has no other source of money for these expenses than their job.

While that's true, if there's a choice between hiring 3 people @ 40 hours/week or 2 people @ 60 hours/week and you're paying a big overhead per head the incentive is to have as few employees as possible and work them harder. Who you employ probably also has an effect on your insurance rates, independent of how their qualifications as employees. It's also one more hold employers have over their employees, lose your job and you lose your health plan too.

If it's financed as a flat tax on income which I know is fairly typical for universal healthcare then it's simply not a factor. It doesn't matter if Bob is a healthy 20yo or a 60yo that needs regular dialysis due to kidney failure doesn't matter as long as they both show up for work. You're not in any practical sense paying for Bob's healthcare or Bob's retirement, you're paying into the healthcare and pension system.

Re:Prediction

[omnichad]

BUT you must make yourself singularly available to them and not work for anyone else

In the US, I think that alone would force you to be classified as an employee rather than a contractor.

Re:Prediction

[Hognoxious]

and that working more _decreases_ total (!) productivity.

Productivity is defined as output per unit of input (usually per hour of labour). Totalling it makes no more sense than walking for five minutes, driving on a road for ten minutes and on a freeway for an hour and saying your total speed was 89 mph.

Re: Prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

Mostly Asian phones, even if not an Asian brand they're still produced in China; mostly hardware produced in China, Taiwan, and so forth; mostly wearing clothes produced in Asian sweatshops; jacking off to mostly Slavic women from eastern Europe.
Fixed that for you.

Re:Prediction

[Cinnamon Beige]

if costly benefits like healthcare and retirement savings are foisted onto employers, then having fewer employees that do the work of two or three is a savings. And hard working employees are simple to replace because "right to work" laws means no notice, no severance, and no reasons need to be given for termination.

We operate a highly efficient serfdom, and it boggles my American brain that Europeans aren't doing the same.

Right to work laws mean that the unions can't insist on membership or a cut of worker's pay--if the union wants members and their money, they must actually provide benefits to the workers they claim to represent and convince them to join of their own free will.

No notice firings and no reasons for termination is entirely disconnected to right to work (the latter even is legal in all but one state), and severance is legally required in some form regardless of it's a right to work state unless you were fired with cause or quit. (Last I checked, constructive dismissal, where your employer makes your life miserable in hopes you'll quit so they don't have to pay out severance, varies by state, and usually is an issue of case law instead of statutory law. If you need to know more, consult a good local lawyer who specializes in labor law.)

One really good way to ensure labor's rights are weak is to spread lies and disinformation, especially when not knowing your rights accurately will make it easier to use you--and not just by the employers.

Re:Prediction

[gweihir]

Aaaand found the clueless nit-picker. As anybody with two brain-cells can see, this is obviously per real-time interval large enough to give stable numbers, i.e. at least a week. It most certainly is _not_ per hour of labor. Even suggesting this means you have not understood anything at all. My very point is that the productivity per hour is dependent on hours worked overall per day/week and that the total sum per week decreases from a certain point of hour worked onward that is around 30 h/week.

If you have a STEM degree, I suggest you hand it back as you clearly have not enough insight into how to do measurements in the real world to deserve that degree.

Re:Prediction

[Hognoxious]

and you're paying a big overhead per head

If the system was set up that way, it can be set up differently.

You're not in any practical sense paying for Bob's healthcare or Bob's retirement, you're paying into the healthcare and pension system.

Good luck with that. I can hear the cries of "Communism! Venezuela! Compulsory gay maerriage!" already.

Re:Prediction

[Hognoxious]

Don't lie. You just think "productivity" is a fancier synonym of "output".

Re:Prediction

[Uberbah]

I think you're being a tad harsh on the US.

Not harsh enough - we need some guillotines & gulags.

However, it also has one of the most dynamic, healthy, advanced economies on the planet.

This cartoon neatly addresses that bubble thinking. You have an absolute pile of shit for an economy when a single silicon valley billionaire has as much wealth as a hundred million Americans.

Re:Prediction

[DNS-and-BIND]

So, blame the workers. You know, for someone who's on the far left you're pretty bad at sticking to your own principles. You're like an alt-right advocating for open borders.

Re:Prediction

[toddestan]

This only applies to mental work, where you have to spend a lot of time thinking about problems and solutions.

I assume a job that has to be staffed 24 hours a day is either menial labor like a cashier, or is a job like fire fighting where the vast majority of the time they are on the clock they aren't actually "working", but instead are there as they may need to do their jobs at a moment's notice.

Re:Prediction

[gweihir]

Here is a hint: The productivity in the given setting _is_ the output because the input is fixed. It is the 168h a single worker has in a week. What is not fixed is the ratio of time spent working to time spent not working. But that is not the "input" in the base formula for productivity here. It is an utilization factor. As we are only asking after the peak dependent on the utilization factor, we do not care about constants. (Warning! Advanced idea!) I am not really surprised you cannot do such an elementary calculation. I have seen this countless times in freshmen. Although those that are still there a year later usually do not have your ignorant arrogance.

What I find utterly hilarious though is that you do recognize the input in my argument is fixed but completely fail to see that this is the right model for the given problem. You probably run equipment with a limited operation time and cool-down requirement nonstop and wonder why it fails as well or think that you can just run one unit twice as long instead of having to get two from a certain utilization onward.

Glitch in the Matrix?

[fazig]

I could swear that I read something very similar some days ago here: https://news.slashdot.org/stor...

Re:Glitch in the Matrix?

[alvinrod]

Maybe the Slashdot editors are already on a four day work week and BeauHD was off the last time it was posted.

UBI

[Camel Pilot]

I know UBI is a hot and popular topic on /.

A shorter work week, more vacation and an earlier retirement are much more practical ways to accommodate the loss of jobs to automation.

Re:UBI

[sjames]

UBI is in part a reaction to the right screeching about employer's rights to expect long hours, low pay, and unpaid vacation only when approved in triplicate.

UBI = fine, let the market decide, but the labor side won't be bent over a barrel when it does.

The capitol class hates it because they know that with the threat of homelessness and starvation removed, wages will drift up to the natural value of labor.

Re:UBI

[gweihir]

Actually, not like this. As 30h/week workers are significantly more productive overall than those working more, this makes the problem worse. If we go to, say 20h/week, work, then the positive effect on the job-market will be there.

Re:UBI

[Tom]

The capitol class hates it because they know that with the threat of homelessness and starvation removed, wages will drift up to the natural value of labor.

This. There was a private conversion between CEOs recently in my area, told to me by my boss who was there. One guy complained loudly about not being able to find trained workers. Another CEO calmly corrected him saying that he would have no trouble at all finding them if he paid them proper salaries.

The brilliance of UBI is in this one thing: It removes fear of survival as a factor in wage negotiations. It allows people to walk away from jobs that are in the "are you kidding me?" category.

Re:UBI

[sjames]

The market is still skewed towards low pay, that's why corporations are posting record profits and pay isn't going up.

Re:UBI

[Tom]

No, you completely misunderstood the anecdote. If you were right, that slave-wage-paying CEO would've never thought he can get away with it, he wouldn't have tried. The fact that he is surprised about not being able to get qualified workers for a ridiculous salary is the point of the story. He should have the idea of paying a proper salary by himself, but he didn't. Because the job market does not work. Too many jobs pay pathetic salaries but people are still forced to take them because the alternative is worse.

The guy just happens to be looking in a field where there happen to be more jobs than qualified people, so for once the strategy doesn't work.

What A Coinkydink!

[IonOtter]

Oh, hey!

It looks like you've dropped below 40 hours! That's great, it means we no longer have to offer you insurance, or a 401K, or matching?

Wow, this is a great idea!

--- Every CEO in America

I call BS (obvious)

[Anonymous Coward]

Having built my own startups in the past, there aren't enough hours in the day to get everything done. If you're in a stagnating business then sure, switch to a 4 day work week while people like me leave you behind.

32 Hours On Average

[Mandrel]

32 hours a week averaged over the year could work better for both employers and staff. It would allow for periods of intense work balanced by periods of extra time off (preferably each with good notice), without having the intense periods charged at overtime premiums.

Re:32 Hours On Average

[iggymanz]

no, the idea is four 10 hour days

same pay
same work

Re:32 Hours On Average

[tlhIngan]

no, the idea is four 10 hour days

same pay
same work

Nope, they say 32 hours.

Which is not unusual, because in many places, 37.5 hour workweeks are common (7.5h/day), or 35 hour workweeks (7h/day) is the standard. Many of those countries do allow 40 hour workweeks as a maximum (often because the laws state overtime must be paid after that).

And yes, in my previous jobs (usually as an intern) I worked 37.5 hours and 35 hours and even OT work (on request).

Re:32 Hours On Average

[iggymanz]

yes 37.5 is actually where I work too, 8 hours - half hour given break = 7.5

For decades the talk was of putting that into four days.

The caveat to it being....

[mark-t]

.... that you don't make as much money per week, and may require a part time job to supplement the four-day a week job.

Uh huh

[Dunbal]

I have to be quick, I have to be focused if I want to have my free Friday.

So basically a quota system. Next comes the part where your boss steadily increases the quota, making sure you NEVER get your free Friday.

Anecdotal evidence

[cordovaCon83]

All these anecdotes are wonderful yet seem to be cherry-picked from industries where this sort of work week is practical. I'm willing to bet most of these companies pay their employees salary anyway and those hours can easily change with the regular ebb and flow of business. I'd be surprised if any of these companies were paying an hourly rate. The companies would have to do a 25% hourly pay increase to keep their hourly employees at the same level of income. Overtime would be that much more expensive to pay out. I'll be more excited about this being a permanent change to America culture when it starts seeping into blue-collar industries.

personal experience

[Tom]

I actually did this years ago, and it was a dramatic improvement for me, both personally and professionally. I could afford to give up the pay and needed more time for my personal life, so it was an easy decision to make, and I would do it again if I could (right now I can't, but I'm hoping for another opportunity in the future).

People dramatically overestimate the amount of work being done in the hours beyond employees "want to be here" time. Fridays especially are days in which very little gets done in many companies. When I was working 4 days a week, I got maybe 90-95% of the work of a full work-week done, not 80% as you'd expect. And I did that feeling much more relaxed, not more hurried. And I could do a lot more on weekends. And I had more time to relax whenever weekends weren't perfect. You know, sometimes shit happens on a weekend, and it ruins your whole weekend. With 3 days instead of 2, there's always at least one day left you can enjoy.

My personal experience says that a 32-hour week is vastly superior to a 40-hour week in all respects. Moving everyone to a 32-hour week with only 10% reduction in salary would be an optimal benefit to society, and everybody would profit. Employees would get more money per hour, companies would get more work done per currency unit, everyone would be less stressed, stress is a major health factor, so healthcare costs would drop - I see not one reason why we aren't doing it. Well, stupidity, like most things in the world today, but aside from that?

Re:personal experience

[epine]

Moving everyone to a 32-hour week with only 10% reduction in salary would be an optimal benefit to society, ...

Some people complain about all the gun–foot problems associated with C++ not having a garbage collector, but then they blithely introduce the word "everyone" after a gerund or the word "if", as if that's not far more dangerous than dereferencing an unchecked pointer (many of these seem to regard the class of algorithms known as "collision detection" as having originated in the arcade era of the 1980s and 1990s—thus neglecting the au courant car–life problems associated with a badly timed, asynchronous GC gag).

That innocuous-seeming word, "everyone", has a lining, and it's not a silver Audi.

When something is made to be foolproof, nature invents a better fool.

I'm sure for many people out there, their productivity is incompressible. The most productivity they can squeeze out of themselves on any given day is 4–6 hours. There are people who can't go four days without sex (not without a short leash, stretched taut), and there are people who can't go four work days without screwing the pooch (downhill in both directions).

So then you get into a scenario of a four-day week only for those who can. The division of the workforce into "cans" and "can nots" surely won't cause any mushroom clouds to erupt at the water cooler, no, not one little bit.

Safe, GC languages don't implement self as a pointer, and they don't implement the keyword everyone either: neither by pointer, nor reference, nor value shall a bent-kneed barrel of monkeys be invoked through a uniform interface of vapid polymorphism.

Ideal work week

[kqc7011]

If a company and the workers are able to do a four day work week this is about the ideal schedule. It goes like this, you work Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday with Saturday and Sunday off. Then the next week you work Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, with Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday off. Every weekend is off and every other weekend is a 4 day weekend. Holidays, vacations and unscheduled (health and personal) time off is where both the company and workers need to figure out how to do this. 24 /7, part time and other non-standard working hour jobs do not fit this.

mental work is more perspiration than inspiration

[RhettLivingston]

But, we must always allow for the exceptions to the rule. They are always there.

The problem comes in that no "mental" work is entirely that. Even "mental" work is usually far more perspiration that inspiration.

As a computer engineer I frequently wrote software. During my peak years there was one very large project for an embedded system with many processors and custom boards linked together that I took on that took two years.

As leader of a team of 10 that worked the software, I reviewed every line of every code, participated in most of the testing, and wrote the most code. I routinely worked 90 hour weeks for two years.

The thing is, I knew what needed to be written before we started. My primary limitations were in the bandwidth of human I/O both to the members of my team and through my keyboard. Much of my actual mental work after the project started was in figuring out ways to speed that up.

Some of the things I did to speed things up included creating extensions to ANSI C that supported our project and writing a compiler to compile that new language to pure ANSI C, automating much of the testing, creating an extensive set of PERL scripts that scanned everyone's code for the patterns of their usual mistakes, and writing a lot of transformation macros for our code that automated coding of common patterns.

While doing all of that, I also wrote the operating system and all of the drivers for the device.

It was two years of hell, but we completed the project on time and on budget.

Most importantly, in the first year of deployment of the new device, there were a total of 5 bugs reported. To put that in perspective, over 3 million lines of new code had been written.

Nobody could ever convince me that we could have done the same thing working 40 hour weeks. We wrote code for over 180 processors and programmable devices every one of which was performing a unique job during those two years. My primary limitation was only being able to type about 60 wpm.

Re:Can you dig it?

[Hognoxious]

This may be less realistic in an industry like mine where most operations run seven days a week and around 360 days a year, but it could be fantastic wherever it is practical.

There are some advanced management techniques available that enable businesses to operate without having all the people there at all times.

Why stop at 4?

[Tony Isaac]

Clearly, if 5 days are better than 6, and 4 days are better than 5, why stop there? How about a 0 day work week! We'd all have so little stress, we'd get everything done in a snap!

Like cutting taxes raises revenue

[Tony Isaac]

And we see how well THAT worked!

https://www.forbes.com/sites/c...