I changed my working arrangement to 80% recently, so now I work four 8-hour day weeks. I wholeheartedly recommend it if you can make it work.
I have wednesday off, so the week is divided into two-day stretches.
Not sure if I'm any more productive (maybe), but I'm a lot happier. I suspect some coworkers are going to follow my lead, now that the precedent has been set.
I never said it was for everyone, but I suspect people magnify the expected issues a lot.
Everyone knows I won't be here on wednesdays, so we try to arrange things so I'm not a bottleneck during that time. If some really important deadline shows up, I'll just work the one wednesday and take thursday off instead, it's not a big deal. I haven't needed to yet though.
Besides, assuming you're not on a really tiny team, if many parts of your project hinge on one person with no available backup, you have bigger problems related to project management.
This is nonsense, although it may depend on the kind of job you have. For most of us, we don't need to be there five days a week. You can plan around that.
Of course if you have five people in a team and everybody has a different day off, you can never get together, and that may be a problem. This is the same if you and your colleagues work many days/hours out of the office or at home.
Pretty much anything can be made to work if it's planned for and executed properly.
Our dev process required a lot of meetings and interaction. So in order to ensure clear blocks of working time, we used to set aside days as "no meeting days" Some people would take the opportunity to work from home on those days since it was guaranteed they wouldn't be pulled into a meeting. Once you know Sally, Jared and Kaitlyn won't be in on Tuesdays, you plan around it.
This happens where I work- one of my coworkers is here Monday - Thursday (10 hour days) but takes Friday off. He's the only one with knowledge of a lot of our legacy systems, so a lot of potential work doesn't happen on Fridays. I'd argue that more of us should learn what he knows to avoid "hit by a bus syndrome" but we don't have enough spare man hours to devote to that.
I did the same for several years at my last job (although with Friday off so I had long weekends). It was great and I'd encourage anyone to try it if they can.
I definitely felt like it made me more productive per hour worked. A shorter week added a little bit of time pressure that helped me stay focused, and I'd often finish something in four days that might otherwise have stretched to five.
Total output was probably a little lower, but I took an equivalent pay cut when I reduced my hours.
I was only able to make that arrangement after I'd been at the job for a while. When I changed jobs, I went back to five days a week, and I'm definitely missing the long weekends.
> The question is not whether or not you're as productive, but rather, are you more than 80% as productive as you were before.
Absolutely, that was what I was trying to convey (productivity per hour rather than total productivity) but it was poorly worded. A lot of discussion around shortening the work week focuses on the latter. While there may be cases where that's true, I think focusing the discussion on that is wrong because it assumes that there has to be an economic argument for making the change. For me, people having more free time is a positive in itself that society should probably optimise more for.
I am certainly not less productive per hour worked. I might be more productive, I don't know, but that should not be the only reason we contemplate such a change.
Did your salary also drop to 80%? Did other benefits which legally require a 'full time' schedule go away?
The worst possible scenario would be workers switching to shorter work weeks, accepting pay cuts and loss of benefits, and proceeding to be more productive for their employer. I mean, unscrupulous employers would love it, but for society it would be terrible.
Yes, sort of. I approached this during the yearly salary interview. I negotiated a 10% raise, and a change in work schedule to 80%. So I'm getting paid 0.8*base_pay, but I didn't just take sudden a 20% cut between months.
> Did other benefits which legally require a 'full time' schedule go away?
I checked with my union (union membership is mandatory here but they really only negotiate minimum vacation days and minimum salary for a given profession/class, neither of which affects me since I have negotiated above and beyond what they have - it's a very different system than US people are probably familiar with) and according to them, there should be no change to any benefits or legal rights. Things like the fixed christmas bonus will be paid to 80%.
> The worst possible scenario would be workers switching to shorter work weeks, accepting pay cuts and loss of benefits, and proceeding to be more productive for their employer. I mean, unscrupulous employers would love it, but for society it would be terrible.
I'd rather not work more hours than I really want because my employer might benefit from me doing what I want to. If this concerns you, you can just keep your productivity per hour to the same level as it was before. I have no idea if I'm actually more productive, and I don't really care. What matters to me is I now have an extra day every week to do something that I actually want to be doing, rather than working for someone else.
Put another way, if you feel like your skills are undervalued, talk to your employer about a raise. This holds regardless of whether your work proportion is 100% or 80%.
I figured it'd be nice to only ever have two-day work stretches. I didn't put much thought into it, just decided to try it and I've been happy with it so far. I feel a lot more energetic on thursdays and fridays now.
Can't speak for GP, but what I did was move my schedule up to 9:30-6:00 or so, let my arrival date float between 9:30 and 10:00 so I could come in pretty much when I felt like it.
After awhile my workload dropped practically to zero, and I started leaving at 5. Kept it up even when there was a workload, and found that completion times didn't suffer.
Don't propose anything. Just start shifting your schedule around and see if people complain. Do it slowly and people won't notice, or if they do, won't care.
In the corporate world, you don't ask for permission, only forgiveness. The word they use for it is 'initiative'.
I should also note that management is likely to see this not as a wayward employee bucking the rules, but as someone doing what he needs to under the circumstances to make himself happy. So long as it's not egregious and work quality stays ultra-sharp, everybody involved is going to just work around your preferences. They know you'll be much less likely to leave if you're happy with your situation, the damage you cause by leaving is far worse than the damage caused by bucking the standards.
Around the time I was doing this, I got a new manager. I was wholly unwilling to reorient my schedule around his expectations, but I would stay until he left for the first few weeks. One day I followed him out, even though it was at least an hour before I "should" have been leaving. I'd also taken an hour-plus long lunch that day. I told him I usually leave at 5, but I was staying late in case he had any questions for me. He was like, "even though you took a long lunch??" and I just nodded, and followed him out. He didn't mention it again, until I started talking about taking another job.
There is a space in between political expectations, business needs, and personal wishes at any job that is ripe for exploration and exploitation. One can iterate towards their ideal work environment and conditions at any job where their performance is stellar. Just keep the business needs and political expectations in mind and you can practically get away with murder.
I'd be happy to take a 20% pay cut for a 4-day work week at some point in my life. I have a semi-retired relative who does just that.
As it is now, I'm vocal at reviews that I'll take more days off per year in lieu of direct salary increase -- an idea which seems to throw people off and hasn't been seriously entertained. At some point, I'll make enough annually, that I'll simply start taking days off without pay, which is something payroll seems to really hate for some reason when it concerns salaried folks.
Corporate pay/work expectations are really odd sometimes.
That's because they know they should just tell you that they don't need to pay you less–you're a salaried employee. Salaried employees get paid a fixed salary to get a job done. The part that employers enjoy in the arrangement is you being able to work more hours to get something done and your compensation remains a fixed cost. What they don't like to talk about is the other side of the coin: It doesn't matter how much time it doesn't take either. So accordingly you should, in theory, be able to work less days if you get your job done in those days.
But the reality is that many managers and employers only support the part that benefits them. Even many of the ones that are supportive of someone taking a Friday off every other week feel that they're doing you a favor or giving you a "perk". At the end of the day your manager has to support it (and if necessary continue believing they're doing you a favor) because they can find a way to shit-can you if you start pushing boundaries they're not comfortable with (in the US).
> ...I'll simply start taking days off without pay, which is something payroll seems to really hate for some reason when it concerns salaried folks.
At the risk of sounding too glib, the short answer to why they hate it is it creates work for them. In the US, all of the major payroll processing services are geared towards either hourly or salaried templates. Most companies' payroll procedures are built around the core assumption that if you are salaried, then it is X salary divided across N weeks/months/your-pay-period. If you take days off without pay, changing the salary, someone in payroll has to manually key in the delta off your normal pay period processing numbers. That sometimes has downstream ramifications upon unemployment insurance reporting and remittance, for larger companies there are other regulatory-originated reporting that this can impact, and put in common issues like tax liens and family court-mandated levies, just for starters, and it gets hairy. Generally payroll processing is still built around a set of assumptions that are at odds with emerging knowledge workforce trends; the trends can be accommodated, but it's a hassle.
If you have a good enough relationship with your manager, then you are far better off negotiating a sub-rosa agreement to (in your example) work Wednesday this week and take off a couple days next week (or leave a couple hours earlier each day), and net out to zero change in time worked over a short (sub-month) period and leaving payroll none the wiser to any change in time worked, than making the payroll department perform an exception-based processing of your payroll.
US payroll processing trivia to illustrate how rigid payroll processing systems are today for the small business, and for flexible work arrangements: if you are a really small, micro-sized business, like say an Etsy seller with a couple full-time employees, set up as your own LLC or whatever, you will run payroll, except unlike larger businesses you will frequently want to know how much to pay yourself (after paying off all employees and vendors) including all employER-side tax liabilities, and not just the employEE-side disbursement. All of the top-ten payroll processors have no capability to compute that for you; you have to iterate to an approximation. In other words, if you know you can afford to pay yourself only $10K total this month, payroll processors force you to key in a employEE net pay number then they spit out the gross including the employER side, and only then do you see if you are over/under the $10K amount. There is no feature that lets a small business owner say, this pay period, I can only afford at most $X cash out the door total including all tax liabilities for so-and-so employee, iterate and solve for me what the best result is to achieve that.
US payroll processing can get really complex, really fast even for small businesses, so I can imagine what a nightmare it must be for the designers and developers of those systems. However, I believe there is still plenty of room for someone to create a disruptive service that caters to and appeals to small businesses.
If you are a salaried employee, the only thing payroll should need to know is whether or not you worked at all during the week. If the answer is yes, you get paid your full salary. If it is no, you get paid your full salary if you have a vacation week left. If it is no, and you have no vacation weeks left, you don't get paid. Simple.
If taking a day off during a working week causes them additional effort, it is only because they are grossly abusing the definition of salaried employee the entire remainder of the year.
If they want to handle employees as though they were hourly, they could just stop lying about their people being salaried exempt employees.
If you are salaried, and your manager is fine with you taking Fridays off, payroll does not need to know. If a deadline approaches, and you need to work Saturday and Sunday, too, payroll does not need to know. Salaried workers are supposed to be paid for getting their work done, and not just for punching the clock.
It seems as though many employers are abusing the legal definitions in order to bend labor laws.
> It seems as though many employers are abusing the legal definitions in order to bend labor laws.
This is absolutely what is going on in many US companies, no question. That's a separate can of worms for the political and legislative arenas, and not one that individual salaried employees can safely change on their own within their company. Discussions about this also tend to drag in meta-discussions about compensation, project management, management accounting, work environments, etc., adding more worms to the can, and even more cans of worms to the original can. It's messy.
What you outlined is definitely what should happen. The jobs situation is bad enough for many fields outside of our own, and even many areas within our own field, that flagrant flouting of salaried exempt labor laws is allowed by regulators, and encouraged by shareholders. Longer-term, this only hurts the companies, because they're receiving imperfect signaling of actual required effort, distorting all future projections; competitive advantage accrues to those companies that accurately and precisely calibrate their projections to known required effort. Change will come slowly and haphazardly, if only from the ongoing population growth slowdown, hopefully.
Most likely, but taking into consideration taxes the decrease could be smaller.
Some countries have progressive income tax. So it depends on salary, but it could be that by working 20% less you receive only 15% less.
We have a progressive income tax here. The 20% comes from the part of my salary that gets the higher tax bracket. So in fact the decrease in amount I get paid is quite a bit less than 20%.
I also suggested this change at the yearly salary interview during which I negotiated a 10% raise. So really the amount I get paid each month didn't change all that much.
You're assuming a fixed workload-based salary. If we're talking about a salary that has a big variable component (commissions, fees, bonuses), the cut may have been smaller.
I have done this before, but arranged my days off to be alternating Mondays and Fridays so that every two weeks I'd get a four day weekend. My bosses were very generous with my schedule. :-)
Honestly this seems like the ideal scenario. Full pay, likely no argument from superiors about the amount of work you'd accomplish, and the ability to take long weekend trips without wasting a day or two of PTO.
I only see a few possible downsides:
- Someone expecting you to be in the office and you're not, particularly if they're not familiar with your schedule.
- For developers the same issues with 60+ work weeks often come up in hours 7-10 of a single working day. Off-campus lunch for a full hour (or more) would probably be important, which pushes your full day to 11+ hours.
- Using 10 hours of PTO when you take a day off, but I guess that's what you get for getting the 4-day weekends :)
This is the schedule my father has, working as a mechanic in a power plant. It's pretty solid.
The only (kind of ironic) downside is that holiday weeks are kind of sucky. The holiday day only pays 8 hours, so he ends up having to still work four eight hour days those weeks.
Working 3 10-hour days during a week and 6 5-hour days during a week seems equally doable, but I think I would get more complex, brainy problems solved with the latter, and more simpleminded grunt work done with the former.
I do this every once in a while, and my most productive hours tend to be... the two hours left in my day after everybody else has gone home. The office is silent and there are no distractions or emails. I can just get "in the zone". Maybe I should start doing this more often...
Anecdotal evidence, I used to to that as a CSR at PayPal years ago. After a "normal" day of height hours of calls or emails you had two more hours of emails.
My brain was fried and I was glad when the policy was canceled.
I loved the extra day though (which was Monday or Wednesday) and as a software engineer I would love to pull it off, to rest or work on my own thing, but I would gladly take a pay cut than work 10 hours a day constantly.
I think I conflated your current role as a software engineer with your previous job as a CSR. Besides poor reading comprehension on my part I think assuming a position like CSR is hourly and (typically?) only salaried employees answer emails after they go home contributed to that. Sorry.
It's not working less, some of us need 100% of our pay to get by and can't afford a 20% cut for less work (the stress of having less money > the stress caused by working more)
You propose spend 20% less time working for 20% less pay. He'll probably not accept it too, and if he accepts you'll probably not progress inside that company anymore. But he very probably won't get annoyed either.
I have wednesday off, so the week is divided into two-day stretches.
Not sure if I'm any more productive (maybe), but I'm a lot happier. I suspect some coworkers are going to follow my lead, now that the precedent has been set.