I've been working 4 day workweeks for well over a decade now, took the pay cut myself.
As for the goal to maintain 100% productivity whilst cutting back on hours, I'm confident that they will succeed. In fact, they'll succeed in this without requiring some kind of brilliant plan, as this recalibration happens automatically.
When you start working one day less, nobody will reduce your workload by 20%. You'll have the exact same workload as before and now need to achieve it in less time.
There's many ways to cross this gap. An obvious one is that a typical 5 day work week has moments of slack, depending on the culture. Friday after lunch is where productivity sinks in many offices. Wednesdays are also slower as it's typically the first moment in the week where things are running (planned, prepared, on track). In a 4 day work week you sacrifice this breathing room, the 4 days become more compressed.
Another natural change is to take a more aggressive stand in rejecting non-sense. Excess meetings, unimportant emails, etc. This works very well and is extremely effective for the simple reason that you MUST. As such this time compression is a blessing, a cleansing mechanism for yourself and the organization.
You'll be amazed at how much time you can win back. Let's say you do need to attend a meeting. It's a 1 hour meeting. You're needed in the meeting. Go in and say you only have 20 mins. As if by sheer magic, what needed to be discussed gets done in 20 mins. Without this forced "budgeting", people would just fill the hour with bullshit.
Counter intuitive, but by being rigid instead of elastic, you maximize value.
I'd argue that the majority of office settings don't have moments of slack, but rather moments of productivity. This same productivity can be achieved in wayy less time than the standard 40 hours/week.
I can only agree, depending on what you include in "productivity".
I'd say it's incredibly common for a modern office worker to be engaged in email, meetings and chat for some 4-6 hours per day.
Not only does this leave little time to do actual tasks, that little time is also highly fragmented across the day.
It's a point I've made repeatedly on similar threads: the problem with modern office work is too much collaboration. Pretty much we spent the vast majority of the day figuring out what to do when, instead of actually doing it.
Give me a project to work on by myself and it will be done in 2 days. Give me the same project with a team of people to help and it will take months, it might never get done.
Just recently I had to migrate a website to some new servers with a new OS. Server build, fully automating the post-build and deployment, code changes, and testing… done in 2 days. Working with other teams around networking, change management, etc…. 9 months of waiting and hell.
> Pretty much we spent the vast majority of the day figuring out what to do when, instead of actually doing it.
One could argue that we virtually never do actual work. Machines or remote workers do. All we are doing is defining, communicating and controlling others' work.
My point is collaboration (aka "figuring out what to do when") is pretty much the essence of our work. It is machines or remote workers that are "actually doing it", as I believe GP means it.
> I'd argue that the majority of office settings don't have moments of slack, but rather moments of productivity.
Absolutely. The complete lack of slack in the modern office drives a lot of my stress. I am transmuting that into an long-term win, however: it is driving me to seek flexible working arrangements, working for myself, setting up passive income streams (however small they are) and generally working less. I refuse to give my best years of my life to my work, and will work 2x as hard (for myself, obviously) to partially decouple time from income.
> This same productivity can be achieved in wayy less time than the standard 40 hours/week.
The nebulousness with which productivity is defined based on the context suggests it is not nearly as objective as some would have you think.
My company does max 30 minute meetings. It's great and somehow everything still gets discussed. Occasionally we run a bit long but everyone knows you can only rely on people to be there for the first 30 minutes.
I'm in a Staff role with my fingers in multiple projects across several teams, and I still only have 2-3 hours of meetings a day.
Great practice. We're doing a similar thing and although these meetings sometimes run late, it's now culturally accepted that invitees just type "need to drop" and leave. When this is normalized, people learn to get to the point.
> As for the goal to maintain 100% productivity whilst cutting back on hours, I'm confident that they will succeed. In fact, they'll succeed in this without requiring some kind of brilliant plan, as this recalibration happens automatically.
I worked as a contractor for a while with a 32 hour/week schedule. I was essentially just as productive as I was full time.
Reality is for most creative jobs, there's a fraction of your work week where you're extremely productive. Everything else is just rounding out the admin work while your brain is mush.
Nothing illustrates this quite like the task that is marked as 'half a week' and some manager doesn't understand why you can't do two of those in the same week.
Like, if a marathon only takes 6 hours then why can't you do a second one on Sunday? And if I harass you enough can you do another one on Saturday afternoon as well?
Yesterday I had a 1 hour meeting where 3 of the 7 participants needed to attend another meeting after 30 minutes. We reorganized the agenda to hit the issues that they were especially concerned about while they were available, and then did the other things in the next 20 minutes, finishing a little early.
It's not impossible, it just requires a culture of consideration, communication, and prioritization.
I wonder if that's the key -- maybe it's acceptable to shorten one meeting on your behalf (or at least your participation in that meeting) if the reason you'll miss this meeting is that you'll be in a different meeting. As long as you're in some time-wasting activity, they're satisfied.
It also heavily favors the loud and self important who will force their way to the front and dominate the conversation. In an hour long meeting there is much more opportunity to give everyone several minutes to speak and have group discussion and deliberation. Now if your meeting can actually get done in 20 minutes, it probably should have been a phone call.
Well, most meetings are phone calls. Over time, I've seen more and more things default to 30 minutes whether meetings, presentations, or whatever. That's not to say that an hour isn't the right length for certain things, but it's reasonable to default to 30 minutes unless people think more time is needed.
Practically the only think I like about Scrum is that there's a person who is slightly at arm's length to referee these sorts of things. But it's a sort of broken clock scenario.
I wonder what percentage of meetings occur because someone in leadership is disorganized and / or unable to properly communicate with staff while they're performing their jobs on a daily basis.
Gonna say that, excluding standup, this has to be at least 50%.
When I was working before my retirement I routinely had to work 60 hr weeks since I was lead (went to every meeting) and wrote code full time along with my team. Most of our projects started with a hard deadline (estimates were only used for budgeting, the time was predetermined) and constant change was endemic during every project. No way this would fit in 32 hr weeks. Yet we still had sprints (which assumed 40 hrs of effort) and burndown charts (which is antiagile and idiotic given all the changes). The real issue is institutional insanity, assuming you can direct engineers like they were machines.
Until you fix the institution you can't change the hours.
Absolutely. Almost every org treats engineers as an expendable resource. They do this because they fear the alternative, which requires treating people with respect, because those people are valuable to your organization.
You and I have very different career experiences. I have worked for 5 Fortune-100 technology companies over the past 20 years and never once did I feel like I was an expendable resource. Outside one particular experience, every one of my managers (Directors, Sr Directors) treated everyone with respect and honesty. Furthermore, they were genuinely concerned about health and family issues (family health, PTO, etc). Even in my current role, my company goes out of its way to provide a solid work-life balance (additional PTO for COVID, extra volunteer time, etc).
I hope others on HN have had the opportunity to work in places such as these...
Things have changed in the past decade for engineers. In the 00s, I felt expendable at every job, even at places that suffered after an exodus engineers. In the 10s, I felt necessary, but fungible. And in the 20s, I feel important and that my skills are distinct.
I'm sure this varies a lot for people working in different sectors, but I think every sector has seen the perceived importance of technology engineering increase over time.
they do it because they can. Engineers have the tendency to be overly individualistic and ignore collective bargaining which is the primary means by which people can gain better working conditions. As long as people are willing to put in those 60 hours to climb up the next career rank ahead of their peers it's gonna be that way.
If you are organized you can call their bluff. But if more than a couple of people defect and keep insisting they can make the unreasonable deadlines, then those people get attention because they are saying what management wants to hear.
One of my goals in life is to get better at identifying (read, admitting/accepting) when the team has defectors and finding someplace else to apply my skills. But the few times it has actually worked are a mighty incentive to try again, even when I should know better.
Agreed. The situation you describe is one where constraints do not exist, which is cultural. You assume input, say 40 hours (input is not productivity) and keep piling on work, responsibilities and unrealistic deadlines where workers feel forced to put in as much as 60 hours. Which is again input, not output.
Where I work, we work output-based. We work in sprints where the amount of work that can be done in a sprint is fixed, expressed as velocity. This capacity is a hard constraint and immutable (unless you hire additional people).
The business is free to spent that velocity as they please, but they have no say over velocity itself. They also have no say over input (hours) or estimates (they're not qualified to do so).
These hard constraints are a thing of beauty, it forces serious prioritization. Call me old and cynical, but in my 25 years in IT, I'd say at least 80% of what gets build is bullshit. Untested brain farts from higher-ups that have no tangible benefit to any customer or user. Hence I fail to be impressed by almost any "priority" or "deadline", exceptions aside.
The only thing I support more than WFH is my competitors working 20% less.
If they're doing this to compete for talent, go ahead by all means. I suspect they need to do something like this also because they're a UK SaaS company (so lower wages to start) serving the low-end of the non-profit market (price sensitive buyers). And they don't have the enterprise features to compete with Salesforce and CRM for the high-end segment.
The goal is to keep expanding these trials until labor law ratchets the work week down for everyone to 4 days. It will take time, but it will happen.
If you as a freelancer want to work five days a week (or more), by all means, spend your life in such a manner. The rest of us work to live, not live to work.
Laws mostly do not apply across borders, and many of your competitors are in other countries. How do you think you can compete if your competitor's employees work 25% more?
You disadvantage foreign firms with cross border financial/policy mechanisms, in the same way you encourage better labor and environmental practices for work outsourced abroad. This is a well worn policy path.
A race to the bottom can avoided with laws and regulation.
Sad that you call your colleagues "competitors". I guess you also missed the main point of the initiative, which is to have the same productivity in one day less. So your extra day of work effectively does nothing to the bottom line.
In case it does, all power to you. I think it's fair game that when people work more, they earn more. Nothing wrong with that.
I'm starting to get more militant about zoom calls. Trying to avoid angering people explicitly, but still pushing back as best I can to protect to the team from incessant zoom calls to have conversations that would be faster on slack, and better documented in email. Zoom calls just invite conversation that has to repeated again because 80% of everyone on the call forgot some amount of detail.
I'm still searching for the golden goose "conversation" that's actually faster on Slack. Sure, a quick back and forth or check in is actually faster.
I have yet to find a meaningful discussion that's actually faster on Slack. It seems like they always drag out as sparsely filled, 45 minute threads. Nearly everyone of these would have been better served by a 10 minute call.
Faster can mean less clock time (Zoom will almost always win) or less “involved” time - each person reads the thread and responds when they have time, which uses less of their time but more clock time.
It can work either way, depends on the type of discussion. Often the best is to hash as much out in chat as you can and then meet to finalize.
My company's retention policy deletes emails after 6 months, as well as Teams chat logs. So unless we create docs in Sharepoint (who has time to add another layer of documentation?), everything becomes ephemeral at some point. Like tears in rain...
This, so much. Let's just jump on a quick Teams meeting almost always can be taken care of in an email. And then it's documented and can be referenced and sent to all parties who may need to know that were not included in the "quick" Teams meeting.
Quick phone calls are often more efficient than emails. For status updates, downloads of information, sure email works. But if you want a back and forth exchange of ideas, talking is often much faster.
Talking is indeed faster but if you're not recording the result in some document to share with others not on the call there's risk that valuable information will be lost.
I'd say talking is best at straightening out misunderstandings. In those cases there's not necessarily any extra information generated. It's kind of like attaching a debugger to your communication stream.
We create a teams chat that is separate from the meeting and document what we agree on in that chat, that way it is documented for everyone who forgets the details by tomorrow morning.
I hate—hate—when I'm trying to find something in Slack and right where I'm pretty sure it should be I see a marker indicating that a call took place there, often without any surrounding indication of WTF it was about. Fucking hate it.
Yes, there’s only so much work that you can get done in one day. A lot of time is also spent on things like social interaction. What a 4 day work week offers is more flexibility. ie it’ll allow for either more quiet days of work or allow people to compress their work week and have more time to relax
I had a boss who was very sensitive to the fact that most meetings have several agendas, that half of the team doesn't give a shit about a third of the agenda, and so if you let the wrong people start talking first, then the entire team sits there for an hour when they are only interested in 15 minutes out of that hour (often at the end). So you start with the things everyone cares about and work your way down the list.
The upside/downside to this is that you can't filibuster on something that matters to you but nobody else cares about, because they already left the room before you started. But of course neither can any of the other people who think their hill is as valuable as yours.
This makes sense and understand what you're saying. But the idea of having a full extra day where I don't have to open the laptop and can instead concentrate totally on myself is much more important than a decompression day at work.
>When you start working one day less, nobody will reduce your workload by 20%. You'll have the exact same workload as before and now need to achieve it in less time.
That makes no sense. I have exactly the same responsibilities as before my switch. I also have exactly the same responsibilities as my peers working 5 days. And yet I successfully squeeze those 5 days into 4, and it wasn't even that hard.
Magic? No, modern office work is incredibly ineffective. Most of the day is spent collaborating with almost no part of the day spent on actually doing things.
Employees from a wide range of businesses and charities are expected to take part in the scheme, which will run initially from June to December, including the Royal Society of Biology, the London-based brewing company Pressure Drop, a Manchester-based medical devices firm, and a fish and chip shop in Norfolk.
It comes as the push for companies to adopt a shorter working week – crucially with no loss of pay while aiming for higher productivity – gains momentum as a way of improving working conditions.
I live in Sweden and have never hard of any company doing a four day week. The closest I get is one of my first jobs which had a 37.5 hour week (rather than the customary 40 hours) but again, spread out over five days.
That said, some of the last few weeks at the time of writing have in practise turned out to be four day weeks due to public holidays. Could this be what causes the confusion?
I live in the Netherlands, here it depends completely on the "cao" that is used within the 'branche' (type of industry). There are industries that use 32, 36, or 40 hours as full-time work weeks. Most goverment jobs for example are either 36 or 32 hours.
I work in SWE, which is almost always 40 hours in my experience YMMV.
I've worked in offices before (engineering, architectural) that have one day a week where they don't answer the phone except for emergencies, and lets say friday is 'catch up and do paperwork day'.
Externally it might seem like 4 days a week, but its actually 5 with one where you can't reach them.
But do they get paid for 5 days? Are their pension contributions the same as for someone who worked 5 days? What about their holiday allowance(s)? Their bonuses?
As with every time these tests are run, I would like to see results longer than the initial few months honeymoon when people's productivity is being closely monitored
I want to know if 1-2 years down the line, the productivity is still running at 125%
I wish them luck. I understand their need to have folks in the office, and this is one way to make that more attractive.
But it is only one factor. Good management, strong teams, and a whole lot of "soft" stuff is even more important than beanbag chairs and foozball tables. The "good management" part is where most companies go pear-shaped. I wouldn't want to go to Buckingham Palace every day, if I hated the people I worked with/for, and felt like my work was being treated badly[0].
Although I work exclusively at home, and have no desire to ever dress "business casual" again, I think that a good* office environment can be extremely conducive to great work.
Wow, that comic really makes me question how much of todays complaning about work and life struggles has been a multi decade persistent thing - not just hardships facing this particular generation. (As someone who was 5 in 1996 and didn't see this first hand.)
I think work is just like everything else in this regard. Providing you have standard white collar job, as things continue to improve and get better, we just find new things to complain about. e.g. parent poster complaining about 'business casual' when it wasn't that long ago business casual was a nice step down from having to wear a suit. The workplace continuously adjusts but so do our expectations.
I worked in a Wall St. firm in the 90's and wore suit and tie every day, even though my job was neither customer facing nor even in New York.
I quickly realized I didn't mind it at all once I found correctly fitting shirts. If you consider a tie to be too constricting, you have the wrong shirt.
Even as borderline OCD (self diagnosed, so likely wrong), I never found particular clothes to be a hinderance to me typing (I'm a software dev), and I'm one of those guys that can't stand tags in t-shirts and rip them out. I think 90% of the angst over "comfortable" clothes is a learned cultural thing, and overblown. IMO.
Are you sure you aren't just unconsciously repeating the same prejudice, but from a different click?
How will the people around you react to you using a suit? If it's badly, you are as much forced to wear a certain kind of clothes as the GP was.
Anyway, just because there is a dressing code, it doesn't mean that the culture normally associated with it dominates. Those are two different things, where one is a huge problem, and the other mostly irrelevant. It's always better if you react to problems that are rally there, instead of noisy proxies.
That's a valid point, but all of us, every day, are subject to rules, mores, peer pressure, etc. No one TRULY does exactly what they want, all the time.
Different people can value these rules in different amounts, and to your point, I didn't value "what I'm wearing" as much as some other people do, so I get you.
The trad thing is that your old clothes become your casual clothes, mostly. Except athletic clothes—but half those are dress or business-casual now, anyway, like OCBDs and polos—most of our modern athletic clothes counted as underwear, before, if they existed at all. And it doesn't really work for full-on formal wear like dinner jackets or morning dress.
A bunch of suiting trends come from this. Suit jacket with ruined pants? Now it's a blazer, so, casual wear. Handmedown worn 3-button suit that you're wearing casually at college, with the top button pretty much permanently unbuttoned? You've just invented the 2-roll-3 jacket style. And so on.
We've replaced this behavior with simply having all our clothes be disposable-cheap. Mending a hole and adding patches to keep wearing something's not really worth it when it cost $20 to begin with.
Agreed. For someone whose experience of suits is the ill-fitting obligation for the occasional wedding or funeral, it will be shocking and unbelievable to read that a custom cut dress shirt is more comfortable than a t-shirt, and suit pants, soft and silk lined, more comfortable than jeans.
It might be shocking to realize that not all body types fit well into a suit, regardless of how well tailored it is. I used to be tall and lanky, great for a suit. Then age happened, and now I'm much more round that beanpole. Nothing fits well, and I've tried custom shirts etc. I just look like a well dressed, round person. I'm not more comfortable at all, in fact the opposite.
Plop me in a pair of shorts with a t-shirt or better, a hoodie and I feel great.
Interesting. I've been told that the suit is so ubiquitous over history and nationalities, because it flatters older and portly gentlemen more than other items.
I would say in the last generation, we’ve really had a ton of incredible new textiles be developed. Spandex and its blends in particular has added a lot of comfort in clothing, and wasn’t even that widespread ~15 years ago in comparison to the degree it is now.
> It's always weird to watch Office Space and see the guys all wearing ties. I can't imagine having to do that for a typical software job
I believe this changed in the early 2000s. The dot-com crash reset Silicon Valley. And the Enron scandal reduced corporate America's pull on it. (Steve Jobs wasn't an icon when business casual began taking its hold.)
In my case, it ended in 1994. The company where I worked at the time already had casual Fridays. Business casual, mind you; it was quite some years later before I got to see the whole jeans-and-sneakers casual Friday thing. During the summer of 1994, they went to business-casual-every-day. Then, as a morale booster (probably, as I look at it now, because the execs knew a 40% layoff was months away), the management decided at the end of summer to let us stick with that. The only time I wore a tie to work after that was on a day when I was going to have to leave early to go to a funeral.
When I joined an east coast computer company in the mid-80s, ties all the time were already gone for a lot of engineering positions (though more senior engineers and managers still tended to wear them). Suits were pretty standard for marketing for marketing and other business roles.
Around the time you say, casual Fridays came in. The funny thing is the CEO got annoyed at one point because a lot of the engineers felt they need to underdress relative to the business people who were now dressing business casual on Fridays and increasingly most days.
I'd say that over the next couple decades, things got more and more casual to the point where ties, much less suits, are pretty uncommon in settings where not wearing one would have seemed out of place 25 years or so ago.
At trade shows, as I recall, at some point in the 90s, IBM booth staff showed up at one big show wearing branded polo shirts rather than suits. At which point, most everyone else went: If IBM isn't wearing suits, I guess we don't need to.
A company in my town still requires suit and tie for men, dresses or long skirts for women. If you leave your chair, you need to put your suit jacket on. You can take it off when sitting.
The amount of money it would take for me to put up with such ancient, sexist and conformist bullshit is hard to imagine.
Even long after Ross Perot had sold EDS to General Motors, it was still frowned-upon for men to go to an EDS cafeteria without wearing their suit coats. Saw this in 1993 and, even as a lowly temp worker while between permanent gigs, I felt plenty of pressure to conform (and I did, because I wanted to be asked back for more work).
A lot of what people complain about in white-collar offices have been problems people've complained about effectively since such offices started to become common (the 1950s). Including how little actual work is required for most companies to function, and how much of "working" is just presenteeism.
And actually, some things have gotten worse. I think requirements for natural light used to be much stricter in older buildings (that's where you get all those u-shaped ones) so you were more likely to be near a window, for instance.
“After your boss has taken away your door, your walls, and your storage areas, there aren't many options left for the next revolution in office design. One of the following things is likely to go next: the floor; the ceiling; your happiness."
Scott Adams was blasting open concept offices before it was cool to blast them.
I worked briefly for a transportation company helping with a migration to Solaris. I was the FNG, and everyone else was primarily Windows so I stuck out like a sore thumb. My manager (and his manager) were really nice but had experienced a bit of turnover. My first day showed why.
All of the sysadmins worked from one room, with a "datacenter" in the room next door. Imagine a single room, with desks lined up around the walls. No cubicles, and barely enough room for a keyboard/mouse/monitor and room for a soda or coffee. Crappy chairs too. Since I was the FNG, I got the desk in the back corner underneath the A/C duct. So I was perpetually frozen.
No one looks at each other since our desks faced the walls. The walls between our room and the "datacenter" had no soundproofing, so whenever I spun up the Sun gear (T2 cpus) the noise was like a helicopter taking off. Even over the A/C blasting down on me, I would hear these servers when I did a reboot.
I think the average salary at the time was around $70K or so, and there were 9 of us crammed into that crappy little room. So roughly $1M in compensation, but they couldn't find a real spot for us to work. Screw that place...
Hah, interesting; my first job out of college ('92) was using Suns with Solaris. I think a later generation than yours; we had pizza boxes but I was lucky enough to have one of the newer vertical 4" wide by about 10" high models. The name escapes me.
They weren't so loud, but those older ones, yeah I remember them.
When I entered the workplace in 2003 I was lucky to get a peg for my coat, had to hot-desk during the day - there were 6 people on shift but only 4 computers. You'd go out to fix a printer or something and when you came back to base someone's taken your place
The Dilbert world of the time had cubicles, it was glorious. 3 years later the IT crowd had an entire room with just 2 people in, with their own phones, computers, desks etc.
Now of course I'm in a far more senior position and no longer deal with printers (literally have a high-viz saying "We don't do printers"). If I went into the office I'd still have to hot desk, although only on a per-day basis.
That's the problem, there. One-size-fits-all approach.
Every job is different. A lot of it is up to the management. If they get it right, things are shiny. If they get it wrong, they're sitting on their beanbag chair, alone, waiting for the movers to take the furniture away.
But every company (and internal culture) is different. Some, I intensely dislike, but have to admit, they get results. Others, I like the culture, but I don't feel they get much done.
Also, every employee is different. I know people that dress up in bespoke suits for work, in a cube farm, every day, and absolutely love it.
I know people that hate remote work, and can't wait to get back into the office.
Different(folks).different(strokes)
Good managers, especially first-line managers, are worth their weight in gold, and are usually disregarded by upper managers.
A good manager can make an open-plan or cube farm job an absolute joy, and a bad manager can make a corner office career a nightmare.
I like to think I was a good manager. I kept really good employees for decades, in a pretty banal environment, and for a fairly low salary. They could have gone anywhere, and they knew it, but they stuck around, anyway.
I work a four-day week (80% time, not imagining 4-10s) as a software engineer at a non-profit academic organization. For a paycut basically, I make 80% of what I think of as my "actual" salary.
I have managed to do this at a succession of several jobs now. When I briefly tried to go back to 5 days, it was really hard. It seems insane to me now that anyone works 5 days a week. (And I do know plenty of people work even more, and I am very lucky).
Fridays are for doctor's appointments and car repair and grocery shopping and errands. Which probably does mean I'm away from "work hours" for these things less than I would be full-time, I just schedule such things for Fridays where possible. In general, I am pretty convinced that I'm at least 90% as productive on 80% time as I would be on 100%, maybe more.
Working at non-profit academic, I'm definitely not making my "market" salary. I could be making a lot more than I am now, even at 80% of a salary, at various more typical organizations. But I'm not sure how viable the 4-day week is with potential employers -- even if I'm willing to take a paycut to 80% of salary, which I am! Unlike the OP which is giving everyone a 4-day week at full salary? My impression is that most high-paying software engineering jobs/organizations are not going to let you do 4-days a week? Which is crazy when they could get me for 80% of the cost with most of the productivity -- but I guess the high-paying organizations aren't exactly trying to save money on salary.
I really don't think I'd go back to 40-hour-a-week-standard unless I had to.
To clarify to a since flagged (by someone else) comment:
When i say "I'm at least 90% as productive" -- I mean I am more productive per hour worked. Not that I end up working 90% hours but only getting paid for 80%.
I really do work 80% hours, only four days a week, Monday to Thursday. I am not expected to and don't work on Fridays, Saturdays, or Sundays.
I just get done I think 90% or more of what I would get done in five days, in four days. As seems to be commonly reported by people in this situation.
Some people have also said "Yeah, but in my remote software dev job, I work even less than 80% of my expected hours, I just don't tell them, and I get paid a full salary."
I'm not gonna say much about the ethics of that, I guess I think it depends on the specific situation. But regardless, I'd myself just be stressed out if I had to be less than honest about my work. And my 80% schedule is clear -- I really don't work on Friday, nobody expects to be able to reach me on Friday (any better than they could on a Sunday or at 4am, unless I'm on-call), I don't check my email or look at my work calendar, I am really not working. And that's the whole benefit to me -- it's a different thing than using lots of hours for personal social media or something (which, sure, I do to some extent too whether 4 or 5 days a week.
Personally I don’t find an ethics violation. If you’re meeting your output expectations who cares how many hours you work. I certainly don’t as a manager at a large public company. I fully expect most ppl are getting some amount of personal stuff done during the day, or power napping between meetings. Just don’t be a dick and make the rest of the team pick up your slack.
Oh, I think it's expected that we get some amount of personal stuff done during the day, and don't feel the need to hide this from my coworkers or even boss. At the lower end, there are few "white collar" desk jobs where you can't, say, take a phone call from a family member during the work day, or take coffee breaks whenever you want, or have to hide any of this from your boss.
If it got to the point where I felt like I had to hide the amount of time I was spending "working"/"not working" from my boss, then even if it were ethical (I still think it depends on the situation), I would just find it too stressful and unpleasant an experience, to be routinely hiding or lying about what I did with my day.
To me, doing 'some amount' of personal stuff during the day (which should be acceptable at any job), is still an entirely different thing than "I don't work Fridays, don't expect to see me online". Qualitatively, not just quantitatively.
"meeting output expectations" is tricky, I think, because what is the amount of "output" expected from "a person week"? It obviously varies for different people, at different times in their career, different skills, and just from week to week different things going on their lives/stress level. Knowing that I am not "cheating" my week is part of what makes me feel justified and honest in pushing back if a workplace does try to assign more work than is possible. Barring emergencies (and "your failure to plan is not my emergency") -- we should not be expected to work extra hours to get more work done. We get done in a week what we get done in a week, and then we come back the next week and do more -- to some extent, as engineers, the amount we can get done in a week is simply defined by what we do get done in a week.
But still, my real point is that even using this humane "you get done what you get done" approach, in our line of work, most organizations would find, I predict, that people working only 4 days a week (80% time), get done 90% or more of what people working five days a week do.
If you were explaining the world to an alien, it would be hard to justify the lack of diversity in working arrangements. I applaud any such non standard option in the labor market - may your office be full of good fits!
People in a company often collaborate so having them work at the same place/time is useful. Companies often collaborate or use each others services so having all companies and all people work at the time is useful. Parents need their kids taken care of while they work, so school hours mirror (to an extent) working hours and vice versa. All very explainable I think.
"People in a company often collaborate so having them work at the same place/time is useful."
the funny thing is that the same people who talk about collaboration at the office are often the decision makers that set up open offices where everybody wears headphones and nobody ever talks to each other.
I meant more historically why things are this way. Open offices/cubicles have been around longer than people have been wearing headphones in the office. I certainly don't agree with it for modern tech work.
I'm not saying it's right or the most effective option, but I believe it would be trivial to justify: it's easier to organise something in a group if everyone's available at the same time. I'm the only person in the team working 4 day week and even that was a bit awkward in planning. (still totally worth it)
> it's easier to organise something in a group if everyone's available at the same time
I think most workgroups have effectively been paying extremely high overhead in social costs just so the organization could have the option to organize easily. The problem then is that meetings are called flippantly. If it's hard to get everyone in a room, you'll do a better job capitalizing on when it happens.
The downside is there really are a large array of tasks that a group can tackle better than an individual, but I've never seen a corporate group meaningfully recognize or organize for those tasks. Far more often, I get pulled into meetings because some specific individual or another is lacking in autonomy and expertise.
> I get pulled into meetings because some specific individual or another is lacking in autonomy and expertise
These people are unconsciously aware that they are incompetent. They pull people into meetings in order to have a sense of having done work, at the cost of total productivity.
I think it would be pretty easy to explain how everyone converged on the same system. If you continually optimise for the best arrangement, everyone is going to end up on pretty much the same thing.
I recently watched the movie 9 To 5 where Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton rebel against their boss at work, and ultimately fix the workplace by allowing people to job-share, where sets of two people each work half a day, and by opening a day care center on their floor. This movie came out in 1980.
We've been doing this (4day x 8hr) at Monograph (monograph.com) for much longer than I've been at the company. I like to think we're a bit of an outlier since we take Wednesdays off. While this seems strange, it means that I never work more than two days at a time, I have time in the middle of the week to recharge, and I don't totally lose context on problems I'm working on. We could argue that this means it's not a true "off" day which may be true but I'm completely happy with this setup.
That sounds like a very family-friendly policy, but as a single individual it would be vastly less useful than regular 3 and 4 day weekends that could be used for travel.
Strange how many orgs discover that working less hours or remote increases productivity for most people. It’s almost as if unstressed “workers” produce better quality work. There was an experiment whereby cows were shown to give more milk if not stressed. Certainly the same applies to humans. When will companies learn that milking their “workforce” of their energy doesnt yield the expected results but quite the opposite.
We're still working like (eg.) coal miners, inherited from the first industrial revolution.
More people, more hours: more coal extracted.
Interestingly, farmers in the middle ages are a much more balanced model (catastrophes aside): the land they had was mostly manageable by a small group of people, and there's only only so much you can optimize, given the patch of land that you have. So you do what you have to do and when you're done, well, you're done.
If this approach works startups will leverage it to gain an upper hand. We've seen this with remote work. Startups identified this gap and used it to outcompete other larger companies.
Personally I believe in remote and that it will get even better as tech to facilitate it improves.
I don't believe in working 4 days for engineering specifically. The field changes rapidly, there is a large learning curve and it takes a lot of hours to really master it. There is also some fixed overhead in communicating with other departments which stays the same even if you work less hours. So you remove more than 20% of your productive hours with this approach. You also reduce the time you spend learning. This further hampers your productivity. I think it will be a niche thing only done by some startups that care about this, have no other way to attract talent and aren't very ambitious.
That being said, for some people it will work well. It's pretty common for some roles in the netherlands for instance.
I spend personal time learning, and would welcome more time to do so without having to waste more time "learning" things like "why didn't the OP put a foreign key on this column, was it intentional or ignorance?"
At my company they aren't hiring "people" anymore but "resources". Even when looking for somebody internally to help out with a project, managers try to "find a resource", not "finding somebody".
Fun for who? You? The people around you getting off on it? The HR employee who didn’t elect the name of the organization and who is just trying to get through a day like you are, and apparently has to put up with meme confrontations in the workplace?
There is not much that is more cringe than overhearing someone do this within earshot; it’s almost as bad as a joke everyone has heard and can predict while someone loudly stumbles through it a few cubes over. As described, you’re not funny, you’re just an asshole.
What form does this confrontation take, exactly? That might help clarify.
Every position has a storytelling. That of HR is about building a double standard: on the one hand, a discourse that emphasizes on the employees' best interests, while on the other hand, take actions that are on the employer's sole interest.
Is it expected? Yes of course, I stopped being naive on the topic long ago.
Where this is pervasive is that even some HR people tend to buy it. Also the tech industry should consider happy to at least have some reassuring (yet false) speech.
Sure, in the tech industry, people may be considered a bit better, but I've seen and met people in blue collar industries where people were not worth so much more than the paper clips holding their contracts together.
And since HR, as a support function of a company, does not differ much from one indistry to another, the culture of HR, really, fundamentally, is to treat people as you'd do with your trucks or machines or chairs or paperclips, and that is, treat them as resources. Hence the very apt name of the function: human resources.
And this is the kind of perspective I have on HR and the kind of points I could (but not always do) raise if we touch on the societal aspects of our jobs.
Note that as a manager myself, I have my fair share of cognitive dissonance to bear as well, and critics are always welcome :)
> Strange how many orgs discover that working less hours or remote increases productivity for most people.
I've worked remote and managed remote teams for many years.
Working remote definitely doesn't not make "most people" more productive. Some people are more productive remote, but the average person gets less done even if they work more hours when remote. It takes a lot of training, mentoring, and performance management to get them back to in-office baseline.
Business hierarchies are wired to advance those who sacrifice more and more of their life for the business. Those people then perpetuate the status quo by promoting those who are like them in that regard.
Quick refresher on productivity in economic terms: decreasing inputs = decreasing outputs UNLESS tech or technique improves. During supply and/or debt driven inflationary periods (eg. now), increased productivity = increased supply and/or decreased debt.
What do these maxims of economics mean for a 4 day work week?
At Beacon, nothing*. But implement this at Tyson Foods, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Waste Management, the FX trading desk at JP Morgan Chase, etc. and you get 2-6% productivity declines & some amount of increased supply-driven inflation unless you offset with new technology (eg. software, robotics) or techniques.
Celebrate work from home, 4 day weeks, flex-time, etc.... but understand that as these benefits carry costs in important (not all) industries. Also, the migration to jobs having these benefits, from those important jobs that do not, drives inflation and/or illegal immigration and so-called "white collar" top-heavy joblessness risk during recession.
No free lunch, even on Fridays.
** Note: UK small business situation is concerning, even if it doesn't apply to Beacon: "Office for National Statistics (ONS) data, showing that 2 million (or about 40%) of the UK's small businesses had less than three months of cash in reserves to support operations. He noted that 10% (or 200,000) were in grave danger, and 300,000 only had a few weeks of cash left."
That's why in my next start-up, we're making sure that each employee works 168 hours a week. We believe that maximising inputs is the only way to get results.
That’s some bleeding heart liberal commie bs. I make my employees bend the space time continuum to work more than 168 hours per week! <serveral bicep, rocket and fire emojis here>
There’s a balance somewhere. I guarantee my 8/4 workers will outperform your 24/7 workers. Your workers will be worthless 20 hours into their eternal shift, and dead from sleep exhaustion after a few days.
It’s obvious that the relationship is not as simple as one input, one output.
If you work your employees 8/5, and I do the same, but with a gym break with a company-provided trainer, my employees will work fewer hours than yours, but I’d bet my productivity will win in the long run.
This 4 hour work week experiment is along these lines. It’s not obvious to most of us how it will end or what impact it will have on productivity.
> It’s obvious that the relationship is not as simple as one input, one output.
Yes. It's easy to say "if we assume everything is linear...". Justifying that assumption and demonstrating that it's valid is another, significantly more difficult, thing entirely.
You dropped the "UNLESS" there. Also lots of work is actually not useful. Constraints can be very good and quite often lead to qualitative outputs. There are lots of other factors at play as well e.g. more people finding employment / at higher pay to fill the gaps -> being able to spend more etc. The model is probably way more complex than that, it's not a simple function IMHO.
> and you get 2-6% productivity declines & some amount of increased supply-driven inflation unless you offset with new technology (eg. software, robotics) or techniques.
People worked 40 hours a decade or two ago as well, and since then there's been enormous technical improvements. Why not use that improvement to work less and enjoy life, instead of chasing higher throughput in various industries?
Haters: you're missing my point, which is (a) this applies to some industries, not all; and (b) this applies to supply-driven inflationary periods and/or periods of excessive aggregate debt (public, commercial and personal). As someone who remembers 1979/80 talking to a bunch of people who may not have been born then --- we're in for a shit storm that only productivity & hard work will fix... unless USGOV finds more way to kick the can down the road.
Beacon, and I bet the majority of the audience here, is a knowledge worker environment. You don't shed out x widgets per hour. Your result is highly variable as it involves creating bespoke, unique or novel (in a broad sense) solutions to various challanges in development. In non-rote work mood has an extreme impact on results.
Rote assembly line tasks in a warehouse or factory setting, even there you will see a ramp up mistakes and accidents as the hours get beyond a certain point. The chances of these ever have been "work from home"are slim to begin.
Are you trying to say if Amazon works less hours delivering packages , less packages will be delivered because they are already pushing every productivity edge possible?
That is shocking to me. It feels like I just push these buttons and the package shows up to my door like magic. I assumed everyone has a job pushing buttons so why would we waste time pushing buttons for more than 4 days a week.
Factories don't shut down on the weekends, they just have different groups of people come in for different shifts. A 4-day work week would just mean that they have to hire more people to fill the hours. Productivity wouldn't fall, unless they wanted it to fall.
I really can't wrap my head around this four-day week trend. If the organization is focused on KPI's so why does it matter if people work one day or four-days?
If the organization is focused on time spend no work (either in office or remotely) how can work be done in 80% of the time?
Really don't understand how it works in day-to-day. It resembles the unlimited vacation days policy which was later found out to be unhelpful to employees.
> If the organization is focused on KPI's so why does it matter if people work one day or four-days?
Arguably it matters in how you KPIs are set. I think it's reasonable to expect a full time employee to work more than one day a week. If you can meet all your KPIs with everyone working one day a week, then maybe you're aiming too low. Of course, if you require everyone to work 60 hour weeks to hit KPIs, that's an even bigger problem.
KPIs can be change continuously so that's why I'm baffled by this trend. Companies can just say - we measure only by KPIs, work whenever you want. Something like this signals a much better workspace than four-days workweek, since the latter still measures time instead of output.
I'm not sure which trend are you referring to. In any case, I'm not suggesting employees should be measured solely by time worked. Only that I think setting performance targets based on a reasonable number of hours worked seems to make sense to me. Otherwise, I'm not really sure what benchmark you would use.
It's mostly a case of figuring out when people will be available to work together. Some companies have a concept of "core hours". As long as you're active during the core hours, the rest are flexible.
There is ample research showing that humans can't be consistently productive for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. I'm less personally familiar with research on 4-day weeks, but I've seen several studies with plenty of rigor that showed that working 6 hours a day, people were, on average, at least as productive as they were working 8 hours a day.
Banish from your mind the idea that "hours spent at work" translates directly into productivity. My butt in my seat doesn't produce anything. My brain is what produces code, designs, problem-solving, ideas, etc, and it, like any other part of my body, needs periodic rest in order to function properly.
I had a 4 tens option at a previous job. We could have Monday or Friday off. I especially liked it late in the day when the 5 eights people left and it was quiet and there weren't any meetings.
Presumably the company already has indicators and metrics they use. You just continue using those same indicators and validate there is no significant change.
I was very pro home-office (and even Anti-Office) before and during the pandemic. Now that restrictions are more or less gone, I'm glad to be working in the office again.
Being in the office for the first time in my career showed me that there are definitely upsides, especially when you get along with your team really well.
>> I'm glad to be working in the office again. / Being in the office for the first time.
I think the fact it's your first time has a big impact. Give it time. Any time I start a new job I enjoy being in the office for the first 6-12 months. Once it becomes routine (same commute, same lunch, same people) and you have learnt how to do your job (and rely on others less) it becomes much less attractive. I'm not saying you'd go full remote but I would bet you will go hybrid and transition further remote over time. This is what I've seen happen with all of my colleagues (including people I thought would jump straight back to the office post-pandemic).
> the CDC estimates that 1 in 5 will result in long COVID.
This scolding "I'm not sure exactly how, yet, but you'll be sorry!" any time anyone admits that they're no longer hiding inside & wiping down every banana with bleach is getting a little tired.
I actually WANT to go to the office, especially when it's nice out. My body is craving the walking and the activity, and the positive stress of being in a different environment is actually helping my mood significantly. I've become puffy, lazy, and slow.
I've never understood this. If you work from home you can also just... go walking outside? In fact you could even go walking for longer, since nobody is checking for your presence and you haven't wasted time commuting.
I'd rather walk to the lake and go for a swim during the afternoon, than walk to a train to walk to an office.
My personal observation is that most pro office folks are seeking to substitute gaps in their personal lives with onsite work. A drain on their coworkers to be frank. Lack of friends, proper housing, lack of exercise you name it. A tiring hindrance on those whom understand that most of these issues are caused by being farmed in offices 8 hours a day and clustered in crowded, poorly planned cities. Of course there are valid practical reasons as well for onsite work.
But if your excuses for wanting to drag people back into offices are that you cant walk on your own, dont have friends, cant play politics, cant hold remote conferences or online chats, then i am sorry but you are on your own. Too many have been conditioned to think that you need to sit in a building and slave away for a praise and a rushed holiday every now and then.
Quite the contrary. My aim is at those opinions that tell _me_ what to do, essentially not respecting my own opinion. I am more than happy for people to return to the office if that's _their_ wish but I am not returning to an office to be someone’s substitute for a normal life. To each his own, basically. As i said, there are valid reasons but not at my own freedom’s expense.
If you only said you don't want other's needs to affect you, that would be a valid opinion. (Albeit not very altruistic)
But what you're saying is also that those wanting to be at the office are friendless, need this as a substitute for a normal life etc. That's unnecessary, and just you being a total dick. Please present your arguments here in a better way.
i never said that. please be more mindful when making accusations and try and reread what people write here if english is not your strength, instead of being a pretentious prick.
>My personal observation is that most pro office folks are seeking to substitute gaps in their personal lives with onsite work. A drain on their coworkers to be frank. Lack of friends, proper housing, lack of exercise you name it. A tiring hindrance on those...
This is an unfair and spiteful characterisation of people who happen to have a different viewpoint than you. We can do better than that.
>> I'd rather walk to the lake and go for a swim during the afternoon, than walk to a train to walk to an office.
This requires some degree of motivation. When you had to go to the office you were forced to get dressed, get outside and travel etc. When you are WFH it is so tempting to get up late, get online, and stay comfortable. This is true even when you know what you are doing is unhealthy. It's similar to people eating a poor diet. They know they're doing it, they know it's bad, but it's hard to do the right thing (even when the right thing is relatively easy to do).
I say this as someone who loves WFH but also has fallen into a lot of bad habits that have definitely impacted my physical/mental health.
This has nothing to do with WFH, and more to do with how conditioned we are to rely on offices and employers to give us direction in life. It's like when you graduate high school and go to college, no one is going to proactively check in on you. It's a necessary adjustment we should all make at some point.
I have a giant park near me, and a lake. I love it and I go there almost every day, sometimes more than once. But it's monotonous over time, same routine, same routes. It engages your autopilot and then you are just cruising through the day with no positive stress.
It's different. I may not enjoy being with people, but I like being around them. Maybe because Manhattan is just so different from everywhere else, and provides a special level of intensity.
The problem isn't remote work, the problem is the never ending productivity growth. Chances are, you've shaved at least 30-40 minutes a day of your commute. You've probably let work gobble that up because even though it wasn't comped time, you still considered it work time so it wasn't too difficult to squeeze a little bit more in each day.
Take that time back, go use it to go on a walk or exercise. You'll thank yourself. Prior to the pandemic I worked remote but in a location less obsessed with productivity. I had flexibility to exercise in the middle of the day most days when my energy levels topped out and I was in the best shape of my life. Fast forward to now and infinite demand always likes to pretend everyone is somehow behind and I too let my reclaimed commute time slide. I've recaptured it, started exercising regularly again, and already feel great. This culture that obsesses with productivity generation for someone else above all else isn't healthy.
Yeh I kind of thought the same. I applaud them either way, the more companies adopt it, the more pressure is placed on the others to offer the same, but whereas 4 day work week is a huge bonus for me, wfh is a hard requirement.
I mean you do you, but Bleck. "You don't have to come to work on Friday but we still want you to spend 12 hours a week crammed onto a bus or train." How else could you possibly write code or sit in front of a computer all day?
They don't want you to spend 3 hours a day commuting, that's up to you. That does sound like a miserable commute.
A quick google search suggests that the average US commute is 28 minutes one way, or about an hour a day, not 3 hours a day. The average US commuter is probably in their own car though, mass transit is usually going to add some, despite other social and personal benefits. I also know it's going to be higher in certain major metro areas. And that the US built environment is kind of insane, and sometimes seems like it was honestly designed to maximize commutes.
I agree nobody should ever be spending 3 hours a day commuting. But it's not like the only possibilities are working from home or 3 hours commuting...
Yeah that surprised me too. Surely if they are able to get the same job done while working from home that would be the better option for everyone involved no?
As some employees may lose like an hour a day just to travel whereas that hour could be spent working on features etc. if they didn't have to travel into the office.
That was easily my commute when I was working in London. I'd drive to the train station, take the train into London, then the tube within London and walk the last 10 minutes to the office. On a normal day it would take 1h40 each way. On a bad day it could be much longer.
That's nearly 17 hours over a 5 day week assuming no problems.
Sincere question: is this 4-day work week mostly an inflation hedge?
Anticipating huge real CPI cost increases, weighed against net productivity of people working from home, is the bet that you can net the same amount of value and productivity from existing employees in a 20% shorter period, and compensate for inflation by giving them time "off" instead of spending cash on a raise?
Not cynical, just a very wise hedge. I will probably ask this on other 4-day threads, as it seems like a very economical way to retain staff at the same net productivity without paying out cost of living increases. If the economy ever finds a new equillibrium and your company is still profitable, it becomes a tempting private equity target, as they could buy it and simply remove the 4-day week compensation and reap easy growth benefits.
My employer has been fully remote with half-day Fridays for 2 years. In practice, those half-days are worth maybe 20% of a regular work day, not 50%. I feel like we've already proven a 4-day work week can be effective and the only thing holding us back is an adherence to convention and expectations (by managers, execs and investors).
They say it's 100% of the full-time salary, but the one open position they have is a full-stack JS engineer for the equivalent of about $66k USD. Is the market really that bad in the UK? That's not even a good new grad offer in the US.
That’s fairly normal outside SF/Silicon Valley - my friends and I all fell around the 60-80 range fresh out of school with CS degrees, working in the southeast (Raleigh, NC)
A new grad offer in much of the UK outside London would be up-to $33k USD maybe less though I may be a few years out of date. US salaries are very different and seem strange to (this) non-American(s).
You might ask yourself - if Europeans are willing to do the work that Americans are doing, but for half (sometimes even a third, or quarter!) the price - Are European workers underpriced, or American workers overpriced?
With global corporations it's hard to imagine they would be willing to lose this badly on Labor Costs if there isn't a clear benefit to paying more in the US. Especially with the rise of remote.
Almost every company outside the US pays at most half of what the US offers for similar positions. Only a few unicorns and a few countries are exceptions to this.
In quite a few countries the 32 hour workweek is already very normal, it creates a bit of extra scheduling work but nothing you can't handle in a larger organization. For smaller companies this is a bigger problem because they don't usually have the headcount to fill the resulting gaps and things tend to rely more on personal relationships.
But you won't be paid 100% for 40 hours, you will be paid 100% for 32 hours. And people that work 40 hours should get more than those that work 32 hours.
By the way, it is common to be paid far less for 40 hours than you should receive as well, and plenty of people work unpaid overtime who would be happy just to work the 40 hours they get paid for.
Salary negotiations are always tricky, especially if you don't know your true market value. Given the difference between compensation at different companies one way you could attack this problem is to find a company that will match your current salary but at a reduced number of hours. Employees have the same problem that companies have: it is hard to charge by value if you don't know your value.
As a gardener my work is worth less than as a computer programmer than as a financial advisor. Because each of those domains values time entirely differently, and because there are different levels of competition.
If you can show your boss that if you work less that your productivity will likely remain the same or that it will go up they will probably wonder why they've been paying you for all that extra time in the past... so instead I would just argue to try moving to a different company at a better salary for the same amount of work or for the same salary with less work.
That's not what the trial is; workers will be paid 100% of their salary for 80% of their usual time. That's what makes it different from a 'flexible hours' pilot.
Overtime is extremely uncommon even in Europe and has to be agreed upon in contract, and even then most employers just provide extra time off instead of money for full-time workers.
Yes, but eventually that will normalize to a raise if the trial is made permanent, the reason they structure it like that is if they revert that the employees won't see it as a pay cut.
Which is fine. The goal of the trial is to reward employees for increased productivity (historical trends tell an impressive story) by offering them the opportunity to keep their existing salaries by working (and therefore stressing themselves) less.
Sure, high performers should be rewarded using subjective metrics, which is already the case for blue collar workers. This trial gives people the opportunity to not be penalized for working less, which is the case with all the existing flexible hour arrangements. If successful, I have no doubt that this would lead to a longer term bigger change in what counts as full-time employment when it comes to taxation, immigration, and retirement.
It's already a success elsewhere, I really don't see the point of a trial, they should just do it. In NL I don't know all that many people that still have regular 40 hour work weeks, the vast majority are 32, 28, 24 or even 20 hour workweeks, which incidentally helps a lot with leveling the pay gap between men and women.
You interview for a job -- the offer is €X @ 40hrs/wk; you tell the HR that you'd like to only work for 80% of the time since you have childcare responsibilities. HR either writes back that the job requires you to work 40hrs or they revise their offer to €0.8X.
When 80% is the new 100%
You interview, get an offer for €X @ 32hrs/wk; you tell HR that you'd like to work extra since you're really passionate. HR either writes back that you could take extra time off or they revise their offer to €X + conditional bonus of €Y.
Like you said, working more doesn't mean more productivity, and so if a company is paying more just for you sitting in front of your computer more, we're not talking about the same jobs.
And if all of this normalizes, sure, salaries would be rebased, but the negotiation changes, as described above.
>> And people that work 40 hours should get more than those that work 32 hours.
This is not how it works currently. You get paid your salary and are expected to do a minimum number of hours + any more reasonably required. You don't get extra for those extra hours in a salaried job so I don't see why you would if they reduced the hours required.
> You get paid your salary and are expected to do a minimum number of hours + any more reasonably required.
This is a geographically limited factoid, and even then lots of companies do pay overtime. But in those cases where they do not: I always wonder how those companies would respond if I treated them the way they treat their employees.
> You don't get extra for those extra hours in a salaried job so I don't see why you would if they reduced the hours required.
UK tech companies can and do pay for overtime, just not all of them and the ones that don't would like to have that discussion squelched as much as possible.
Talking about a 'four day work week' is meaningless if you at the same time claim that you have to work more than those four days per week to satisfy your employment contract, it just turns one vague thing into an even vaguer thing.
It's up to the employer to decide for how long they contract someone, whether they are more or less efficient is something that is their problem, not the employees' problem, they are reserved for more time so they should get paid more. Lots of jobs are paid by the hour, and that is the sort of job that I believe we were discussing.
The variables then are: your hourly rate, how many hours you are contracted for. I've never seen 'efficiency' in a labor contract as a metric, though, performance reviews may indicate that compared to your peergroup you are not performing well. In the end that then becomes an economics exercise, which in turn might lead to the company deciding that employing people for 32 hours is more efficient.
But until then they should pay for what they receive in terms of time spent on the job.
Your question presumes that my opinion on this matters but that's not how employment works. Employment is governed by contract law/labor law. To reduce your example to absurdity: Person 'A' gets their work done in 40 hours a week and person B in one minute, do you think person 'A' should get more money?
Clearly, the answer is yes because the claim on the life of person 'A' is a much higher one than the claim on the life of person 'B'. And you could argue the opposite just as easily: Person 'B' should get more money because they've figured out a way to be much more productive that might scale to others, and besides, sometimes getting something done in one minute has immense value and getting the same thing done in a week has none. But in practice neither of these things will happen. There isn't really a free market when it comes to jobs, employers hold most of the power and the differences between employees for most jobs do not exceed the normal bandwidth available for compensation, almost nobody except a lucky few contractors get paid by the value they create for the company.
So what will happen instead is that employers will set a certain hourly rate for a certain kind of job with some leeway to incentivize people to come and work for them or stay and hopefully a career path so they can migrate into better positions if they perform well. This arrangement will be formalized using an employment contract which together with applicable law will govern the relationship. This is not without problems but in the end it is what we have as a solution. Whether your colleague (who gets their job done in 32 hours) and you (who work 40 hours) have different pay depends on who is in control of the relationship: if the employees have control then they might be able to get paid by the value they contribute but this is extremely rare for salaried employees. The alternative, an hourly wage is much more common.
And one of the fundamental reasons for that is that we (1) all recognize the value of our time and (2) have tried very hard to get away from labor that was paid 'by the piece', which was very common in the early industrial revolution days (and which is now returning through a backdoor as the 'gig economy').
I still don’t understand the 100% as productive in 80% of the time. The math doesn’t check out there unless the expectation is people are working 10 hr days Mon-Thurs. Even in that scenario, not everyone has the stamina to execute at that pace and it also makes it hard to recruit anyone with a kid who needs to navigate school dropoffs/pickups etc.
In addition to what other people are saying about productivity not being linear:
Screw productivity.
We, as a society, produce vastly more than enough stuff of all kinds for everyone to live comfortably. Insisting that everyone must continue working a 40-hour week every week forever just because that's the best that could be negotiated the first time workers successfully fought for their rights after the Industrial Revolution is foolishness.
Total productivity has skyrocketed since computers came on the scene and helped to streamline millions of different processes. And where have those gains gone? Eaten up by the very wealthy.
A 4-day work week is one very small step toward letting us, the regular workers who actually produce all the stuff, genuinely share in the spoils that streamlining created.
You're assuming people are 100% productive each day currently. If people are told they need to keep hitting the same KPI's etc. or they go back to a 5-day week, you bet they're going to work a bit harder on those 4 days. A bit less news, Facebook, chatting etc and a bit more actual work.
People aren't machines, they bend to their environment.
Even without crunching extra hours per day, you can be essentially as productive with fewer working days per week if you are more focussed on the days do you do work.
Agreed but I’ve yet to hear the killer tactic for how a company gets every employee 100% focused 100% of the time.
I think there are some roles that end up suffering. Like someone who is a product designer and now has to cram more creativity in fewer hours. Someone who is in inside or outside sales and has less time where they overlap with customers to perform demos and close deals. It may work - it may not work.
The penalty for being sick for a day (or your kid being sick for a day) is more drastic too. Although perhaps those folks just use their extra day to catch up.
I’m more bullish on remote work than these 4 day a week experiments.
People seem to put forth the argument that "people will work more efficiently if they work less hours" to counter the argument "if less time is being worked, then less work is being done, then costs/prices go up". And, while it may be (and probably is) true that efficiency will go up, it's almost certainly true that overall work will go down (because efficiency will not go up enough to compensate for the loss of work time).
Now, the/your argument that the overall loss in work is worth it for the work/life balance benefit is one worth considering. It's just a different point from the one that that less work, overall, will be done, likely resulting in higher costs. I guess another way to look at it might be
- Am I willing to earn 10% less in exchange for working 20% less?
And, as a reverse example for the 6-day work week
- Am I willing to earn 10% more in exchange for working 20% more?
For me, at least, the answer is no to both, because I'm comfortable with my 5 day work week. For some people, the answer to one or the other of those is yes.
> it's almost certainly true that overall work will go down (because efficiency will not go up enough to compensate for the loss of work time)
That might be true, or it might not. It depends on how much efficiency goes up and how much buffer time people has, right? In many jobs people spene a non-trivial amount of time reading news, or in FB/Twitter/etc, so it def can be true that removing one hour of news+twitter yields the same productivity.
I've seen no compelling evidence to suggest that working fewer hours will raise efficiency enough to result in the same amount of work being done in those fewer hours. It _can_ be true, but it seems unlikely enough (to my intuition) that I'll assume it would not be the case unless someone can put forth a convincing argument/evidence.
I really support 4x9, though, for a lot of reasons. It should become a work norm (and 36 hours set as the nominal workweek by government).
- I do think productivity will go up some, and the fall in output will be less than 10%. Split the difference, and call it 5%.
- Because there will be some fall in output, and because there are some professions where you need butts-in-seats for coverage... I think it will, by reducing the supply of labor, push up the equilibrium price and get more people into skilled work.
- It's a hedge against automation reducing demand for labor.
- I think we'll recognize a lot of ancillary benefits from reduction of commute times, etc.
> I think there are some roles that end up suffering. Like someone who is a product designer and now has to cram more creativity in fewer hours.
I’m sure everyone said similar things moving to work week with 40 hours and 5 days. Nothing magical about it, people still work over when they feel the need to because deadlines are silly in some cases.
This is a pilot for a reason. A work week with 32 hours and 4 days does improve the health of people overall, but we will see if it’s the same as 40 hours which also didn’t have merit when it was chosen.
Take the counter direction. Imagine there was a push to extend the current normal to a schedule of 6 days of 8 hours each. Would you expect the typical office worker’s weekly production to soar by 20%? I would not.
One way I make sense of it is that employers are competing for talent. Better working conditions (such as 4 day workweeks) might attract better employees for the same price. This could unlock enough productivity to compensate for the 5th day.
Unless people are machines, it's incorrect to strictly equate hours with productivity. What actually happens is there is quite a bit of slack time in the typical day. Going to 4 days/week is applying a forcing function[1] to remove some of this slack time and given it back to employees.
I think a better question is how much of this slack time is necessary to reach the current productivity levels, and how much is just...slack?
[1] There are a lot of anecdote stories where people have a kid which limits their available time, and suddenly they are more productive than they have ever been during that small time window and get their startup off the ground etc...
> also makes it hard to recruit anyone with a kid who needs to navigate school dropoffs/pickups etc.
But this is a pilot in a country where over 40% of kids go home and get to school by themselves starting at age 5 [1]. Not to mention we are talking about a continent where many children are independent in terms of mobility to school [2]. Denmark, Spain, Poland, Italy, Czechia, Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Finland, Great Britain, Norway, and the list goes on.
Plenty of bullshit jobs where your input hardly matters. It's like a thin gas that expands to fill the working week - 20% compression doesn't mean much in that context.
I feel many people in tech and other office jobs have implicitly worked 4 day workweeks for years. During an average workday, how much time do you spend doing personal things at your desk (texting friends, reading non work-related online articles, etc.)? I bet that time aggregated across Monday to Friday adds up to at least a full 8 hour day.
In other words, another management team fails to understand that many of the best software engineers work most effectively in silence, and on their own for large periods of time, and that this is best done at home.
The obstinacy, arrogance, and stupidity of managers from these guys to Musk and Sandberg is incredibly disappointing.
Any large profitable public companies doing this? These guys raised $56M less than a year ago. Just curious who has proved the concept is sustainable without burning VC money.
I believe that a company that does 6-day work week for 25% higher pay would completely put competitors out of business... and considering the world economy, NOW is the time to do THAT.
Changing to 4-day work week at this time just shows how out of touch some people are. It's only a matter of time before reality catches up to them.
So if this becomes the new ‘standard’ work week, which day becomes part of the weekend? Friday?
I see these stories all the time. I’m pro the idea. But it’s not going to work if one industry works Tue-Fri and another Mon-Thu and their customers are taking off Wednesday. That standard work week being _standard_ is a feature.
Negotiating schedules is already an issue in most workplaces, as everyone is essentially close to overbooked. And the outcome of almost every meeting is the same whether it happens on a Friday or a Monday.
My last job (America’s Test Kitchen in case they’re hiring) did/does 4.5 day work weeks. Friday afternoons off. Zero loss of productivity. For me it was a built in zero-guilt place to schedule my dentist appointments, rare in-person tasks at the bank, take cats to the vet, etc.
Sounds to me like someone does not trust employees to manage themselves and meet deadlines, and thats ok. I was coming into this thread from a highly skilled, well paid workers perspective.
Completely agree, if you need to micro-manage then workday oriented results are easier.
Well, if you ever get the chance to work with highly skilled, well paid workers I think you'll be surprised to find that even we have a hard time estimating the effort needed to complete tasks since we are usually doing unique and complex things that have unknowns. I also suggest studying agile methodologies which assume workers are working at 100% and instead of guaranteeing work gets completed according to estimates it tracks work completed and adjusts accordingly.
estimate and result oriented work are two different things.
Result oriented work is: Here is how much I did this week. I either met, exceeded or fell short of some expectation. The person then decides if this is the place they want to be and the employer decides if they are a good fit.
Agile in most places is a managers whip. I will go so far to say I have never seen it implemented in a way that is beneficial to devs. (possibly by design)
Estimates are even worse... you cant estimate software at scale. spending dollars to pickup dimes as the saying goes.
The problem I see is that without defined boundaries, employees tend to overwork instead of underwork. I see managers praising engineers that work nights or weekends and Managers not encouraging their reports to take enough vacation under 'unlimited vacation' policies. Mgmt is still going to rate you based on your performance but at least having a time off policy prevents a complete race to bottom in the name of productivity.
Who is setting the deadlines? The ones that have been flying around my office lately completely ignore the engineers and architects. They are completely unrealistic and would have people working around the clock in a panic 7 days per week to try and meet them, and still slip. No thanks.
They don’t need to micromanage, but they are choosing to, and doing it very poorly (as if there is a good way).
In theory it's like how a school project is scheduled - you have milestones and a deadline but you can work flexibly as long as you hit your targets. So if you want to get it all done on the first day, crunch on the last, or spread it out, it's up to you and no one cares as long as it's complete with sufficient quality.
Likely this doesn't work well on a team, or for more open-ended work. Never seen any organisation aside from private contractors who actually do this though.
Right. I used to fix bid contracts and assumed the risk, so I would charge more than contracting by the hour. I imagine employees would give longer estimates to reduce their risk of working overtime.
Not sure what the big deal is with working a 4 day week. I've done it for years, but at 40 hours. It not hard at all to work 40 hours in 4 days, and I am very productive.
Advocating for working 32 hours a week as if 40 is hard? I don't really get that at all. I know lots of people in other areas who easily work 60+ hours a week for years on end.
I suppose if all you want to do is coast along at a company that will likely get wiped out by the competition when TSHTF, it would be nice to work 32 hours, but if you want to get ahead, don't set your sights so low.
France tried to limit work week to 35 hours thinking that all hours are equal and it would lead to reduced productivity and a need to hire more workers. It failed to have the intended effect except for factory workers. We are starting to have plenty of signals saying that 4 day work week is good for morale, happiness and not at all detrimental to productivity.
80% of work time at 100% pay doesn’t really add up when you’re paying £53k for a office-based role in London. For a mid level role, £66k at 0.8FTE would just be the same.
Sure, some benefits sound decent but also deceiving… pension match is nice but 6 weeks of holiday (+BH) is actually 24 days and getting £60 for each holiday day taken is £1440 a year that won’t rise with pay rises.
it sounds all nice except you will end up with company splitted to two parts working Mo-Th and Tu-Fr, because customers/clients/partners want to reach you at least 5 days a week
so while I would not mind having 20% income cut considering I work most projects for company which embrace more likely 996 scheme this would either mean I would have on Monday twice as much work as usual or i would lose these projects
this can't work unless you are isolated company (hard to imagine the field) or there is nationwide law making this standard
4 day work weeks are clearly here to stay and a huge quality of life improvement but taking a 20% pay check reduction for it is absurd.
You are doing the same amount of work in less time, not less work. Company goals do not change, nor do their deliverables or expectations of you.
A reduction would only make sense for hourly employees (though I think the hourly rate should go up so the total weekly pay is the same) but if you are being paid full time, it should not matter how much time it takes you to complete your work.
You are paid for your knowledge, skill, and ability to deliver. You are not paid to be working a set amount of hours or days.
I'd prefer they cut hours over cutting days. 7+ hours in classrooms with hardly any breaks is brutal. Keep them for childcare purposes if you must, but cut the instruction hours. More free time or recess, and wholly-optional, casual courses in various subjects on a drop-in basis. Fewer hours sitting in classrooms and expected to be fully engaged, unable to even take a piss without begging permission first.
The 4 day workweek. This is life just laughing at me for having the gall to try & start my own company. 30 years on I'm still trying. Everybody else who just went & got a job are now millionaires & retired. I wrote a news publishing system 2 years before Elon sold them. I wrote the first Taxi app on iPhone. On my todo list for 2 years before Instagram was "twitter with photos".
You definitely need a biz partner you can count on. Unless you have a family situation that encourages & helps this sort of endeavor.
When someone burns you, don't go back to him / her for the second go around! Even if that person is a good friend. That's what I've learned. Alternative version of this is don't start a company with someone who is a newly minted millionaire & is single, not sure of what to do next in life, and not all that interested in money.
The idea is that 4-hours work weeks for relatively highly skilled knowledge workers will actually help lower the costs for the social security system (less burnouts, early retirements) and a more productive society (instead of 'grinding out' pointlessly long hours, work less and contribute to society in your free time) -- work is merely one way to be productive in society.
>How will they handle this and still emerge unscathed while competing with China and India and Indonesia and the likes.
This isn't even accurate. What is EU competing with China and India on? It should the reverse if anything, how will India and China compete in High Tech and Precision Manufacturing with the West when they are suffering massive brain drain?
Sheer numbers and growth rate. China and India are huge markets and growing. Europe is a mature market which is stagflated. US has some more growth left.
Agreed on all points. Europe should serve as a warning to the rest of the world of what happens when you become complacent- the decline from earlier centuries to now is just staggering and shows no signs of slowing. Many of the lauded social benefits aren't actually sustainable long term and the stifling business climate has forced governments to become increasingly protectionary which is a death spiral for competitiveness long term.
Immigration -- they'll be a move to a two-tired (zero-hours, contract-only, fire-at-will) base largely made up of the young and immigrants. Then gold-plated 4d work-from-home jobs for 45-65s.
Higher import tariffs are a mid term solution, but in the end nation states and national governance are dysfunctional concepts for an ultimately globalized world.
I'm from Rome, Italy and I feel like I'm on a sinking boat where everyone is enthusiastically carving holes in the bottom.
My grand-parents bought a house to my parents when they were 27.
My parents had it easy and never learned personal finance.
They refused to lend me 30k to start a mortgage for the house in Budapest, Hungary despite having 2 young kids because they didn't trust Hungary stability and wanted me to go back to Italy.
They have been keeping 60k in their checking account for the past 10 years.
I've tried to convince them to invest a part of it in ETF but my father wrote me that: "They have invested in the Italian social security system and they have no need for other investments other than their government pensions and the house they own".
Real estate value in Rome has declined 30% since 2012.
I have been telling them about the population decline and how the pension system is gonna go belly up in the future.
Then Elon Musk also tweeted about Italy grim population collapse future last month.
I told my father in great distress that I was sadly right.
He told me I'm working too much and I need to relax and essentially he won't be taking advice from me because I'm not thinking straight, implying I need medical attention.
For me, the common usage of the terms "training" and "working" are not the same. In most jobs, we perform a lot of "working," or applying known patterns, and very little "training," or learning new patterns.
Pro sports is flipped, and often each week the athletes are learning new tactics/counter-tactics based on their opponent, or adjusting their existing patterns to perfection, or grinding out exercise routines to be able to demand more from their body. Drills are required to "train" their body into being able to do these routines reliably on-demand, and new exercise routines are often the best at forcing your body to adapt and grow.
That said, even pro-athletes have rest periods once the season is over. Also, many of them incorporate rest into training routines as well. An NFL player usually will rest after game day for 1 or 2 days.
Lol, what a scam, 4 day work week but you have to be in the office.
I live close to Shoreditch but preparation time and travel both ways is easily 2 hours a day (for some of my colleagues that would be 3+ hours a day).
If you went from working from home 100% 5 days a week to working from the office 100% 4 days a week results in the exact same amount of time, except you remove all the monetary savings from working from home (~100GBP in travel alone).
They claim 80% of time but it's not true at all as I explained before. Not only that but the cost for the individuals is huge when going back to the office.
I think its farcical to claim that a 4 day week is a 'scam' because you find it offensive for whatever reason. Its still an improvement on the 5 day week and something atypical. I am not sure what you think a 'scam' is but we have different definitions.
The number of people who are working from home will not be 100% nor will the number of companies working from home exclusively be 100%.
Given we have had limited time to run this experiment, perhaps it would be good if we didn't just jump to conclusions that working from home is the be all and end all. The office has had a pretty good run of productivity over the last century.
They have marketed this by saying they will be working 80% of the hours they use to work yet they want their employees to travel to the office? Surely the hours they've cut for their employees will now be lost travelling to the office and back instead?
I'd rather work a 5 day week if I could work from home then a 4 day work week and have to travel to the office
Scam is a bit strong. But I can see leadership wanting everyone back to office for whatever reasons, and out of fear of people leaving if they are forced to return to office, they came up with this 4 day work week thing to make it attractive enough for people to stay.
Calling it a scam is completely inaccurate, scams rely on people not being aware (on some level) of what they're signing up for, and on people making promises they don't intend to keep. Here it is perfectly clear what everyone's getting.
Tons of people would prefer a 4-day in-office work week over a 5-day remote work week. You may not, but there are many who do.
At https://www.waiterio.com we are fully remote and we introduced 32 hours work weeks except for customer support which still does 40 hours a week.
We track hours with hubstaff.com which takes a random screenshot every 10 minutes.
It's been a mixed bag. Half of the team kept productivity up and logged those 32 hours stably. Another half of the team, when left unchecked went down to 14 hours a week and very low output.
I have still a lot to learn and I'm far from a great manager.
I know perfectly well I might be the reason why a part of my team is underperforming and not working while I don't watch.
I too have dreamt of giving autonomy and see the team reach great goals on their own. Those dreams seem naive now given the much harsher reality I've faced so far.
Given how all this announcement of reduce hours look more like self-advertisement rather than a justly curious trial in something new that might or might not work, I'm a bit skeptic the others are getting things done with the same budget and efficiency that I do.
What if the others have a larger budget and hiring more senior team-mates?
What if their efficiency is actually lower than mine?
What if they have already fired all the employees that were not absolute workaholics?
Frankly I'm not so confident of my ways. I'll keep hustling and crawling my way up in the mud though. At least I know I'm not sugar-coating it.
You assume everyone is self-oriented and wants to be autonomous and have a great work ethics and care about their privacy.
There are people like that. There are also people that want a lot of guidance.
There are also people that just wants to be paid and don't really care much about the current job goals. There are also people that will do the bare-minumum they can to keep the job.
Understanding who is who requires good management and a good number of managers.
How big is your company? What's the ratio of managers vs doers?
> You assume everyone is self-oriented and wants to be autonomous and have a great work ethics and care about their privacy.
No, they assume that people who are self-oriented and want to be autonomous and have a great work ethic are the people that you want to have working for you. You don't need to employ "everyone", you just need enough for your workload, and you will need fewer people if you optimize your company's structure for high performers rather than deadweights.
Your employee surveillance policies are beyond the pale (screenshots every ten minutes... really?!) and treat all your employees are completely inept, lazy, or both. With policies like that, you shouldn't be surprised when the only employees you manage to hire and retain are that way.
The number of people on the planet is limited.
Maybe you work in a venture backed startup and you hire people with a yearly salary of 100k or more.
The rest of the startups from other locations and less funding will choose less talented people with a lower budget salary.
The people you are hiring with great salaries have been educated with great effort and cost and rules previously by someone else.
I work at a bootstrapped startup with two engineers, only one full time (me). I'm paid well below my market rate, but I stick around because the CEO treats me with respect and gives me the flexibility that I need to be productive and happy.
When you don't have money, you can compensate in other ways, like autonomy and work-life balance. You may not get the best of the best, but you'll get loyal employees who appreciate the flexibility you give them.
Alternatively you can try to build a company on the backs of people who you have to micromanage and who will be gone in a year (and if not, only stick around because they have no other options). I'll leave it to you to decide which is more likely to succeed.
I've watched the screenshots 3 times in 2 years when someone has been missing deadlines and failing to explaining why for several weeks in a row.
I employee people from all over the world. Some of them have real problems.
A guy from Venezuela got his computer fried from an electrical surge.
I asked him a lot of proof and he did provide it immediately. It was all true and I bought him a new laptop.
Another guy from Mexico said he could not work because a hail storm had damaged his computer. When asked for proof turned out that it was all completely made up.
He did not wanted to provide a single photo of his damaged equipment.
He played the "You don't trust me??" card.
In my experience people that do the "You don't trust me?!?" card are at the last rope and have buried theirselves in a huge pile of lies.
So no, I don't trust employees from the other side of the planet that I've never met in person that I just started to work with last month. Trust need to be earned over time with actual proof of being worth of trust.
I give them the benefit of the doubt and I ask for proof.
I will just talk in general terms and not say anything personal since I don't have any personal knowledge of your situation.
But in general, the problem with surveillance is that it is just all about appearances. People usually learn to "look" busy instead of being productive and that is counter-productive to actual productivity when people are just pre-occupied with appearances.
Another problem is that it creates an atmosphere of low trust in the company. When there is an atmosphere of low trust, people will be less motivated to work hard and to give their whole effort since they will feel they are just expendable since the manager doesn't trust them.
Please ask me questions rather than assuming I simply do things.
In Waiterio we do not have managers at all so far.
We are 6 people and there isn't a single manager. There you go!
How many got wind of your surveillance policies and never bothered to apply? How many sensed your attitude towards your employees in the interview and took a different offer? How many spoke to one of your employees after the interview and then ghosted you?
You can't measure the potentially wide-ranging negative impacts of your attitude and policies.
We are a startup of 6 people and we do international hires from different countries. So practically certainly no 2 candidates we've ever interviewed knew each other. You assume we are a big startup with a big budget and all problems that come with it. Ask questions next time.
I didn't assume anything. Everything in my original post was a question. The point wasn't that any one of those hypotheticals was real, just that you can't account for all of the downsides to treating your employees like toddlers.
If you need to take 10-minute screenshots while your company only has 6 people, you've got the wrong 6 people and you're going to fail. At that stage you can't afford to have anyone who isn't pulling their weight.
If you're taking 10 minute screenshots with six people and don't need to do so, you're still going to fail, but it will be because you drove away your founding team.
Some people don't have a strong enough work ethic to be productive when left without direct supervision, but there's hardly a more obvious and intrusive way to say "We don't trust you" than to take a screenshot every 10 minutes. That would absolutely demolish my desire to work.
In fact, I don't trust my employees to a full 100% degree. I didn't have time or ways to build trust (yet).
They work on the other side of the planet, I've never met them in person. Many of them are literally missing the few goals I've managed to set.
> That would absolutely demolish my desire to work.
I've watched probably the screenshots 3 times in 2 years when someone was underperforming and it turned out s/he was just not working at all.
If you had the desire to work to start with, I would have never checked your screenshots because you have hit goals or showed me you could do awesome stuff.
This is not an argument. You are literally saying you don't want to believe in something that is actually happening. I'm telling you of a real problem with real people. You are saying it's not possible to believe it (unbelievably). You called me immature. Yet the problem stands and you have no idea of my actual maturity. You only apply correlation with the fact that other people you know that would do that surveillance would be immature. You don't know about my situation. Ask questions.
As for the goal to maintain 100% productivity whilst cutting back on hours, I'm confident that they will succeed. In fact, they'll succeed in this without requiring some kind of brilliant plan, as this recalibration happens automatically.
When you start working one day less, nobody will reduce your workload by 20%. You'll have the exact same workload as before and now need to achieve it in less time.
There's many ways to cross this gap. An obvious one is that a typical 5 day work week has moments of slack, depending on the culture. Friday after lunch is where productivity sinks in many offices. Wednesdays are also slower as it's typically the first moment in the week where things are running (planned, prepared, on track). In a 4 day work week you sacrifice this breathing room, the 4 days become more compressed.
Another natural change is to take a more aggressive stand in rejecting non-sense. Excess meetings, unimportant emails, etc. This works very well and is extremely effective for the simple reason that you MUST. As such this time compression is a blessing, a cleansing mechanism for yourself and the organization.
You'll be amazed at how much time you can win back. Let's say you do need to attend a meeting. It's a 1 hour meeting. You're needed in the meeting. Go in and say you only have 20 mins. As if by sheer magic, what needed to be discussed gets done in 20 mins. Without this forced "budgeting", people would just fill the hour with bullshit.
Counter intuitive, but by being rigid instead of elastic, you maximize value.