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.
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.