
Work less, get more: New Zealand firm's four-day week an 'unmitigated success' - GordonS
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/19/work-less-get-more-new-zealand-firms-four-day-week-an-unmitigated-success
======
GordonS
I've actually been working a 4-day week for the past 2.5 years now, working 30
hours a week instead of 37.5.

My employer has got the better end of the deal by far - I'm as productive as I
was working a 5-day week, but had to take a 20% pay cut. Still, it works for
me, giving me extra time for family and side projects.

~~~
nine_k
This is pretty interesting. Did you feel overworked working 37.5 hours?

I spend more than 40 hours a week at work, but I actually work less than that
whole time, because I have to wait for certain processes, or certain people,
filling the gaps with activities like reading HN (as in right now).

~~~
toyg
That's really where the productivity gains of the next 20 years will be: free
employees from the tyranny of workplace attendance, so that they will not
resent these gaps and actually concentrate on end-product.

~~~
nine_k
The need for attendance is coordination.

I worked remotely for 3 years in a high-profile company. Being remote helps
control your time better. Coordinating anything with other people takes more
effort, though, because you can't just walk around, see if somebody is busy,
or out for a coffee, etc.

This is definitely solvable with technology, and will increasingly be solved.

There's also economy in employees providing their own computers, internet
connectivity, and (most importantly) office space.

------
borplk
It's somewhat surprising (and not really) that more companies are not
competing with each other seriously on real benefits like this to attract and
keep talent.

Most jobs provide no real extra benefit. They have a bunch of fake gimmicks
like "snack room" or "monthly social event" (read: mandatory team building
event but free for the company).

Four-day week for five-day pay is a serious and tangible benefit that a smart
company could provide and it would give them a strong hiring/culture advantage
for a long time.

That's a 20% reduction in work hours. To me it seems very doable if you build
a good high-productivity culture in the company. Meaning everyone kind of
knows they have less time to screw around so you save all that for your 3 days
off work, and 4 days it's high productivity work.

If this increases productivity by 10%, the cost to the company is the other
10%.

Also consider that 1.5 hours is 18% of the work day. Many companies easily and
carelessly waste that much every day.

~~~
shados
I know some people who do that in big techs, but I've always wondered how that
works. My work doesn't really fit in a well defined bucket of "days".
Sometimes we have deadlines and Ill work on Sunday. Sometimes I'll have a
meeting with someone in an international office and have to accommodate their
schedule (sometimes they do the reverse). Sometimes I just have bad days and
say "f it" and just stay home. The job gets done, everyone's happy.

Changing from that fluid "as long as shit gets done" schedule to a specific
"you now work for days" gets really weird to me. Do I have to work at least 4
days now? What happens with crunch time? What happens if there's an emergency
and I end up working on the 5th day, do I get overtime?

Then what happens during perf review? there's already a 500% difference in
output between 2 random engineers, and it's already hard to figure out if
they're just better, working longer, or what. Comparing the output of a 4
day/week vs a 5 day/week one to make sure the former doesn't get penalized
gets tricky.

I mean, if it works at the likes of Google, so I assume people have the
answers to these questions. I'm genuinely curious.

~~~
s73v3r_
" What happens with crunch time? "

Managers actually plan, and stop relying on it. Crunch time is not something
that should exist, as it's just punishing employees for the inability of
management to make a sane schedule.

~~~
shados
The majority of the time, totally agree with you. But the real world has
certain dates that matter, and something things go wrong. Someone gets sick.
Someone gets pregnant (I guess something might have gone right rather than
wrong here, but you get the point). A server goes down. Shit happens. There's
only so much buffer time that's practical to allocate. And black Friday
doesn't move.

~~~
borplk
Require "crunch time" to be fairly compensated as it should be (overtime rate)
and see how quickly and suddenly crunch time is not needed anymore.

At most companies "crunch time" is just a label stuck on "squeezing salaried
employees for every last drop of juice".

When there's no penalty on the company for needing crunch time, suddenly they
find themselves needing a lot of it.

You can easily see how nonsensical all of this corporate garbage is by
hypothetically flipping it around to the benefit of employees and think about
how they would react instead.

Hey boss it's "quiet time" can I go home an hour early for 2 weeks? No ...
DING DING!

So don't expect it to be ok to ask me to stay an hour late because it's
"crunch time".

Same thing applies to "as long as shit gets done". They always adjust that so
that somehow the amount of shit that is expected to get done is more than you
can manage in a day. Never the other way around.

No company says "hey enough shit got done for today and it's 3PM so go home
and see you tomorrow". No in that case you keep working and get more shit
done.

Let's not dress it up, it's all corporate psychological warfare.

~~~
shados
Your post reminds me of just how spoiled I am, and I understand the problem
with my understanding of the situation might be exactly that. I totally worked
for companies that match what you describe.

My current employer though? If we had crunch time and then told my boss I was
gonna go home an hour early and do 4 days a week for the next 2 weeks to make
up for it? No brainer, they'll say yes. It's also not that uncommon for
managers to send people home if they shipped a lot of stuff that day.

I'm a manager myself, and I frequently had to have the talk with my reports to
tone it down. The last thing I want is burnt out employees. I've actively told
some to calm down and work less.

------
jackconnor
Not to be that guy, but we all knew that "Less stress" and "better work life
balance" would result from working one day less a week, but it doesn't talk
about productivity or revenue or any of that. I don't think you can
realistically call this a "success" if it's not something most businesses
could afford to do, and if there was a productivity loss on par with the 20%
of work missed then...they're just paying more for less? Am I missing
something here?

~~~
colemannugent
It's probably not a full 20% loss, but I think your point still stands. To
expand a bit:

It seems to me that the only way they could work a day less and not affect the
companies productivity is if those employees did nothing during that day
anyway. Say that in a work week an employee produced 100 units of work (feel
free to substitute this with your favorite productivity microbenchmark). Thus,
with the 5 day work-week each day the employee must produce around 20 units of
work. Say you reduce that to 4 days, so now each day the worker must produce
25 units of work to be as productive. It follows that in order to work one
less day per week the worker must work 25% more per day or overall
productivity will suffer.

Imagine that your company implements something like this, suddenly per-day
expectations go way up. Can you complete that meeting at 125% speed? Will your
builds finish 25% faster? Can you increase your typing speed by 25%? Can you
dig that ditch in 3 hours instead of 4? Can you clear tables 25% faster? I
don't think anyone wants the consequences of this.

The only way I can remotely see this working out is for the employers of
salaried info-workers in high profit-margin industries. For someone employed
in a manual or skilled labor position it may be impossible or outright
dangerous to attempt to complete tasks at 125% speed. I could however see this
being a neat benefit that employers like the Silicon Valley types offer to
outbid the competition, but I don't think this is practical for the economy in
general.

~~~
ridgeguy
>It seems to me that the only way they could work a day less and not affect
the companies productivity is if those employees did nothing during that day
anyway.

An alternative would be that the 4-day schedule boosted employee efficiency by
enough to make up for missing day 5.

Stress often degrades performance, particularly when it's chronic. I don't
find it incredible that giving employees an extra day for their non-work
duties/joys might increase their efficiency 20%.

~~~
colemannugent
> _I don 't find it incredible that giving employees an extra day for their
> non-work duties/joys might increase their efficiency 20%._

Note that the employees must improve their efficiency by more than 25% for
this to benefit the employer, and that they must do this every single day.

I can easily imagine that Monday mornings would be much more pleasant with a
4-day work week, but beyond that first morning I think it would increase
stress. If every day I came to work knowing that my employer expected 125% out
of me that day I think I would burnout much faster.

------
dmurray
> Academics studied the trial before, during and after its implementation,
> collecting qualitative and quantitative data

All the quantitative measurements given in the article are about the
employees' happiness. Of course they felt they had a better work/life balance!
Of course they felt less stressed! Of course they said they had more time to
spend with their family!

They'd probably feel even better getting paid for five days and working three
- and why stop there? Why not two, or one, or zero?

I don't doubt that most people in white collar jobs can be just as productive
in four days, with the right incentives, as they currently are in five. But it
would be nice, if only to justify the headline, to see metrics from the
company's side rather than the parenthetical mention of "employees performing
better in their jobs". Did they set up more trusts? Did they draft more
legally rigorous wills? Did their customers report higher satisfaction and
bring more repeat or referral business? If the "studies" aren't complete
nonsense, the numbers were measured for these things. But then why aren't they
reported with the same breathlessness as "overall life satisfaction increased
by 5%"?

~~~
GordonS
> They'd probably feel even better getting paid for five days and working
> three - and why stop there? Why not two, or one, or zero?

As someone who went from working a 5-day week to a 4-day week, I feel like a
4-day week is a 'sweet spot' \- I'm just as productive as I was working a
5-day week, but when I work any less than 30 hours a week (e.g. when I take a
day off), my productivity always goes down.

~~~
StavrosK
I agree. Three days is too little (the "weekend" is too long), but four days
is just right. I've worked four days for years, now I'm temporarily working
five, and I am looking forward to going back. Two days aren't long enough to
unwind from the other five, I keep feeling that the week is too long and the
weekend too short.

Working four day weeks, every week I'd think "damn, is it the Thursday
already?" and on Sunday I'd be looking forward to going to work on Monday

~~~
ant6n
It sounds like every week there's a holiday. Weeks with a holiday are awesome.

~~~
StavrosK
Yeah, it's exactly like that. Every Friday is a holiday.

~~~
jonhendry18
But without the holiday traffic.

------
perfunctory
Society should definitely have a debate about working less. Right now we are
very productively warming up the planet 40 hours a week. Just working less is
a big part of the solution.

As I was writing this comment I opened [0]. Fascinating read.

"The front runners for lowest average weekly work hours are the Netherlands
with 27 hours,..."

"The New Economics Foundation has recommended moving to a 21-hour standard
work week to address problems with unemployment, high carbon emissions, low
well-being, entrenched inequalities, overworking, family care, and the general
lack of free time."

Let's get away from the notion that 40 hours is the norm.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time)

~~~
eriken
Assuming that cutting work hours per position would allow for more positions.
How would this achieve both less unemployment and less carbon emissions? Would
you not need to choose one over the other?

~~~
perfunctory
Moving to 21-hour week is almost 50% reduction from the current level. But
unemployment is not 50%, it's much much lower. I guess it's a matter of
degree. If reduction of working hours is radical enough it could reduce both
unemployment and emissions.

------
ironjunkie
I have been thinking about this a lot.

On average, each year I use some of my PTO to be able to take some 3 day
weekends which I really enjoy for going outdoor.

This means that I have had some ground to compare 4 day weeks and 5 day weeks.
Based on my observation, my output is almost exactly the same. I feel like in
a 5 day week, there is at least one day where I feel unproductive, or just
wait to coordinate with other people. Since I'm officially paid on that day,
it feels like an unproductive day at work.

In a 4 day week, I usually feel like each day has been productive. I sometimes
agree to connect on the 5th day, for very specific events, but with no
guarantees or expectations on my side. As such, the 5th day feels like I'm
100% off.

------
oliwarner
This sounds awesome but it only works for time-insensitive service provision.
Where there's a relatively fixed amount of work to do, but you don't have to
constantly be in contact with your customer.

I'm a contractor. I have to pick up the phone _any_ time of day or night or I
lose a client. Most of my friends and family work at varying levels of
healthcare provision. They can't just send everybody home on Friday. They
can't even do that at the weekend. And retail faces similar issues. Plus
they're still fighting online sales.

Estate planners are basically the slowest possible service. They could
probably work a two day week and let the answerphone and inboxes pick up the
grunt work. It's neat that this works for them, but —and this isn't just
jealousy— I don't expect this to become widespread any time soon.

~~~
s73v3r_
They could hire enough people to where there would be enough people for every
day, yet everyone still gets to work 4 days.

~~~
oliwarner
Hire more people to handle the same workload? How are you paying for that?

The NHS in the UK —where the employees would most benefit from something like
this— is right at the other end of the spectrum in terms of capacity. They are
s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d. Long rotas. Unsociable hours. Poor cover. Almost no
redundancy.

Throwing more people at the problem would certainly help and there are other
issues to do with training and retention, but even if you fix that, it'll
eventually come down to money.

~~~
Firadeoclus
It's not just the employees who would benefit. There's a structural debt
building up which will need to be paid and patients are suffering, too. It's
false economy.

------
sethammons
I feel 3 days, minimum, makes the most sense. You have a day for personal
errands, a day dedicated to family activities, and a day for rest and
relaxation. As it is, time is hyper squished on the weekends, at least for me
it is.

------
NeedMoreTea
Back in 1974 there was a six month spell where the UK worked 3 days a week -
to conserve power and coal during a miners strike.

With a 40% reduction in working hours, UK productivity dropped just 4%.
(Government's own figures)

I'm not in the least surprised this experiment is a success. I am surprised
such things haven't become more common.

------
yalph
I seriously belive if work weeks were 4 days a lot of the world’s problems
would be resolved.

------
l5870uoo9y
> Two-hundred-and-forty staff at Perpetual Guardian, a company which manages
> trusts, wills and estate planning, trialled a four-day working week over
> March and April, working four, eight-hour days but getting paid for five.

Similar trails were conducted in the eldercare in Sweden or Finland, I have
forgot exactly where. The conclusion was that a shorter work week meant that
less work got done, resulting in worse service for the citizens. Which seems
intuitive. This exercise can't be replicated in other sectors, like
construction, teaching, social work or garbage collection, without resulting
in worse service or product.

However I do believe that there vast amount of worthless work being done. If
you ever worked at a large cooperation you properly shuck your head on
multiple occasions when reports, evaluations, surveys and such were being
carried out involving multiple departments and requiring multiple approvals
only to end unused in the trashcan. I have heard a number as high as 40% of
work being done is essentially worthless, it serves no meaningful purpose and
the people who made it could as well go home. Perhaps the example in the
article is exactly this, the company were simply doing too much worthless work
and the real success is realising this, stopping the madness and branding it
as a success.

------
octygen
The problem is that this extra day will allow them to think of/execute their
own plan... but I need them to be part of my plan and have the weekends JUST
be for rest.

~~~
overcast
What do you think I'm doing all day at work? Planning my own venture.

~~~
octygen
I actually do this too but I have to say it's hard to work 12h days and then
work out and then hang out with the woman/friends/family and then build a
business plan. I am a big fan of what three of my friends have done which is
take a sabbatical to build a business plan and get fit. I'm not really
complaining about my job but I am planning this for 2019 or 2020.

------
ivanjaros
I've been working part-time for the past 6-7 years. I cannot even begin to
imagine going back to full-time. 4-5 hours a day is maximum for
intellectually-heavy job. Anything else is pure waste of time playing pretend.
I could have been rich by working full-time all this time, but it's simply not
worth to me. Even if I have nothing to do, it beats slaving away my time for
someone else.

------
dvcrn
The place I'm working at right now doesn't calculate work hours by the week,
but by the month. So you have a lot of freedom in moving your hours around.
You could do 4x10h and take a day off each week, work on weekends and take
another day off instead and so on.

I would be much happier if I could do 4x8h and have a 3-day weekend, but 4x10h
works for now as well.

------
rosser
For maximum flexibility, and hopefully also some productivity gains, I'd
implement a four-day work week by giving the employee ongoing discretion to
use Monday, Wednesday, or Friday as their third "weekend" day, and encourage
limiting meetings to Tuesdays and Thursdays, as much as possible.

~~~
vorg
This caters for everyone -- some employees would prefer to take Wednesdays
off, while others would prefer three-day weekends. Some of the "work hard play
hard" workers, though, would alternate between Mondays and Fridays off so
every second weekend is four days long, giving plenty of time for hiking or
travel. Others in the "work-life balance" crowd would want to continue working
a 5-day week but only 6 hours each day, giving time for daily pickups from
school or late night hobbies. Better limit those Tuesday and Thursday meetings
to between 10am to 3pm, excluding lunch.

------
overcast
3 day weekends should be mandatory no matter what. Whether that's 4x10 or 4x8,
I'm fine with either.

~~~
megaman22
Four tens is a pretty great schedule. Those two extra hours somewhere in the
day when there's usually not anybody working are almost as good for
productivity as the other eight. And a day off during the week is worth its
weight in gold for getting errands and all the other nagging little things
that are a huge drag working the whole week.

~~~
olyjohn
If you work 8 hours a day, plus have to commute into a major city, your
evenings are sort of already shot anyways. Working the extra two hours doesn't
feel like much extra work and really doesn't feel like it interferes with
evenings any worse. Plus usually one way on your commute is not during rush
hour, so you save extra time that way too.

And yeah, the 10 hour days really give you a chance to spend longer periods of
time being productive. You can get your meetings done and have bigger blocks
of productive time during the day.

------
nine_k
From TFA I could see that work-life balance is now considered good by 74% of
employees, 24% up from the 5-day week. Still pretty far from 100%.

The article does not seem to mention the resulting performance of the company
as a whole. I think that should be as front and center as the work-life
balance satisfaction figure.

> _Employees designed a number of innovations and initiatives to work in a
> more productive and efficient manner, from automating manual processes to
> reducing or eliminating non-work-related internet usage,” said Delaney._

Employees eliminating non-work Internet usage on their own accord sound a bit
implausible, adding to the general feeling of not listing all the salient
points that the article invokes in me.

~~~
nicoburns
Really? I eould certainly do this if it contributed to the company continuing
with a 4 day week!

~~~
nine_k
Would you suggest it?

I mean, I can see how it could be an employer's initiative. If it's the
employees' initiative, I think the situation might be a bit complicated
inside. The complications could be an important part of how the experiment
went on.

------
linuxlizard
I'd be happy to get a five-day work week.

Source: salaried American software engineer.

------
perfunctory
Most comments seem to focus on productivity. I have been working 3-4 days a
week for the last 5 years. Not sure about productivity but I am definitely
happier this way.

------
jkmcf
Ignored this when it first showed up, but Hacker Newsletter resurfaced it for
me.

Given a sub-40 hour week, and my own penchant to follow the path of least
resistance, I think a happy medium between employer/employee would be making
sure the employees are using the time help them help themselves. E.g., use the
extra time for a massage, yoga, hiking, cooking class, or whatever usually
gets ignored because of work/life interference.

------
dmazin
Curious if 37signals still does this during the summer.

------
mnm1
People working 10 hours a day or more should have this option as they are
already putting in 40 hours in 4 days. Really puts the absurdity of unpaid
overtime into perspective. This idea of working only four days is only as
absurd as the idea of working unpaid overtime. We're fine with one so we
should be fine with the other.

------
Apocryphon
The really unfortunate thing is that this is simply not a change that
corporations will make on their own accord. It's game theory; without top-down
labor regulation, companies that remain on five-day workweeks will have
greater productivity than four-day work weeks. So it's everyone or no one.

~~~
deathanatos
You assume companies are actually effective at maximizing productivity, and
make rational decisions towards that goal. But, for example, I work in an
open-office environment, and studies have pretty conclusively shown open-
office environments are bad across the board: disease, stress, worker
unhappiness, and productivity. Yet, the fad has caught on in SV.

All of Dilbert is a testament to companies not being effective at maximizing
productivity.

It's a big change. Big changes scare people, and people would rather assume
the simple view that if four days is good, five must be better. Another
mythical man-month.

In fact, if five is so clearly better than four, why not six? The first
company to do it would have an advantage while the rest caught up!

~~~
Apocryphon
You're not wrong. But I think companies are addicted to simple metrics,
despite our industry's ballyhooed trust in data, and so face time trumps
efficient use of time. My point was that it will take legislation at the top,
whether pushed through via collective bargaining or other means, to force
companies to adopt a four day week schedule.

------
alexhutcheson
Lots of US federal government agencies and contractors offer 4 day weeks on
alternating weeks. I’ve heard it referred to as RDOs (regular days off) or 9
9s (9 9-hour days instead of 10 8-hour days). At the offices I’m familiar
with, almost everyone does it.

------
nutjob2
If a serious percentage of companies started giving people Friday off (or
maybe Monday, which is worse?) at some point everyone would do it since people
wouldn't be able to get work done on that day. It could happen.

~~~
jwassil
I work for a defense contractor in Los Angeles and that's exactly what's
happened in our industry. I'm not sure which company was first, but nearly all
the defense corporations here are on the 9/80 schedule where you work 9
hours/day (80 hours for the 2-week pay period) and get every-other Friday off.

------
newyearnewyou
This could calm the inevitable social unrest once the massive wealth
inequality in the West (particularly) the US becomes more apparent to people.

------
JTbane
I wish this would catch on, but the only way I feel like most companies could
be convinced is to cut salaries by 20%

------
yazr
Does this simply reduce social mobility ?

If you are already with a strong employer (e.g. banks, google, utilities,
monopolies, university) then yay for u.

But if u r in a 2nd tier employer - then u lose the opportunity to out-compete
them and advance ?

~~~
coenhyde
I'm sorry I'm not following. Could you explain in depth a bit more?

~~~
yazr
Hypothetically, an economy will split into top tier employers (say 10%), and
the rest.

The top employers, are usually quasi-monopoly or rent-seeking. So these
employees can in fact be a bit less productive, and can enjoy the 4 day week,
and the employer can remain highly profitable.

The rest of the economy is a lot more competitive. These employers already
offer lower wages. With 4 -day weeks, these employers will basically get 20%
less revenue per employee, and have to cut back even further.

So now, the inequality between these 2 sectors will simply become even larger.

This is obviously a very gross generalization.

EDIT: the counter argument is that in an advanced economy, many many more
employers are service-oriented and in the 1st group.

------
squozzer
Fridays off is the best argument for giving Islam greater influence in the US.
And the US can water down just about any religion, though the public might
enjoy a beheading.

------
rb808
I'd love a 30 hr week, then I could get 2 full time jobs.

------
extralego
But the employees will use that extra day to search for another job. Not good
for business. It’s better that the employees have their time stretched thin so
that commitment and dependence is kept high.

This is how we do it and it’s great. Honestly I don’t think employees even
realize this is our reasoning.

~~~
overcast
...and then you reach your 30's and realize you're wasting your life in work.

~~~
s73v3r_
Whoa, there. He didn't say they do that to management.

