Although I'm in Australia, I work for a UK-based edtech company (Wonde) that operates a four-day workweek -- having joined just over three months ago. I know that I can only contribute anecdata, but from my perspective I've not seen any reduction in output.
Indeed, I've seen fewer meetings, and meetings defaulting to thirty minutes, rather than sixty. I've also seen more async communication -- not once have I received the dreaded lonely "Hello" in Slack. It's of course not all sunshine and lollipops. People aren't always available, so you have to work around or wait. On a personal level, I find I approach each day with more energy and enthusiasm, and I love that I get to spend more time with my family and can (shock!) go out to lunch with my wife during the week while the kids are at school. There seems to be a direct correlation between my improved personal life and an improved professional life.
If you work on the factory floor and produce all your widgets in 4 days instead of 5 then it doesn't matter what day you take off - it probably makes sense for everyone to take off the same day.
If you're talking to customers 5 (or 7) days a week (restaurants, sales, helplines, healthcare), then the company needs to provide continuous cover.
Not where I am! Rather, it's a negotiation with your manager to see what works best. That way, we can ensure we have coverage across the week. We're all "on" for Mondays and Tuesdays, and then people take Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday off according to preference and suitability.
Yes, more people take Friday than Thursday, but quite a lot of people enjoy the zen-like lack of distraction when they work Fridays. Or so I've been told!
If you don't know what a "stat day" is (I didn't), it apparently stands for "statutory holidays" which is like public holidays.
During my brief time in the US, I observed that over there the public holidays tend to be something like "nth Friday/Monday of so-and-so month"; that way you get a long weekend. This is how it's done in some other countries as well.
Unfortunately not in my country (where I'm lucky to have both Saturdays and Sundays off! (I should probably move...) ); if a public holiday falls on a Wednesday, you get the Wednesday off. But on the bright side, there's plenty of holidays here.
The employer can fix up the imbalance -- if there are N bank holidays in the year, give all 80% part time workers 0.8N extra days of holiday allowance above their usual amount (etc), and mandate that they cover the bank holidays with days from their allowance if they would normally work them. (My UK employer does this.)
It’s time and a half and a day in lieu for working a stat where I am. If you work it much outside 8.30-5 penal rates rise, but that part is employer specific rather than legislated.
It mentions a fish and chip shop and an education facility.
I’d guess that the bulk of fish and chips are sold outside 9-5 Monday to Friday, and that there would be rioting in the streets if school days were reduced 20%.
> there would be rioting in the streets if school days were reduced 20%
Why not move schools to a four-day week, too? If it works for adults at work, I'm sure children would see similar benefits. We already know that typical school hours deprive children of much needed rest.
I absolutely hate it when parents respond to questions like this, but…
Do you have kids? I love mine completely and unconditionally, but a day off being an employee and a parent (well half the day at least) sounds like bliss!
Because unless the kids were all off on the same day each week, which wouldn't work for their parents who have to fit in with their employers needs, then everyone would need even more babsitting cover than they already do.
If the kids were not all off on the same day, then teachers would struggle to get consistent teaching because 20% of the pupils would always be missing from a lesson.
> I love that I [..] can (shock!) go out to lunch with my wife during the week while the kids are at school
(Genuine question) but why wouldn't someone be able to have lunch with their OH while working a traditional 5-day week? Surely a lunch break is something everyone is entitled to even when they're working that day?
Not the OP, but I suspect it's more a question of time. My my wife and I work on opposite ends of town, so if we where to both hop on a bus, meet in the middle, enjoy a nice and leisurely lunch at a nice restaurant (as opposed to just grabbing some fast food) and then hop on a bus back to our respective offices, we're probably looking at at least 2 hours door to door.
Hell, even if I'm just going for lunch by myself there are lots of restaurants I cannot really go to, simply because it takes too long to get there, eat, and get back. Basically, while I always have time to eat lunch, but very rarely have time to enjoy lunch.
So, given we're talking about employers offering flexibility, how about allowing people to take a longer lunch break so they can go for lunch with their OH, but either start their day earlier or stay at work later?
Many professional / salaried roles would be fine with that.
I get in early, only take 10 minutes at lunch but then I head home at 3-4PM to miss rush. Sometimes I log back in from home and do more hours (especially if there is a problem), sometimes I leave even earlier and don't, sometimes I WFH on a Friday and spend 3 hours in the middle of the day getting the train out to my parents for a long weekend then the afternoon is half heartedly watching emails while drinking coffee with my parents.
At the end of the day as long as I'm not inconveniencing colleagues then it comes down to does my output make me worth my salary.
Many employers allow that already, i’d be surprised if all the companies that self selected into this experiment didn’t already have the facility for an employee to arrange this.
It’s not the same thing though. It’s avoiding the pressure to crush wasteful time in the working day (think 30 person zoom meetings that consist of 2 people talking and 28 people quietly doing emails). This pressure is unavoidable with the typical “100 per cent pay, for 80 per cent of the time, while maintaining 100 per cent productivity” 4 day approach.
Oh, absolutely! I have all the regular breaks etc. When I said "go out to lunch" I meant it more in the sense of "go out for a _loooong_ lunch involving a few courses and a bottle or two of wine". ;)
Depends on what you consider a traditional 5-day week; not long ago, people were Expected to be in the office all day, often a commute away. And it's only white collar workers that have gained the priviledge of working from home.
With children, one or both parents often have to sacrifice their lunch breaks to get 40 hours of work in while still dropping off/picking up children at school, activities, etc.
honest answer: both my partner and I work, but she works four days per week to balance childcare. If I worked four days then we would have a whole day together to enjoy hanging out with our son.
My commute to the office is over an hour (London, England) from my home, so returning home for lunch is not an option.
In NL, working less hours (24, 32 or 36 hours) is normalized, to the point where some families have a schedule where either parent has one day a week off, the kids spend one day at their grandparents, and the remaining two days in day care (or something to that effect).
The 4-day work week is fairly normalized here to try and balance careers for both parents with raising children, so these articles seem really weird to me. The tradeoff is you get paid for 32 hours instead of 40, and any other benefits (holidays, bonuses, expenses, etc) are adjusted according to how much of a percentage of full-time (40 hours/week) you work.
> I love that I [..] can (shock!) go out to lunch with my wife during the week while the kids are at school
But slowly this also applies to schools. The teachers would want 4 day workweek. and then the kids would also love to have 4 days instead of 5 days. This would start happening across. The restaurants, grocery shops everywhere and people who come on off days need to be compensated accordingly and then the various other fall outs. :)
There are at least 3 radically different concepts of a 4 day work week:
- same hours, same pay
- reduced hours, same pay
- reduced hours, reduced pay
Why is it always so hard to find this information when people discuss 4 day work weeks? The constant vagueness here is extremely toxic to the diaglogue. People talk past eachother.
> Why is it always so hard to find this information when people discuss 4 day work weeks? The constant vagueness here is extremely toxic to the diaglogue.
I don't think I agree that it's hard to find at all. In almost all coverage I've seen of this in the UK it has been made extremely clear either in the headline or the opening paragraph that it's "reduced hours, same pay".
The pilot scheme's own website https://www.4dayweek.co.uk/pilot-programme says "with almost every company that took part deciding to continue with a four-day week, with no loss of pay for workers."
Employers don't actually use the 40 hours from knowledge workers. If managers planned they'd be able to get better productivity. But as we all know. Bubble in the pipeline cause stalls and then you get meetings and planning days and all staffs that are an hour long which could have been an email.
Hopefully they do same pay,
Less hours. It's a bit tough out there with inflation
Considering that the economy enjoyed 3 decades of basically uninterrupted growth, including right through all significant financial crisis situations (by massively supporting companies with taxpayers money), I couldn't care less how "hard" it is for companys with inflation now.
Baby-Boomers are going into retirement, the next 2 generations are low birth. The workforce is going to be an increasingly limited commodity. Supply and Demand also apply when it doesn't benefit the companies.
Either companies adapt, no matter how tough it is, or there will be less companies, easy as that.
My default assumption is that if people talk about "0.8FTE", they mean 80% pay for 80% time and 80% output, whereas "4dw" _should_ equate to 100% pay for 80% time and 100% output.
If it's anything other than 100/80/100, it's flexible work rather than a four-day working week.
Yeah, articles like this should be more clear on that. In NL the 4 day work week is normalized (by law you're allowed to work less hours if you choose to), but your pay and everything is adjusted accordingly.
If they blasted middle management, management and process consultants, HR and ancillary corporate fluff staff into the sun we’d get 6 days of work done in 3 days and never have to suffer a Monday or Friday again.
But that doesn’t create jobs or indicate growth to investors.
My impression is that what happens sometimes is managers just keep hiring more and more managers, and then eventually someone twigs and suddenly there's a big cull of management. It's happened to companies I've been at a couple of times.
You get to a point where there's two product managers and and a product owner per team, with like three or four engineers until someone realises.
Because almost every complex system that includes facilities controlling its own complexities, has a tendency to increase the resources and structural complexity spent on that task.
If this is not actively kept in check, such a system can deteriorate over time, by a positive-feedback loop of newly created controlling facilities created to control the increasing amount of facilities.
This is not to say that managing roles are not required. Of course they are. Complex systems need control. But the proliferation of that control needs to be kept in check, otherwise, the mechanism that is initially helpful (creating structure to control complexity), will become a problem by creating additional complexity of its own.
Yes they exist because it’s the status quo of corporate structure. I haven’t seen any evidence that adding these staff to a problem actually have a measurable impact on productivity, ROI or decrease organisational risk.
"they exist because it’s the status quo of corporate structure"
This is circular which may have been your point, but do you have a theory as to how they originated?
Just as bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy, so does management.
There is a good way to do big management, but what usually happens is managers find themselves with time to spare and invent activities which do not directly add value, but eventually snowball into formidable tasks requiring more management.
That's true for government because they have no competition. In the corporate world, excessive bloat leads to stifled innovation and eventual irrelevance then bankruptcy.
> If this were true, those roles wouldn't exist to begin with.
Oh sweet summer child.
Though to be fair, HR expansion was triggered by the constitution replacement called the civil rights laws and the associated need to shield against discrimination lawsuits, so there is a real need for that.
I have 5 different HR contacts:
For vacation questions, for overtime regulation, for manual corrections of buggy time accounting software, for general questions and for payslip errors. Forgot new 6th one! For reporting sickness!! They exist and are very real and I must deal with that on daily basis. It’s hard to believe, but that how works big corp.
Yes I’ve been in three now. Running a corporate like a collection of bootstrapped startups with trusted, invested staff and autonomy is the sweet spot.
That dies the moment a large enterprise client makes risk demands. Of course the large enterprise client is a shit show inside almost universally.
I'm still not really seeing how the 4-day-week, at 5 days pay, is delivering the (almost magical) 20%+ productivity boost that its proponents seem to claim it does.
I'm sure almost all people feel better when given the option to work fewer hours for the same money ... I know I would!
How does that translate into increased productivity, though?
Think about it in reverse: imagine that you increased the workweek to six days. Do you think productivity would increase? Now imagine that you increased the workweek to seven days out of the week, giving workers no rest days whatsoever. Would you expect productivity to rise or fall as a result of working people to absolute unending exhaustion?
Since ancient times we have known that there is a tradeoff between days of work and days of rest, which is where the idea of "rest days" came from in the first place. Societies with rest days managed to outcompete societies without rest days, despite the former seeming to produce less on paper. Regardless of whether the optimal ratio is 2:5 or 3:4 or whatever, the general mechanism is not in doubt.
How are we planning on measuring productivity of our hypothetical worker, and what kind of job does she do?
If she's stacking supermarket shelves, or picking and packing in a warehouse, or repairing cars, or caring for the elderly, then I think most people would assume her weekly output is basically some fairly standard "unit output/hour" figure, multiplied by the hours she works in that week.
If she works fewer hours, her output decreases.
If she works more hours (subject to limits, and assuming breaks, weekends, and vacation), her output increases.
Here on HN we don't seem to tend to think about (or hear from) people like her, though...
Parkinson's Law says that you'll get your work completed in the time you're given for it. If you're given more time, the task will take more time. I think there is some truth to this.
But also...people burn out and get unproductive. There will be times in the work week where you just get a lot less done or work slower. If you shorten the time working, you can put more effort into being productive all of the time, because you will have adequate time to rest and recover afterwards. If you don't have the recovery time, then you need to take the week a bit slower so you don't burn out.
A lot of these companies in the trial took Wednesday off. So you can smash out loads of work and be productive for two days straight, and then completely relax for a day, rather than having to spend Tuesday pacing yourself for the whole week.
People realise that their dead time at work is now removed due to the day off so they need to start working smarter. They are more energised, happier, get to do things in their extra day that would otherwise be preying on their minds until the weekend etc.
It also forces you to consider anything that stops you getting your work done quickly enough and have more reason to get rid of it.
Not sure how it works with a Fish and Chip shop but I suspect that even service organisations that need 24/7 cover could make up the shortfall by increased happiness and motivation.
For those of us who have a lot of work to do, I couldn't possibly do it in less days (although I guess I would have to drop stuff) but I guess at worst, I might get less interuptions from staff.
This all relies on self driven people, people who see work as the antagonist in their lives will eventually just settle in to delivering the less than before.
Same as how some people are just as productive WFH and some don’t seem to work at all from home without constant questioning and pushing.
Right company and right team it could work but just a few not on the same page and you’re going to have a lopsided team where resentment will fester from both sides.
>forces you to consider anything that stops you getting your work done quickly enough
Significant percentage of the workforce just doesn’t think this way and never will.
Is this comment an attempt to virtue signal? You realize that 99% of people don't view work in this way right? The standard view is "do as little as possible to avoid getting fired"
Honestly, people keep running trials like this and time and again they have the same results and then no-one does anything. Because, just like the whole WFH thing, these decisions aren’t made by the numbers, but by the personal preferences of employers.
Why would all employers say "I don't want to make more money if it means having to change this one thing"? And if they do, they'd surely be outcompeted by those adopting these policies.
How much waste is incurred from not listening to frontline workers who know about problems/bottleneck and instead enact policy from clueless higher ups, or the proverbial “the beatings will continue until morale improves”, or the “strategic” decisions based on politics/the CEO’s gut feeling…
Just as people are very good at voting against their interests, businesses are very good at enacting (or keeping) policies that go against profitability/retention/efficiency.
But an employee saying "hey boss, we should do this differently" is something different from "here's a bunch of studies that show you save 10% on average if you do it that way". Your employee could be wrong, or their suggestion would only work with them specifically because they're very talented at sliding with their forklift etc.
Unless there's some conspiracy going on, we should see someone change the policy, get significant returns, and either outcompete the others, or at least have a higher profit, which should lead to investors pressuring other CEOs to also adopt the new, better systems. Like Just In Time production did, surely there was some guy who said "no, I prefer to have my year's worth of supplies in my storage on site", but they'd have much higher capital requirements and would be very inflexible for virtually no upside (supply chain breakdowns are rare).
Which is, of course, why a trial of self selecting companies mostly in the knowledge work sector dropping down to 0.8FTE doesn't tell very much about the rest of the world
Lacking the grindset there - my consulting startup offers a 75% increase in productivity, via a 7 day a week schedule at the daily output shown in this trial.
You can trebble that if you dont let the employees sleep or eat as well, for details you would have to sign up for the platinum package.
Unfortunately this is very unlikely to be politically acceptable to the current UK government. The prime minister and various other ministers (e.g. Rees-Mogg) have been publicly opposed to post-pandemic working from home, so I'd expect some pushback on this too. In the end it's up to businesses what they do, but the government can hinder improvements to our lives through their control of the laws and the tax system.
The vast majority of employers in the UK don't need to ask the UK prime minister (and his dark vizier) for permission to make you work 32 hours instead of 40.
I wonder how much people are adjusting their behavior for these trials... if and when it becomes the norm, do the long meetings and less productive practices creep back in?
I think I remember reading a while back that _any_ change to the work environment ends up increasing productivity in the short term, before reverting to historic norms.
Assume 20 productive hours per week (human cpu time) out of a total 40 work week hours (wall time, 9am to 5pm, 5 days a week). Productivity ratio 50%.
Assume 20 productive hours per week (human cpu time) out of a total 32 work week hours (wall time, 9am to 5pm, 4 days a week). Productivity ratio 62.5%.
Simply divide your productivity ratios by each other for a ~20%-25% improvement.
I wonder, if we tack on just an extra 20 productive minutes per day for a total of..
21 productive hours per week (human cpu time) of a further reduced work week of 24 hours (wall time, 9am to 5pm, 3 days a week). Productivity ratio 83.3%.
An additional massive 33% boost over the draconian slavery schedule of the current four-day status quo!
I think I may be on to something.
Further productivity increases are left as an exercise to the reader. Hint: there is a totally logical and clear path to a productivity ratio of 137.5%!
Surely this is a question of supply and demand and if a 4 day workweek is the legally cheap and good path supported by governments in the same way the 5 day workweek is, the competition for salaries will be nearly identical
Stop using environmentalism as a crowbar to get your desires it’s disgusting and devalues the real movement with real issues beyond you wanting to sit in bed till lunch.
Indeed, I've seen fewer meetings, and meetings defaulting to thirty minutes, rather than sixty. I've also seen more async communication -- not once have I received the dreaded lonely "Hello" in Slack. It's of course not all sunshine and lollipops. People aren't always available, so you have to work around or wait. On a personal level, I find I approach each day with more energy and enthusiasm, and I love that I get to spend more time with my family and can (shock!) go out to lunch with my wife during the week while the kids are at school. There seems to be a direct correlation between my improved personal life and an improved professional life.