I’m starting to believe the obfuscation and lack of information regarding “four days but actually working longer” or “four days with reduced hours” models is deliberate.
The “studies” surrounding this topic are laughably bad.
The authors almost always have conflicts of interest. The studies are often funded and/or staffed by proponents of the 4 day work week.
The outcomes are mostly subjective and self reported, which is problematic because employees clearly have a vested interest in claiming they are more productive than they really might be.
They’re also short term, and dont address the doubt every executive has which is whether employees eventually mean revert back to their historical hourly productivity levels.
Then there is the fact that they don’t bother controlling for how much work the employees were previously doing. Many white collar workers are underworked. If you cut their hours it won’t impact output, because they were bottlenecking on work availability not time. What employers want to know is not what happens in over resourced offices, but rather what happens in well managed offices where employee workload was already optimised.
These studies are entirely irrelevant. No one will ever convince any corporation or private owner that they can get more work out of people working less, even if it were true (which I personally highly doubt).
And that is also entirely irrelevant. The relevant question is whether our society can maintain similar levels of good fortune if we all worked less. And the historical evidence is clear: there are many times more workers today, using tools that are monumentally more advanced, than in the 1930s or even 1950s. And yet, we are all required to work just as much as we used to 100+ years ago, while being paid less in real terms.
> The productivity benefits of automation have not led to a 15-hour workweek, as predicted by economist John Maynard Keynes in 1930, but instead to "bullshit jobs": "a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case".
"What employers want to know is not what happens in poorly managed offices, but what happens in well managed offices where employee workload was already optimised."
What I want to know is, whether we can manage a society, where one part is not always overworked and the other part bored to death. But rather a healthy balance. 4 days workweek might help as a step in that direction, but I agree that there is way too much wishful thinking involved in those studies proposing them.
International competition is the interesting thing for me, if we can prove a 4 day week in any form would be similarly efficient, that could give a great incentive to hiring the top talent and convincing them to migrate to the nation's that standardized it.
If it turns out that it's less efficient in the long run, then it would cause the whole nation to fall behind, reducing total comp possible, and leading to the most capable leaving.
Alternatively, international worker solidarity should be the model we work for, as we did with the current 5-day work week. It was neither productivity studies nor economic competitiveness that solidified the 5-day work week, it was workers demanding it under threat of violence and agreeing (or being coerced) not to break strikes even internationally.
Throughout human history, this has always been the only model that has ever brought social progress. Voting for more enlightened leaders sounds nice, but the reality is that massive pressure from working people (in the form of actual strikes and violence) has been the only thing that has actually worked. Not to say that it has always worked: even when the riot is not successfully suppressed , it can be co-opted into bringing in even worse regimes and problems (see Russia, China).
That model worked when people were much more equal in output, before the ambitious could leverage skills and tools to become an order of magnitude more productive than average.
It’ll never work today, because there’s too many people in too many industries who outperform the average worker 10:1.
Collective bargaining is quite unfair to those people and they’ll never accept it.
I very much doubt that is the problem. Lots of people would be happy for their more productive colleagues to get more money, if anyone asked them.
It's much more often managers who don't want to have this type of employee, because they fear for their positions or other similar issues. In particular, this happens via the absurd practice of refusing to give significant raises year to year, forcing the best workers to leave for a new company, taking all of their hard earned organizational knowledge.
Not to mention, I'm not talking about collective bargaining for salaries. This is about an economy-level change, not a company level or even industry level change. And it would benefit the best workers just as much as the worst.
In France in 1851, a new law limited child labour to 10 hours per day between 8 and 14 years old. Then max 12hrs until 16 (Then you are conscripted at 18).
Maybe people can't produce more than 4 days of work per week or 5 hours per day; in that case the productivity would be the same and people working more are essentially wasting time.
My empirical evidence say otherwise (sample_size=1) I can be quite productive up to ~70hrs doing knowledge work (I've been on it for 8 months, hours are tracked and connected to tasks, no idling is counted), but that's pushing it and it might not be sustainable for longer period of time. My will to live is certainly at historical lows.
Lawyers in big law can also do 60-80 hours (while ruining their life) so I think it's reasonable.
I've heard people in other professions (eg. nurses) pushing 90-100hrs but they are not actively thinking all their working time.
It invalidates their point because what’s stopping you from saying say “you can be outcompeted by someone willing to work 168 hours a week.”
it’s not diminishing positive returns. Eventually you work so much the returns go negative.
According to you it doesn’t matter if on the 49th consecutive hour the worker is basically dead and unable to come into work the next week. Overwork leads to loss of productivity and possible negative outcomes for the business if mistakes happen because of exhaustion.
In the real world there is probably some equilibrium for maximizing productivity vs hours work vs supply of workers capable of working those hours to that quality consistently.
Actually, that isn't true. The marginal output of working more than about 40 hours per week turns negative after about 4 weeks of doing so. There's plenty of research on this.
That doesn’t consider the greater picture and all the costs.
If the harder worker becomes dissatisfied sooner and leaves the position sooner than the worker putting in fewer hours, that increased employee turnover will result in lower company productivity and higher overhead.
If 4-day workers are 25% more productive than 5-day workers, or 5-day workers are 20% less productive than 4-day workers, then no.
While it's hard to increase productivity by 25%, it's not a problem for workers to drop productivity by 20%. Owners can work as much as they want, of course.
Do these companies close on a week day, like they just don’t open on a Monday. Or do the staff just do 4 out of the 5 days, but the company operates all week and the team need coordinating so they have coverage all week? I’d love to do this at my place, but would want to close the whole business and I don’t think our clients would be happy.
My company works 24/7. I don’t. Nobody does. Vast majority work “office hours”. Those working shifts tend to do 3 or 4x 12 hour days, those working flexible hours work when required. I might work on a Saturday morning to deliver a specific part of a project, or get a fault escalated at 11pm after the runbooks have run out, but then I will obviously be off for a day or two in the week in exchange.
The company I work for, Wonde, allows staff to choose the day. There's negotiation with the manager to ensure appropriate coverage across the week, and a fair bit of flexibility around swapping days around as and when necessary too.
I am co-founder of a 5 year old tech startup with 50 staff that introduced a 4dww / 32hr work week a little over 2 years ago.
Since are a lot of questions surrounding 4dww - Thought I might be able to offer some insights.
1. “four days but actually working longer” or “four days with reduced hours”.
-- We offer 32hrs work week, rather than the standard 40hrs in our home country. This is generally taken as 4 days, but some work 5 days with less ours (especially those with school aged children).
2. "What employers want to know is not what happens in poorly managed offices, but what happens in well managed offices where employee workload was already optimised."
-- I am going to be biased but we spent 3 year with standard work week, and I think we were highly productive as an organisation, our internal metrics, output and surveys agreed with this assessment. After 2 years, we haven't seen any noticeable / measurable decrease in output or performance compared to 5dww, or since we started.
3. "Do these companies close on a week day, like they just don’t open on a Monday."
-- We generally allow people to choose any day off they want, put have them put it in ~4 weeks before hand. Most people take either Monday or Friday, which means we always have some staff covering the days others have off. In smaller teams that speak with customers (sales/cs) they agree among the team who takes what days, and can trade, as long as we always have coverage.
4. "4 days week sounds great, if you hate your job and you already earn less than you deserve."
-- We pay top percentile as other startup/tech companies in our country's HQ. Anyone joining us shouldn't feel they are being paid any less than someone on 5dww -- and that is because we expect their output to match those of others working 5dww.
Overall we've found the move to be extremely successful at attracting and retaining talent with I believe helps us be significantly more productive than other startups I know doing 5dww.
We have a few things that I think help with our 4dww, include remote async with very flexible hours, hiring worldwide, transparent salaries and virtually no meetings in engineering.
One thing this flexibility allows us to do is ask our staff to be 'switched on' when they are working -- if for any reason they aren't being productive, we encourage them stop working, do something else, and come back later. We expect our staff aren't reading reddit, posting on hacker news, etc during work-time -- in return for the 32hrs we want to see it (almost) all productive.
I believe this, along with staff dropped the least important work gives us a similar/same output as 40hrs. With the benefit that we've been able to attract talent that otherwise may have gone elsewhere, with a turnover of virtually 0%.
Happy to answer any specifics about how we've implemented thing, or what I've seen as a co-founder leading a small (16 people) engineering team.
Retaining those 2-10x engineers because they can’t even imagine leaving your company gives you far higher productivity gains than 1 extra work day a week.
It's worked well with pretty role. However, for our Customer Success / Support team hours = hours out is more true than other roles. So for these roles its more about being able to attract people who are really good at their roles.
We don't track hours at all -- staff are expected to track their own hours and keep them to 32hrs. Occasionally something happens and people work longer hours in a week, however we then give them time off the following week.
Just like remote work, this turns into a culture war issue every time (and the comments turn into a cesspit). I really wish people would stop arguing and let the market show us what's actually more effective.
The market is strongly influenced by the culture though. For example nothing now is actually different to before covid. The only thing that has changed is the culture - people like working from home and are less willing to give it up.
Working hours is simply a negotiation between employers (who obviously want more hours for the same price), and workers (who want the opposite). Again culture has a large influence on that - it's very difficult to persuade people to work 6 days a week (in the West) because culturally we no longer do that.
You can't ignore culture and just say "let the market decide" because culture is part of the market.
Sure, but the point I'm making is that figuring out whether this stuff works is easy - you let companies decide, you let them fairly pay employees, and you see which companies turn out on top.
> "let the market show us what's actually more effective"
I am not sure what are the mechanisms for that. Would that simply be what maximizes short term profits?
It sort of sounds like a suggestion to remove all restrictions on the work week so that the free market can choose the winning system.
Why not decide instead to take a more human approach where people can work productively and still have enough workless time to rest and be healthy and also have time and energy for hobbies, family, exercise, etc.?
It wasn't clear as to whether this also included companies that allow you to work 'compressed hours' - ie a normal 37.5 hour week but in 4 days (start earlier, finish later), which is increasingly common.
Just give me five days of remote work—that’s all I ask. My job doesn’t require me to add to the traffic, yet there are middle managers rallying for RTO to maintain their relevance.
Unless your strictly monitored, 5 day work from home can become work when you feel like but respond quickly during office hours as long as you get things done, which is fine by me and my employer as long as the get things done and respond during office hours actually happens
Since 2003, my companies have always been structured to support a 5-day, 30-hour workweek, and most employees follow this model. I was fortunate to implement this approach long before it became a widely discussed topic. The reasoning was straightforward: many employees were also studying, and the complexity, and intense focus of our work, such as reverse engineering, made adding two extra artificial hours unnecessary. However, shifting to a four-day workweek would be challenging in our context due to synchronization issues.
That said, some employees do work full-time, particularly those in operations and other roles that require broader availability to communicate with external parties. There are also situations where someone needs to stay longer to complete a critical task, these exceptions are inevitable, but having clear guidelines helps ensure they remain just that: exceptions.
A related challenge, as highlighted by @rsavage, is the use of social media during work hours, especially in a remote setting. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to fully control, but what matters is cultivating a company culture that balances flexibility with accountability. The key is staying aware and making adjustments before things get out of hand.
Personally, I think some of the reality is that in a dual income household if both individuals work full time there's limited time to do life admin and some life admin can only be done during business hours. So in aggregate, many companies aren't getting 5 full days of work from their employees. Sure when you're in your twenties it's easy to give 6.5 days a week. But when you're two working parents with no help? Good luck getting 10 days of work consistently out of that family. I think parents in a 4 day work week probably have better focus because they know they have one day ring fenced for catching up on non-work things (when the weekend then becomes full time parenting)
It always amazes me that, for example, shops are open when everyone is at work.
In my town, the shopping high street closes at 5pm. So when I finished work, I'd be back in my town at 6pm, where everything is dead. The only way to do any shopping is to drive to a supermarket that’s open until 10pm or shop online.
It's like everything is catered to people who don't work.
One of the complaints I hear about Italy is the shops aren't open all day in smaller towns. But, they are open in the morning and in the evening. Exactly the time you want them to be open. Until you internalize this clock it can sometimes be annoying, but makes a lot of sense.
I'm personally indifferent to 4-day working week. If that works for people, and if that improves their lives, I'm here to root for you. What I root for even strongly, is for WFH to be written into law: what can be done from home, MUST be done from home. Treat people like adults. Office work for the sake of office work -- fuck that.
Most, including the company I work for, operate on a 100/100/80 model: 100% pay for 100% performance/output in 80% of the time. This means that, for example, meetings are generally short, on time, and straight into the topic. For me personally, and from what I've heard from colleagues, you get more done when you don't have the same mid-week or end-of-week slump.
Proponents pretend like 4 day work weeks don’t reduce output with all sorts of dubious motivated reasoning.
A lot of it is “we can be more efficient” and therefore we don’t need to work as many hours, overlooking the obvious fact that if everyone can be 20% more efficient then logical thing to do is downside headcount by 20%, not keep 100% of the workforce at 80% of capacity.
It takes so long for a woman to go through the gestation period before giving birth. But when you get 9 women you can get 9 babies in the same period. But it still takes 9 months. I think the women just aren't working at full capacity for those 9 months. It should be possible to just get the 9 women to produce 1 baby in 1/9th of the period.
The person I replied to made it sound like there's a magic switch you can press to make your workforce operate at 125% efficiency after getting rid of 20% of it and that it's idiotic to reduce the working week from 5 to 4 days.
I thought this was so absurd of a statement that I re-stated the 9 women cannot make a baby in 1 month saying to jokingly point out that it's just not how these things work.
... Except the obvious argument for a 4 day week is that in a knowledge economy, downtime is more critical to meaningful work. People like Tolkien don't just write 9-5, there's no reason consultants or programmers should work that way, it just doesn't scale.
Knowledge work does require time where you are mulling over the problem, rather than executing, but that isn’t downtime. Reducing working hours, in most cases, will reduce time spent doing both those tasks.
If Tolkien took an additional day off each week, it absolutely would have increased the time taken to complete his works.
... are you not at all more productive the week right after a holiday than when you've been crunching for 5 months straight with no time off? Because I bloody know I am. Knowledge work really can't just be conveniently bundled into units of productive vs unproductive time like making widgets.
There’s no quality evidence that reducing hours worked below 40 hours increases productivity per hour.
All research done to date shows that productivity per hour is flat until about 60 hours or even higher for low skill work.
What you’re doing is called motivated reasoning. You want to believe that you can work less and still get the same amount done, so you cling to whatever nebulous explanation you can find to support it.
The reality is that you work less hours, you get less done.
Speaking as a worker this seems like a positive move.
Stepping outside that though - how is this going to impact the wider economy? The UK is in a tough spot. Partially self-inflicted, partially political, partially just the way things are now.
Personally, I don’t see how it helps in their current political climate. Inflation and energy costs are a huge problem in the UK right now and that would lead to the assumption that people need to earn more. Going to a 4 day work week seems counter to the idea of earning more. Perhaps at the very high end (corporate management, etc) where companies can afford keep salaries the same without expecting more output, but at the low end of the workforce, there’s no way in hell that employers will pay employees for “unworked” days.
So some people might have an extra day off, but if they can’t pay their rent, it doesn’t really help anything. Those workers will pick up a 3rd or 4th job and nothing will change.
Unfortunate, but I think the UK has still a ways to sink before it comes to grips with the current reality and starts to climb out of it.
There is also aspect of having 1 extra day and no money to do anything meaningful with it.
UK wages are already poor and cost of living is insane.
Are you going to spend that day in your sorry mould ridden flat with other housemates also skint with nothing else to do?
Where do you even go? Shops are dead, public transport is unaffordable and state of it resembles soviet union near its collapse, entertainment, attractions out of reach. Sure there are some free things, but how many times you will go there before it is boring?
So I don't know, 4 days at main employer and 1 day doing Deliveroo? Selling weed? Only Fans?
"doing ok" or "barely keeping head above water". Is not a good look, when you have people doing demanding engineering jobs that require skill and years of education, that they have to keep themselves up to date learning past 9-5. I know married senior developer with two kids, 20 years of experience, still saving for deposit for a flat (as house is now out of reach). Rents are going up and so the property prices so they can't catch up. His wife can't work full time, because of children and nursery etc is unaffordable. They have not been on holidays since Covid and employer is talking about downsizing. Man is 40 and looks like 50 due to stress.
I know a couple of developers who are single, yes they do "okay", but they are nowhere near in a position to start a family. It's grim.
Then you have wage compression where really doing warehouse job doesn't get you much worse living standard than typical developer. You will have shittier flat, maybe extra housemate and you will shop in Aldi instead of Waitrose. That's very much the difference right now.
> how is this going to impact the wider economy? The UK is in a tough spot. Partially self-inflicted
Well, take example from France, if you ever do. In 1936, the glorious Leon Blum signed the first national paid leave of the world (Congés Payés). We have literal photos of us going to the beach by train in 1936.
Meanwhile the Germans were working in factories for countless hours building bombs. Congés Payés cost us an alarming defeat. What a chance we were at the beach before those hard times.
(I confirm this comment is a tribute to all the English and US youths who had to save us from our sins).
I guess companies were you already worked 30 hours (6 hours per day of effective work as in many "mental work" jobs). I'm not from UK, are any manufacturing companies on the list?
They're either unrecognisable (so quite small), or where they are recognisable they seem to be charities or CIC (community interest companies). That latter group of companies are structured so that profit is not the raison d'être of the organisation, so work/life balance is likely to be considered a higher priority than squeezing every last bit of utility out of an exhausted workforce.
Well Keir Starmer famously said he would only work until 6pm on a Friday and the opposition were all over it accusing him of being a part time PM.
The govt doing this would be political suicide, especially in the UK. Although we may see it as progressive, political opposition would absolutely leap on it
4 days week sounds great, if you hate your job and you already earn less than you deserve. If you feel like you are underpaid, 4 days for the same money may actually sound like a win, until after a while you realise you are still underpaid and extra day is probably not enough to do proper moonlighting.
Depend of work, 3 days break often means a lot of effort to catch up and refresh memory on Monday, that could lead to staying late anyways and probably create false economy.
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