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It's time to implement a 4-day workweek
In May, Andrew Yang, the entrepreneur and former Democratic presidential candidate, floated the idea of implementing a four-day workweek to better accommodate working Americans in a time of uncertainty, saying a shorter workweek could have mental-health benefits for employees.
There's not one overarching definition of a four-day workweek. "There are different models for the shortened week, some of which envision the same output condensed into fewer hours while others simply imagine longer hours spread over fewer days," a Washington Post report said.
Some involve a three-day weekend, while others mean a day off midweek.
[...] "It would help get us off of this hamster wheel that we're on right now, where we're all sort of racing against the clock in service of this giant capital-efficiency machine," Yang said. "And the race is driving us all crazy."
In a Harris poll conducted in late May, 82% of employed US respondents said they would prefer to have a shorter workweek, even if it meant longer workdays.
The idea of a shorter workweek has become so popular in Finland that Prime Minister Sanna Marin has called for employers to allow employees to work only six hours a day, four days a week. In New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern proposed the policy as part of a coronavirus economic recovery effort.
Andrew Barnes, the CEO of Perpetual Guardian, introduced a four-day workweek at his company in New Zealand in 2018.
Barnes, a cofounder of the nonprofit platform 4 Day Week Global and the author of "The 4 Day Week," said he found that "stress levels drop, creativity goes up, team cohesion goes up" under such a policy.[...] Microsoft experimented with a four-day workweek last year at a subsidiary in Japan as part of its "Work-Life Choice Challenge." The subsidiary closed every Friday in August and said it saw productivity jump by 40% compared with the previous year.
I'm somehow attracted to the idea, be it only for the reason the weekends are the most productive time for me, with no meeting interruptions (large grin)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday August 12 2020, @05:29PM (15 children)
In the agricultural and industrial sectors, where the primary work activity is manual labor that produces goods and services, there's a direct relationship between the hours of labor worked and how much stuff you get out of each worker. In the commercial and scientific sectors, that relationship doesn't exist and never has.
Why were white-collar employees kept cooped up in offices for at least 40 hours a week prior to Covid? Because the bosses were hanging onto a completely incorrect model of how work actually gets done. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if having everyone working from home and completely slacking off 10-20 hours per week they're supposed to be working has had approximately zero effects on company productivity.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday August 12 2020, @06:09PM (8 children)
Better for them to be slacking off at home, getting something else productive done during those 10-20 hours instead of just hiding in an office, or worse distracting other people from getting their work done in an office "social" setting.
The danger is losing the thread altogether, white collar workers can't usually do productive work 40+ hours per week, but they do still need to stay engaged enough to do whatever it is they do for the organization, and being completely disengaged will eventually start to reduce their value to the organization.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday August 12 2020, @07:24PM (5 children)
What if "whatever it is they do for the organization" is "nothing useful"? My experience is that lots of organization would not be harmed and might actually be improved if someone with a title like "Long-Range Strategic Planning Coordinator" was basically unreachable for weeks at a time. In the book "The Peter Principle", Peter told a possibly untrue but fantastic story about how a company was able to improve their productivity dramatically by building a Head Office far away from any of their R&D and production facilities and sales team, and promoting all the useless people to the Head Office to keep them busy with meetings and memos and office politics while those who were doing the work were now able to do that work without being bothered so much.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday August 12 2020, @07:47PM (4 children)
In practice, not too many people have these kinds of titles. Most "value" built in corporations has some correlation with relationships, familiarity, knowing the same jargon, how each other thinks and works, and while this can be theoretically trained from documents in practice it comes from practice interacting with the people. This is true in spades for sales - widgets don't sell themselves, sales (above the WalMart level) works by making personal contacts and influencing people to buy product. Even at the K-Mart / WalMart level, sales happens by getting product in people's faces, making them walk stuff they don't need on the way to stuff they do need.
We've got a remote guy who I speak with about once a month on average, that's enough for us to stay on the same wavelength and skip a lot of noise when we do engage to exchange info. Right now I'm between calls with a corporate drone I never met before, and it's going to take me at least 90 minutes to get what should have been 30 minutes of valuable interaction out of him, mostly because of the "newness" of both of our concepts we're trying to communicate.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday August 12 2020, @08:05PM (3 children)
My experience, on the other hand, is that once the organization is large enough and successful enough that there's no real risk of the whole thing going under, management starts seeing winning internal conflicts as an easier path to raises and perks than doing whatever the organization as a whole is supposed to do. And part of an executive fighting those internal conflicts is accumulating teams of people loyal to them personally whose real job, regardless of their official reporting chain and job title, is to back their patron in those internal battles, e.g. coming up with documents that nobody will actually read in full that invariably conclude that their patron should get a higher budget and more staff, or piping up in meetings to support their patron's plan. And those are precisely the people you want to keep away from those who are busy keeping the organization running.
All this is largely to disguise the fact that once you get a couple steps above the ranks of the people that directly produce or sell things, basically everybody is in over their heads and doesn't have the slightest clue what they're doing.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday August 12 2020, @09:00PM (2 children)
In spades... In academia I was convinced that those who could not do, taught. My first job out of academia was a small shop - 30 employees max, usually more like 10, for 12 years - what people did or didn't do around there mattered, although the man who hired me was a bit worse than dead weight: playing the games of active undermining, etc. that you describe - by year 6 I had his title, by year 8 he was gone.
Next job was with a ~1000 person company, and the V.P. level there seemed first and foremost (and very transparently) concerned with "looking busy" like they earned their $800K/yr compensations - after busy, they tried to feign competence, but most of them were hopeless at that and just fell back on appearing to be so incredibly busy, their time in such high demand, that of course they don't have time to discuss anything of substance "more than 3mm deep" as I recently heard a manager refer to it.
Some of them do have a little clue, the most clueful I have met are the ones who acknowledge their absolute lack of control or depth of understanding and simply try to guide the big picture as effectively as possible. Steve Jobs pulled off a pretty good speech once wherein he acknowledged ignorance of many details within Apple.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday August 12 2020, @11:50PM (1 child)
I work for a company that employs something like 75,000 people worldwide (I think).
Every now and again we get a visit from some Vice-President or other top level VIP, and I have noticed a few things they have in common:
They all have some title which does not seem to describe an actual job.
They are all good-looking. All of them. Especially the women. I don't think that is a coincidence.
None of them last more than 6 months or so in whatever their job is.
I don't have a problem with it though. If the fabulously profitable company wants to give money to people who are dead wood, then good luck to them. The dead wood are just going to spend some of that money anyway and then a useful person can make use of it.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 13 2020, @12:15AM
My company grew from 40K to 100K employees via acquisition a few months before I also joined via acquisition.
Our CEO when I started was reasonably level headed, didn't do anything to upset the apple cart, tried to push for good things while protecting the all important growth numbers. A new VP was hired about a year after me, he came an toured our little 1.5K employee backwater and delivered a speech he had prepared for the other 25K people under his purview - it had nothing to do with us, except that we are a distinct division under the same corporate umbrella as the one he was talking about.
Said VP is our CEO now, and he seems to have learned a bit - while he oversaw a successful turnaround of those other 25K employees out of their troubles, he openly admitted that he had little or no clue how things worked in our industry while doing so - he was learning the ropes on the job. But he gives a good speech, and people can sort of relate to him - like Bill Clinton or George Bush, they're brighter than they appear to be when on camera "talking to the masses."
Now, I worked for another CEO who thought he could give a good speech, but really was just a bipolar psychopath who was born into LOTS of money, and the company effectively borrowed that money from him for a bit and put up with him as CEO until we had paid him back with interest and he got bored. He actively made things worse than they could have been, but without his (or, rather his daddy's) money, or somebody else's money, that place would have been stuck growing VERY slowly for a VERY long time.
It's a different skillset, and some of the "skills" you have to be born into rather than learn, skills like: powerful contacts, access to large sums of money, etc.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @10:20PM (1 child)
You can't, it upsets the number of billable hours in the project. Why would you want to invoice the customer for less worked hours?
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday August 12 2020, @11:26PM
But the company achieves exactly the same goal by having the employee in question work 20 hours and charge for 35 hours, right?
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @08:19PM
I was going to post something along these lines.
Especially that this would effect different jobs very differently. Some of them, part of what you're paying for is simply having a warm body handy just in case. A lot of service jobs default to this when things aren't busy, but you still need every hour covered. And given the huge overhead of hiring one additional person, no business that needs a lot of hours-fillers will ever go for this proposal, and no amount of productivity increase will do anything about that bar full automation. Manual labor is in a similar situation for the reasons you gave.
Lots of rote salaried office jobs could handle the reduced work week without issue, and probably without changing staffing. Only hit will be to some of the middle management's egos.
Salaried creative work is never going to touch this. There are superstar coders, and of course plenty of superstars in the entertainment industry, but those are hardly the only ones with some people who are huge outliers on whatever the relevant scale is. Those people will continue to do what they do, and most of them give no shits about hours as it stands now. They'll work what they need to, and that goes in both directions. I've known great coders that have pretty much checked out of the promotion train who'll do their work in a short burst and then bugger off (even pre-COVID) and won't get in trouble for it, and ones that work pretty much every waking hour (although that latter was at a startup).
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Wednesday August 12 2020, @10:07PM (1 child)
Because farmers still use wooden plows dragged by oxen, and millions of blacksmiths spend their days hand forging iron structural parts. Tractors and harvesters and pesticides and chemical fertilizers, blast furnaces and laser cutters are mere figments of the imagination.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday August 12 2020, @11:23PM
If a farmer drives their modern tractor for 20 hours, they get approximately half as much done as if they had driven that same tractor 40 hours (provided, of course, that there's enough land being cultivated to have 40 hours worth of tractor-driving to do). Ditto for modern industrial equipment: If you have a guy running the robots for 20 hours, he's getting approximately half as much done as a guy running the robots for 40 hours.
That formula stops being true when you're talking about things like marketing artwork, because your artists will get burnt out.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @06:23AM (2 children)
Managers are like babies: If they can't see it, it doesn't exist; they demand all your attention; they whine when you don't do what they want; and they expect you to clean up all the shit they create.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday August 13 2020, @01:25PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @03:50AM
I'm replying to one of them! Though to be fair you're probably closer to CEO sociopath level.