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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday August 12 2020, @04:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the 4-tens? dept.

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)


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 13 2020, @12:15AM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday August 13 2020, @12:15AM (#1035883)

    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.

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