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The 89 people who work at Buffer, a company that makes social-media management tools, are used to having an unconventional employer. Everyone's salary, including the CEO's, is public. All employees work remotely; their only office closed down six years ago. And as a perk, Buffer pays for any books employees want to buy for themselves.
So perhaps it is unsurprising that last year, when the pandemic obliterated countless workers' work-life balance and mental health, Buffer responded in a way that few other companies did: It gave employees an extra day off each week, without reducing pay—an experiment that's still running a year later. "It has been such a godsend," Essence Muhammad, a customer-support agent at Buffer, told me.
Miraculously—or predictably, if you ask proponents of the four-day workweek—the company seemed to be getting the same amount of work done in less time. It had scaled back on meetings and social events, and employees increased the pace of their day. Nicole Miller, who works in human resources at Buffer, also cited "the principle of work expanding to the time you give it": When we have 40 hours of work a week, we find ways to work for 40 hours. Buffer might never go back to a five-day week.
[...] In 2018, Andrew Barnes approached the employees of his company, a New Zealand firm called Perpetual Guardian that manages wills, estates, and trusts, with an offer: If they could figure out how to get more done in a day, they could work one fewer day per week. In consultation with employees, the company installed lockers in which workers can voluntarily stash their phones for the day, and soundproofed meeting spaces to reduce the sound of ambient chatter. Meetings were shortened; employees started putting little flags in their pencil holders whenever they wanted to signal to coworkers that they didn't want to be disturbed. It worked: Perpetual Guardian's business didn't suffer, and the four-day workweek is still in place three years later.
[...] Natalie Nagele, the CEO of Wildbit, a small software company, introduced a four-day, 32-hour week in 2017, after reading about research indicating that the optimal amount of intense cognitive work is no more than four hours a day. (The four-day schedule even applies to Wildbit's customer-support team; their days off are staggered so they can respond to inquiries all week.) "I have this dream that knowledge workers can get to a point where we can clearly define what enough means," Nagele told me. "We don't do a good job of saying, 'This is done,' or 'I can put it away.'" She wonders if Wildbit's next schedule could be four six-hour days.
[...] Not all business leaders favored the change. "Any man demanding the forty hour week should be ashamed to claim citizenship in this great country," the chairman of the board of the Philadelphia Gear Works wrote shortly after Ford rolled out its new hours. "The men of our country are becoming a race of softies and mollycoddles." Less aggressive but just as resistant, the president of the National Association of Manufacturers, a trade group, wrote, "I am for everything that will make work happier but against everything that will further subordinate its importance."
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 22 2021, @08:10PM (9 children)
Ridiculous, and already proven wrong since they are open an extra day already and haven't taken all the business.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 22 2021, @11:02PM (8 children)
They have taken quite a lot of business however, like textiles and memory boards. I think it likely that another productivity killing move will mean more business for them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 22 2021, @11:21PM (2 children)
Have you ever worked with an Asian outsourcer? Price is their strong point, not productivity, timeliness, or quality.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 22 2021, @11:49PM (1 child)
At present. I notice also the talk of a shorter work week has even less strong points than that.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday June 23 2021, @09:37AM
I've read several studies that show for 'knowledge worker' tasks productivity peaks at 20 hours a week, plateaus until 40, and then net productivity drops off. They weren't able to measure a difference in net productivity between folks working 20 hours a week and folks working 40 hours a week. They were able to measure a difference between people working 40 hours a week and folks working 60 hours: the latter were a lot less productive.
This difference is really obvious for people who are programming. It takes two seconds of tired inattention to introduce a bug and a week to find and fix it. I worked with someone who was working 100 hours a week a little while ago: his net productivity was negative, he made mistakes that took two other people their full time to fix.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 22 2021, @11:32PM (4 children)
~g~d~a~m~n~u~s~t~u~p~i~d~
#1D-chess
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 22 2021, @11:50PM (3 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 23 2021, @08:53AM (1 child)
You hear about that mine that managed to optimize so efficiently that all the labor was done by one Aussie badass?
(Score: 0, Redundant) by khallow on Wednesday June 23 2021, @10:19AM
Here's my take. Say you have a small mine that takes 10 workers to operate at 40 hours a week. There's all kinds of overhead to employing people in a mine: personal gear, training, getting them up to speed at the beginning of a shift, paperwork and regulatory testing, etc. So let's say conservatively that 4 hours a week is consumed just keeping up with that. So you're effectively getting 36 hours of a week of productive work out of those miners. Now cut their work hours to 32 hours a week. You still pay that 4 hours a week in overhead so you're now getting 28 hours a week in productive work. That means you need 13 miners to do the work. So your payroll went from 40*10=400 hours a week in pay to 13*32=416 hours a week. You just increased the cost of your workers by 4% without getting a bit of extra work out of them.
This is the problem with shortening an already short work week for most jobs. Sure, there are a few intellectually demanding jobs where dropping the number of hours worked from 40 to 32 will significantly improve productivity. Mining isn't one of them. It's a straight productivity loss for the mine.
Now consider the worker's point of view. They have to maintain a place to live, transportation, their own personal work gear, etc. And now, they're missing 8 hours of work a week to pay for that. It's less productive for them too.
Finally, for society, we're getting 20% less work out of most of the population (unless they pick up a second job). The three extra people employed in the mine could have gainfully employed elsewhere.
What really is the benefit here? It's just a typical moocher logic - if we force everyone to slack off and cut the supply of labor, then the real slackers will get better pay and be able to hide easier in the herd. Pretending to work for 32 hours is easier than pretending to work for 40 hours a week. But who's doing the work when you reduced your society's work capacity by a fifth?
So here's the problem as I see it. A shorter workweek is a net loss for everyone. It introduces collective inefficiencies for no gain. If you don't want to work 40 hours a week, just get a part time job and work less. Don't take the rest of us down.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 23 2021, @12:36PM
> losing at 1-d chess.
Isn't that true of essentially everything? It "loses" until it wins. (Unless you're a Trump support in which case you don't lose, you just get tired of winning).