SoylentNews

upstart writes:

Kill the 5-Day Workweek:

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.

Original Submission

[...] 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."