Except most executive level people are too short sighted for that to work in practice.
Lead in paint, pipes, and gas was killing people. Asbestos was killing people. And law makers had to be pushed into writing legislation because the companies making these products were more concerned about the next quarter than the next generation.
They won't do it because a workforce that has enough time off also has enough time to think about labor laws.
American capitalism relies on unhappy workers who don't have the time and energy to revolt.
Actually the tech company I work for was recently asked whether they would implement the 4 day work week and leadership replied that if they were to implement this, then workers would be expected back in the office for those 4 days (we are currently fully remote). I prefer 5 days of working remote to 4 days of being in the office so I would take that trade off any day!
But, you realize that if you can do 5 days remote, you can do 4 remote. One less day doesn’t necessitate all the others being in office, your employers are just being dicks.
True I realise that they may be making excuses to avoid giving us a 4 day work week, but in this economy where companies are mandating RTO even after hiring fully remote worker, I’m grateful that my company is staying fully remote and a 4 day work week is not high up on my priority list as compared to staying remote.
That is a bullshit trade-off though. If you can already handle 5 days a week remotely, then there's no reason why you couldn't handle 4 days. Your management simply didn't want to give you 4 day work weeks, because very few would accept that shitty deal.
It only works in certain industries and with knowledge workers. An extra day of might help you code faster but it won’t help you build a wall any faster.
Yes it will… 4 day work week with people on alternating schedules? Fresh people ready to rock out some physical labor are going to build faster and make less mistakes. This applies to pretty much everything
I really don’t think it works like that with physical labour, I don’t think the workers can safely move 25% faster.
There are also plenty of jobs that are reactive and just need someone to be there at all times. Think about a security guard or emergency worker, even a cashiers. These type of jobs can’t have a total workload that can be done faster, they just need someone to be available during certain hours.
You haven’t done much physical labor if you don’t think there’s that much different between someone rested and ready and someone overworked and run ragged. The rested guys don’t magically work faster, but the tired guys absolutely do move slower.
We need to change the 7-day week while we're at it. 7 days is just stupid for a 365 day planet. The work week is balanced around the 7-day week.
Why not 5 or 6 day weeks with a 5-day end of year holiday?
5 days gives 73 weeks, or 72 weeks of 12 6-week months and one 5-day holiday.
6 days gives 60 weeks of 12 5-week months and one 5-day holiday.
Leap year, only the holiday length changes.
Then we can have a work week of 3 days on 2 days off for 5-day weeks or 4 days on 2 days off for 6-day weeks.
A five day working span among seven days always leads to exhaustion by the end of the work week. Energy levels are shot by Wednesday or Thursday. Everyone is phoning it in on Friday. Saturday you don't want to do anything but recharge from the week. Sunday has the feeling of "well fuck, tomorrow is work day." There's never any rest because of the length of the week. Mondays, people are just annoyed to be back at work. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are really the only productive days.
13 months of 4 weeks of 7 days = 364 days. +1 day international holiday for new year and we're at 365, make new year's a 2-day event for leap years.
Best of all? It involves disliked numbers for more than one culture. 13 is considered unlucky in much of the Anglosphere, 4 is a homophone/near-homophone with death in Japanese, Korean and multiple Chinese languages.
This is purely anecdotal but 100% WFH has stayed at my company. It’s set up where if you want to go in the office you can but you always have the option to WFH anywhere you want. There are maybe two days a month where it’s recommended to go in and most people in the area do but it still isn’t a requirement. My manager is in a whole separate state from me.
I know of a fair few other jobs like this, so while many may have gone back to the old way, COVID definitely had some sort of a positive lasting impact on a portion of the workforce. At the very least, the idea is no longer deemed crazy or “impossible”.
My old office isn’t even owned by my employer anymore. We have a new flex office with like 10 desks for people who need to do stuff on site from time to time, but my department has over 100 employees so they couldn’t mandate on-site hours if they wanted to anymore. A couple of those desks are basically occupied full-time play people who didn’t like working from home.
Same here, I heard from my coworkers that my company was in person before covid, I joined after covid hit and it’s been fully remote since then. I’ve not even seen my office building yet!
I chuckled when I read that line too. I mean, I’m hopeful that any meaningful change will happen, but it won’t. Workers need to focus on higher wages and lower income gaps. We can fight for a 4 day week after that. We have a large population that work full time and still need government assistance, looking at you Walmart, Amazon, McDonald’s etc.
Depends on the industry…
I work in tech and WFH is now the norm. I actually don’t know anyone who works in tech that doesn’t WFH most of the time.
My last company absolutely did not allow WFH pre-pandemic and now Hybrid working with only 2 days in the office is standard across the company, with many teams allowing more days at home.
I wouldn’t even entertain a job offer that wasn’t Hybrid working.
I get why some industries aren’t though. Not like you can make a Big Mac remotely…
100% WFH is here to stay.
That phrase doesn't mean it will be done by every company, all the time, forever. It was never like that even in the earliest pandemic days, some jobs simply have to be done in person.
But we're never creeping back to the rate of in-office work from before, there's a new balance.
I love how every response to this is like "well MY company still does WFH so you're wrong" but not a single person said "well MY state still has child labor laws". It's as if everyone got the point but wanted to argue anyway.
Pity the company I work for is gaslighting it's staff into thinking 9-5 with no compressed hours and being in the office 2 days a week is beneficial to us.
But then still promotes itself as being one of the most flexable employers.
But think about all that office culture you will be missing! Like Mark from accounting standing at the coffee machine all day bitching about Susan from communication not doing anything! Don't you see what you're missing out on?! Don't you miss Mark from accounting?? Don't you want to bitch about Susan?? Don't you want to smell Rick from IT as he unplugs you PC because it's frozen again?? Beter come into office! Better sit in traffic for hours!! Don't you miss it? I sure miss micro managing every little thing about every little thing. Come on down to down town office culture! When you're here you're family!
Don't forget student loans! He's got lots invested in that bank that treats loans as a security, because after all, if someone is paying interest for life and only seeing their balance go up it's basically just free money.
I dont see that element most executives dont have commercial real estate side gig.
I see various other stuff.
People that hate home
People that cant perform
People that exist to socially climb
People that want to watch/make the world burn.
Micro souls that NEED Lordship.
No where treats you better than where your the boss. Better a king of small country than a general an Empire.
At home your Bosses are mostly the same sorry sacks you are. Laundry over due. Someone like a life partner that is sick of your shit. Long term relationships:-)
They run away from stuff or towards other things.
There's also a pretty good chunk of people who actually enjoy working in the office because they like the flow better
For some things, it is just straight up easier and quicker for all parties involved to have a 90 second face-to-face conversation instead of several back-and-forth emails dragged out across the course of the day.
Note I said "open door", for those who will immediately lambast me as "one of the bad guys", characterizing me as the person in their office who has no concept of other peoples time. The decision to have an in person, face-to-face conversation should be one that considers saving time and effort for both parties, not just one.
Zoom and MS Teams exist, as so webcams.
I’m not saying they are as good as an in person meeting but this is the problem, assuming issues have to be solved via email, shows more modern tools have not been adopted in your workplace.
What’s crazy is that my company is big enough it owns its own HQ, so commercial real estate isn’t a factor. But we’re in Retail, so I think it’s that all the folks in stores and field leadership get salty that we corporate types can WFH when they can’t.
Management loves this one simple trick!
“Employees talking shit about other employees keeps me busy and my job justified!”
“Mr. Manager, Jack touched Sarah inappropriately on the shoulder because she was in the way of the restroom. This is becoming a toxic and hostile work environment!”
“Okay I will have a little talk with Jack about touching female coworkers.”
“Thank you. Now I feel better!”
Nothing says “collaboration” then killing a few hours with your coworkers in the office talking smack about others, spending extra time in the bathroom, making sure to interrupt other team members who are trying to get stuff done. Thats “culture building” as decreed by the highest levels of the C Suite.
Nothing can beat the proximity learning you get sitting in a cube and hearing other people work all day…makes you so much more efficient. Not to mention when you get to drive 1-2 hours everyday to get to the office, wake up earlier, have a sad office lunch it really helps you have those social interactions we all missed during Covid.
Even better than your work life balance at a fully remote company? Idk I think the hours saved on commute time every week is pretty valuable. Also, buying work clothes, gas, takeout… you’re paying a lot of money to LARP in office for your company.
That’s the thing, the company is EXCEPTIONALLY stable, my leadership aren’t assholes, and I’ve already sunk cash on clothes. Plus, PHEV means I don’t spend cash on gas.
Compared to the stress of a new company and culture, the uncertainty of a completely unprecedented economy, and the potential political turmoil of the coming year, I prefer to stick with the devil I know right now.
Not to mention, my career field (supply chain) isn’t nearly as available fully remote as something in IT.
The most dangerous thing to companies is shit management and MBA's unfortunately. There's been so many companies I've seen fail due to poor decisions and general greed or ego that could have just coasted while slowly keeping up with technological advances instead.
"MBAs are dumb" is a bit like the Army trope about officers being bad at navigation. It's not true at all. But if the person leading makes a mistake, it's a big thing that everyone notices. If a team member makes a daft suggestion in the break room about what the company should do, no one cares.
Lol, ours is 1 day WFH, with supervisor approval (which almost nobody ever gets) every other week, cannot be on the same week as your 9/80 (we work 9 hours a day to get every other Friday off).
Early last year we tested a four day work week for a month. We told the staff that if they could find ways to be 20% more efficient, we could go to a 4 day work week. One easy win was that we all try our best to schedule personal stuff on Fridays (the weekday we don’t work). We sometimes work slightly longer hours but overall, we have felt that we were just as efficient.
Everyone loves it. Some of us still do occasionally work on Fridays if we just have something that needs to be get done but there are no meetings of course and it’s never a full day.
It doesn't matter how many studies say the contrary, upper management gung ho on the 9-5 grind will stick their fingers in their ears and ignore it. It isn't about facts and evidence-based policy. It's about middle managers whose entire lives revolve around escaping their broken family lives for 10 hours a day and micromanaging their peons.
My last company was like that. The owner straight up said "While some have said working remotely improves productivity, I do not think this is the case, therefore we will continue our no remote policy." More than half the company quit and they haven't been able to hire anyone to replace most of those who left.
Back in 2008 I looked around our office and noticed that it was half empty. The intention had been to hire people and move them to Austin but most of the time that didn’t happen we are a tech company so it was easy enough for them to work from home. I realized that half our staff worked remotely from home. I then came across an article that talked about how the 98% staff of MySQL worked from home. So I sat down with the Austin-based team and asked them how they would feel about working from home permanently. Most likely the idea but some had reservations. We decided to try it for a month. I knew that we’d need a sublease tenant for our office space and we started to identify systems that would need to change to make to work should our one month trial work out.
A month later we concluded that it did work. We closed the office and have been working from home ever since. I personally love it. I can’t imagine ever working in an office again. I was there every morning to see my kids leave for school and I was there every afternoon when they got home. I had lunch with my wife.
There was also an unexpected beneficial side effect we had not anticipated. It turned out that while we had the office, we had two forms of communication. One with those that worked in the office and one with those that did not. It was easy to end up having meetings in the office and unintentionally not including the remote staff because it was sometimes hard to coordinate with them.
Once we all went remote, that disappeared. We have all of our meetings on Zoom now. We have staff in 5 different time zones on two continents and it all works quite well.
Of course I’m very rational and try to base all of my decisions on empirical evidence and reason. That’s just the core of who I am as a person. I also decided a long time ago that I needed to hire people with whom I could trust to do their jobs without me having to manage them. That helps. We also have an unlimited paid time off policy. You’d think people would be prone to abusing that bit actually it’s the opposite. No one takes more time off and some take less. Why? Because it results in people taking time off when they need it instead of taking if off when they don’t because they are treating it as an asset that will go away if they don’t use it.
Hire smart, reliable, trustworthy people who are a good fit for your company culture. Give them what they need to get their job done. Treat them like the adults they are. Running a business is so much easier if you do this.
You seem to have empathy and a trusting org but I have seen unlimited PTO used nefariously to not provide those benefits to employees and to then look down upon anyone actually using PTO.
The ambiguity of it’s “unlimited" nature can also lead employees to take less time off, resulting in burnout, engagement, and turnover issues if not communicated properly. But it sounds like your hiring practices help this not be an issue
I want people to be at their best and the only way that happens is if they can take time away from work when they feel they need it. Thus I never ever put pressure on anyone when they need time off. Most of the time it’s just a mental health day here or there. And of course people plan vacations.
The four day work week helps with this because the longer weekends give people time to refresh properly. We also close between Christmas and New Years usually giving staff about 10 essentially mandatory days off. That’s just about right. At the end of that period I’m completely refreshed and ready to jump back into work.
I’ve been running my company for over two decades and I have never, ever asked nor told a member of my team, even those who are technically full-time contractors, that their time off would be without pay. Maternity and paternity leave is also paid time off. We leave it up to the team member to decide how much time the need.
I’m not trying to pat myself on the back when I say this but now that we are talking about it, it feels to me like we have a culture that no team member wishes to abuse. So they take only the time off they need and we don’t question it. We also have a fair number of holidays throughout the year.
PTO is not evenly dispersed either. We have some members that take very little time off. We have others that take a lot. We are not all the same. Our lives are not all the same. So our needs are thus not all the same. This is why I dislike unions. They make it impossible to see people as they really are: individuals, with all the pros and cons that go along with that. The goal is to treat everyone the same but the problem is, we aren’t all the same. A good manager knows this and accounts for it.
You want your team to work hard, be productive, be honest, be reliable, think about the health of the company in everything they do at work? Then treat them in ways that foster that. It’s pretty simple and yet so many don’t see it.
People who actually enjoy power are probably the last people who should ever be allowed to have it.
I hope not. I guess a lot of managers are shortsighted. If you’re playing the long game and if you care about being a descent human being, it’s not hard to do.
>You seem to have empathy and a trusting org but I have seen unlimited PTO used nefariously to not provide those benefits to employees and to then look down upon anyone actually using PTO.
I have seen plenty of places with tracked PTO do the same.
Thank you for sharing this. Most stories here are about people saying “my boss does not get it”.
It’s good to get the side of someone who actually implemented it (as senior management ) and made it work,
I didn’t spend a lot of time working for other people but I had my share of bosses that didn’t get it. When I worked in Silicon Valley I realized one day that my boss was a sociopath. That’s when I began planning my exit.
I never set out to be a boss. I don’t really even like the distance it creates between me and my coworkers even though I do everything I can to keep that distance to a minimum. When I see bosses that get drunk and stupid from having that authority, I feel sorry for both them and those who work for them. That’s no way to live.
I like what we do. I like the team we have. Everyone is productive and there’s almost no drama at all. It hasn’t always been that way. I have had to fire people and I never enjoyed it. It always feels like a personal failure to me. In fact I would give people chance after chance but very few ever changed. At this point, while it’s not official policy, I basically work on a three strikes rule. If you make a mistake, not big deal. I expect mistakes. If you make it a second time, people are human. I’m certainly not perfect. If you make that same mistake a third time, that means you’re incompetent or just don’t care and at that point I’m going to let you go. Fortunately that’s been pretty rare. I think we have gotten better at vetting people before we hire them. Hire slowly, fire quickly.
No matter how desperate you are in either situation, that’s very good advice.
>We also have an unlimited paid time off policy. You’d think people would be prone to abusing that bit actually it’s the opposite
I find this is always the case with "unlimited" PTO. No one wants to be the one to take too much, because it looks bad.
I got this idea from a friend who had implemented it at his company where half his employees are *hourly delivery drivers*. I asked him what he does if someone is taking too much time off. He said, “So far that’s never happened. But if it does, you have a different problem. You have an employee who doesn’t like their job.”
I have wondered how much of the "you need to be back in the office" stuff is because they miss strolling around with a cup of coffee getting to feel like a big boss. If I am working from home no one gets to see that I am in charge.
I wish it was easy to find a venn diagram of people insisting their employees get back to the office and people who actually enjoy their time being rich instead of being at the office.
Was there a reduction in personal time off, since you're generally scheduling stuff for Fridays? Or harder to get approval if you do need to schedule it during M-Th?
While we keep track of the time off people take, I haven’t actually looked at it since we implemented the policy. The reason we track it is so that if we ever *think* someone is abusing it, we can look and see if they really are. So far that’s never been the case. Some take a lot and others take very little but those patterns didn’t change after the policy was implemented.
I don’t understand managers that try to put the screws to their employees. Relationships are relationships. Just because you’re in a position of authority doesn’t change the basic dynamics. Treat people with dignity and respect, show that you care about them and they will work hard and be loyal. Treat them like shit and they will do the bare minimum to get by and leave the moment something just slightly better comes along. It’s not hard to figure out.
Our basic rule is try to do personal stuff on Friday when you can. If you need to take time off, take it. If it’s a day here or there you don’t need to ask. If it’s a week or two just let us know in advance. Honestly people don’t really ask. They just tell us. That works. I don’t need or want to feel like I’m controlling people. We are a team. I know I’m the boss and they will always see me differently because of that but for me it’s a necessary evil rather than something I enjoy.
> Everyone loves it. Some of us still do occasionally work on Fridays if we just have something that needs to be get done but there are no meetings of course and it’s never a full day.
I was expecting this to go, "It was a huge success all around, and management decided to scrap the idea anyway."
Well I am the CEO so while I want and need the advice of the senior management team, at the end of the day, decisions of this magnitude are ultimately mine.
I think it boils down to how I see people. Hire the right people, provide them with a good work environment and you should be able to depend upon them without the need to micromanage.
When I worked in Silicon Valley, a member of my then team thanked me for not micromanaging her. The fact is, I have no desire to do that and very much prefer not to do so. I told her, “I appreciate what you are saying but if I did have to micromanage you, I’d have to fire you. I can’t afford to micromanage anyone.”
Bosses need to learn to spend their time finding people that are a great fit and then treat them as the adults they are. It’s not hard. It’s the old Golden Rule: treat others the way you want to be treated. For me, anything else would be an enormous personal failure.
Well look at what we have here, a CEO that's actually a good leader and can think beyond "average business class 101."
Quite refreshing. I started my own company with a very similar attitude ie disenfranchisement with the status quo. Thankfully the last time I worked for someone else I actually had bosses that had that kind of mindset too. I still keep in touch with them from time to time.
I’m glad to hear I’m not the only one. We are perhaps not as profitable as we might otherwise be had I been more tyrannical but that is not who I ever have been nor could be. Regardless, we have created a place where our team loves to work. Most have been with me for over a decade, unheard of in tech. I’m proud of that.
So many managers and execs just don’t understand that about micromanagement. For my team I was there for them to be a blocker for outside interruptions as well as my other duties but I let them be. Vacation time was never denied and I just told them to drop it into our calendar so everyone knew they would be out and have a good time. Unfortunately I had too many people above me that liked to micromanage and it was stressful beyond belief keeping that away from my team. It’s one of the reasons I was just let go. One of my bosses that was slipped into place due to a merger didn’t like how I did things so I was cut, now the team is in worst shape, and morale is in the tank. Oh and I’m out of a job after 12 years of exceptional reviews, promotions, raises and praise.
I did something similar at my job in Silicon Valley. I shielded my team from the nonsense of the upper management. When I realized that my boss was a serious sociopath, I made plans to leave. When the day arrived to announce my plans, I told my team first. One member told me that if I was leaving, he was leaving.
Since making my plans there had been a restructuring and now I reported to someone who reported to me old boss but that did not change my plans. So I went to my new boss to say I had some bad news and some worse news. I told her about the member of team that was quitting. She asked if it was due to salary and that we could raise it if that was the case. I took delight in telling her that money was not the issue. I then told her I was leaving.
A few weeks later she took me to lunch. She told me that I had a reputation in the company. I asked her to elaborate. “No one ever hears you scream, yell or get upset.” I told her that I do sometimes get upset but not at work because that would be inappropriate. That I had to say that at all made it clear that she hadn’t noticed how inappropriate such behavior is in a professional environment. I’d witnessed my share of outbursts and had had a few aimed at me.
For me, getting angry is a bit of a personal failure. It only happens when I’m caught off guard, when I’m unprepared and that is the true failure on my part.
I’m so sorry that you’ve had to go through what you have and are going through. It is my hope that a day will come when you will be in a much better place and thus grateful it happened. It’s hard to see that now but I will continue to hope that the sun rises soon for you.
Thanks for the kindness. I keep telling myself and family that it is for the best and it’ll work out so we are just trying to ride it out and work on getting something new and better.
Indeed. A friend called me years ago to tell me that he had discovered that his wife was having an affair and that as a result, they are divorcing. He was devastated. I told him how sorry I was but that as much as he couldn’t imagine it now, one day he would be glad it happened. A few years went by and one day my phone rang. My friend had met someone who he was madly in love with and he had remembered what I told him back on that difficult day years earlier. He had just called to tell me I was right. I was so glad to hear joy in his voice again.
We will continue progressing towards our goals as long as we keep moving forward.
Man I keep seeing these sentiments. People who work in tech sometimes seem soooo…… just……. Sheltered from the world. So many people going “well of course! The world would function just fine if I didn’t show up to my job!” meanwhile *skilled* blue collar workers literally are what makes their cities functional and there isn’t a big enough pool of workers to keep things running 24/7 and give the most necessary workers 4 day work weeks lol
The pool of available workers is not the limiting factor here. Deliberate and coordinated cross-industry wage suppression has been a thing for 40 years.
I'm a white collar professional field worker. Same for us, takes time to visit facilities. I can't be more efficient than I already am. Someone has to do the visit.
I’m sorry if I generalized too much, my own bias reeks in my viewpoint of the importance of the trades when really, many industries within blue and white collar descriptions have necessary roles, and skill sets, that are hard to master and train across the board. I think there will always be highly skilled workers in surprising places that are important cogs in society. And I appreciate the hard work any of these skilled workers put in, day after day. Wish the average corporate executives had the same capabilities and abilities to contribute.
That would definitely help. Currently you get paid shit 5-10 years before you can make a good thriving wage. That alone probably deters a lot of people who’d become a quality, skilled mechanic over time but need to make a better wage, faster. Or, easier work that pays the same. The work is hard and the lowest workers have it rough and don’t get a lot of chances to *really* grow their skills.
I’d say overall it’s probably just a trickle down effect of corporate greed plus the issue of trade schools and other higher education being just too expensive. So, I mean, what’s that leave us at? Can we declare a class war yet orrrrr lol
Do you ever consider that if your work was forced to commit to a 4 day work week by a union then you would only work 4 days a week like office workers?
I know the excuse is always that the processes won't work on that schedule but then you can just make adjustments to the process to make it work with that schedule.
My husband *does* have four days a week as his schedule restriction, but there are emergency situations (constantly- and time sensitive), due to the fact that he is often the only one legally cleared to work on that specific piece of equipment. Specialty work is one of those situations where there simply isn’t enough of a skilled workforce to perform those jobs. And there’s a lots of reasons that’s the case, most of it comes down to the fact that work force needs to be paid better and treated better in the training process to get there. Be that by affordable education, better wages, better schedules, or all of it. Mostly just has to do with workers being treated better, properly, in the end, huh?
its usually only implimented when 12 hour shifts are involved and with the rolling 8 day week you end up working through weekends. completely diffenent to 9-5 monday to thursday white collar jobs that the article is talking about.
Even just stuff like retail or hospitality or all kinds of industries where you need to have people physically there during certain hours, and giving staff an extra day off means either hiring more staff or cutting hours.
Like a security guard or a hotel front desk. You can't just cut hours from a place that needs to be monitored 24/7.
You do understand that not every workplace is an evil gigacorporation that could afford to hire more staff and pay them better but chooses not to?
If a 4 day work week is going to become the standard for everyone, it needs to come with support for small and independent and nonprofit employers that can't afford to be mandated to hire 20% more staff just to maintain their current hours.
Most corporations have making money as first priority. “Our people are our first priority” is great HR marketing, but it’s not really their first priority. If they can make money making employees happy, great. They can survive with a disgruntled workforce too.
It would definitely be an either or. There is zero chance companies would pay the same, and would almost certainly start playing the full time vs part time game, or just straight start treating more employees like contractors.
It truly belongs on the long list of things that the ruling elite cannot allow to happen. An educated, happy, and healthy workforce/electorate with free time to pursue enriching activities is the biggest threat to the ultra rich and always has been.
No, the point of the study was 100/80/100, so 100% of pay for 80% of hours to determine if they can keep up or above 100% productivity. Iirc the results were that all participating firms saw increases in productivity.
I work at a place with 3 day and 4 day alternating work weeks. Always the same days on and off so no scheduling disasters.
Actually having time to have a life outside of work and sleep has been a huge game changer for me.
I drive a semi truck, just local work. Load at a plant, drive about 8 miles to unload at a railyard. Repeat that process for as many rotations I can fit before it's time to clock out. Shifts are 12 hours, but work is so easy they don't feel longer than any other 8 hour shift somewhere. Plus they are Union now, so it's 10 hours of 1x pay, and 2 hours of 1.5x overtime pay every shift.
To have a 3 day or 4 day weekend EVERY WEEK never seemed possible before I found this gig. Pay is nice at $28/hr...and if for any reason I wanted more money, they're always begging drivers to pick up extra shifts with no caps on that.
I'm not against this but I just don't see it working everywhere. I build houses. Guys on our crews (subcontractora,not my employees) work their asses off all day 5, sometimes 6, days a week. The more jobs they get done, the more money they make. How would mandated 4 day work week benefit them, the companies they work for or those of us contracting them?
It doesn't benefit workers who have 40 (or more) hours worth of work to do in a week. It benefits workers who have 32 (or less) hours of work to do in a week.
They can already pretty much choose how much they want to work. I don't see any way they'd actually get 20% more done in a 4 day week, not without working extra hours each day which kind of defeats the point.
When I bring this idea up to people, some have a bad reaction. Typicallyyy the ones that lean right. I usually tell them to take the politics out of it. I just ask them if they’re genuinely okay with working so much? Then I ask why they personally wouldn’t want more free time? So, instead of pointing out all of the reasons they’re told shortening the work week is a bad idea , I try to get them to think for themselves. I mention other successful countries that thrive on shorter work weeks. If it can be done then why not? I just don’t get the brainwashing and the accepting of life as it is rather than what it could be.
Here in the UK there have been several promising 6-month trials over the last few years, each with a few tens of companies and most seem happy to extend the trail or stick with it - https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/03/four-day-work-week-uk-trial/
The small company I work (software development) for has just started a 6-month trial starting a month ago and all seems good so far. I don't think it is an official trial though so won't be counted in national stats and presumably nor will many others.
>"with exploding technology and increased worker productivity, it's time to move toward a four-day work week with no loss of pay. Workers must benefit from technology, not just corporate CEOs."
yea, that's a hard sell to those CEOs 😀
The people who fight this the most vigorously usually have no idea who to manage workers without fear, and exploitation as a virtue.
Certainly plenty of industries where this isn’t possible in the same sense as knowledge workers getting a solid three day weekend. But we gotta start somewhere, and the people fighting to keep commercial real estate investments alive are a good first target.
Can confirm. 4 day work week rocks. I went back to 5 days this year just to test the difference, but I'm going back to 4 days a week (this time permanent) next year.
My job allows choice of workday off - so I picked wednesdays. For one there are no day-linked public holidays that fall on a wendesday where I live and for another whenever there is a public holiday it just takes me one additional vacation day to have 5 days off in a row. Enough for a mini-vacation.
These studies are useless because companies who sign up for them are the ones with no heavy load and no new projects or deadlines coming up. That and that fact that employees know they're on a trial, they know it's temporary and their performance is being monitored. So yeah of course the study is going to be positive.
Heavy industry here. ~3 and 4 day weeks are the norm and we must literally run 24/7/365.
Don't let your employer lie to you that it's impossible, but do question if the trade-offs are worthwhile.
Edit: And if others are getting better working conditions than you, such as 4 days vs your 5, you should use it to argue for more pay to compensate. Not blame your fellows for improving their lives slightly.
A lot of jobs are bullshit. Mine sure is. I write software for a living, but if I didn’t do it then society would keep rolling just fine. Most people just have jobs because they have to, not because they’re actually doing any good for society.
>I write software for a living, but if I didn’t do it then society would keep rolling just fine.
That doesn't make the job bullshit. It's just not a critical job. Not every job is a critical job.
>Most people just have jobs because they have to, not because they’re actually doing any good for society.
Humanity has worked very hard to get to this point. We have enough excess resources from the critical roles that people can do other stuff. Would you rather go back to substance farming?
I’d rather make art half time and volunteer half time. But I have bills to pay, so I do a job I don’t care about or like very much because it pays well.
No one is 'essential'. If you have business where one guy getting sick for a day (or even a month) crashes the entire enterprise then you're doing it wrong.
Yep. There are essential roles for society like nurses/doctors, farmers, grocers, etc, but if one individual being temporarily out of commission brings a whole chunk to the ground, many mistakes were made before that point.
Not the same commenter but my husband is an HVAC tech that has more certifications and licenses than most of the people he works with. He often is the only one they can legally send to work on certain units. Hence why no one else can go on a call to fix the equipment. He’s the main guy at our local dam that powers a lot of our local region, as well as the the default guy for many local grocery stores. My dad is an elevator mechanic and it’s similar- you’d be surprised how much an area can rely on just a handful of skilled blue collar workers that are keeping everything functional and *very* difficult workers to replace in this labor market.
Yeah but why should that be the repair guy's problem? When my last job tried to force me to work outside of my agreed-upon availability a year after I was hired, due to staff shortage issues, I quit. Now their staff shortage issues are worse.
Meanwhile mechanics, welders, delivery drivers are all working 60 plus hour weeks because some genius MBA figured out that if he just works us to death they only have to pay 2/3 the benefits. I'll keep holding my breath on this one. Until we stop having to compete with Chinese slave labor working 60 hours a week for 1.50 an hour.
The part of the movement that supports living wages and employer accountability is great . The part that thinks everything should be paid for and no one should work ever is a joke .
🙃 I wish I could stop seeing studies like this. It won’t ever help people who actually need shorter work weeks. If you work at dollar general or McDonald’s you’ll still work 6~7 days a week. That won’t change.
4x10 is a pass for me. Been there done that. 4x8 and I’m down to see whats up. I bet what really happened was 4x10 in office + 7x2 fielding the never ending flow of emails and taskers.
Unfortunately it will never happen in my industry. Concrete takes time to cure so you literally just can’t match what you do in 5 days in 4 with more hours. You work until it’s poured (we try to get it to 8 hours but sometimes it doesn’t work) and then there’s nothing left to do that day.
No way could we just increase lead times 20%. It’ll be cool seeing everyone else enjoy it.
I enjoy everyone that works an office job discussing the idea of moving to 4 days a week but let’s lot forget the essential jobs like plumbing and electric that this really would never work for.
I got on a 4-10 schedule at work for about 2 years. Off every sat, sun and monday. They took it away from me and i was bitter about it every day up until i quit. That extra day makes all the difference in the world.
Roughly 12-13% of the US workforce is already remote and another 28% in a hybrid. It's even expected that WFH will be 22% of the workforce by 2025.
Staggering 98% of folks want wfh or a remote hybrid as well.
It's totally fine that you don't like or work well in a remote setting. But the majority of folks don't feel the way you do.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/remote-work-statistics/#:~:text=By%202025%2C%2032.6%20million%20Americans,about%2022%25%20of%20the%20workforce.
As a service plumber, I have news for you, some of us are on call 24/7 for emergencies etc.
I can promise you 4 days work week aint happening in my world anytime soon, we cant even find enough people that want to do service plumbing to begin with, and the ones that are are working long hours often to maintain the infrastructure that all of the rest of you would literally not be able to function without.
Same for service electricians, hvac techs etc. Some of us dont go by any real kind of set schedule like that like the folks that sit in front of computers all day long do. Somebody has to maintain all of the plumbing and electrical in order for everything else to happen. And that my friends does not go by any set schedule, much less a 4 day one, period.
How many fuckin’ times am I going to see articles about this before I actually see companies beginning to adopt the 4 day work week more widely?
At least one more. It will always be at least one more.
Until one large companies work force revolts and forces it. Change won’t happen unless you force it.
[удалено]
Except most executive level people are too short sighted for that to work in practice. Lead in paint, pipes, and gas was killing people. Asbestos was killing people. And law makers had to be pushed into writing legislation because the companies making these products were more concerned about the next quarter than the next generation.
[удалено]
They won't do it because a workforce that has enough time off also has enough time to think about labor laws. American capitalism relies on unhappy workers who don't have the time and energy to revolt.
Actually the tech company I work for was recently asked whether they would implement the 4 day work week and leadership replied that if they were to implement this, then workers would be expected back in the office for those 4 days (we are currently fully remote). I prefer 5 days of working remote to 4 days of being in the office so I would take that trade off any day!
But, you realize that if you can do 5 days remote, you can do 4 remote. One less day doesn’t necessitate all the others being in office, your employers are just being dicks.
True I realise that they may be making excuses to avoid giving us a 4 day work week, but in this economy where companies are mandating RTO even after hiring fully remote worker, I’m grateful that my company is staying fully remote and a 4 day work week is not high up on my priority list as compared to staying remote.
That is a bullshit trade-off though. If you can already handle 5 days a week remotely, then there's no reason why you couldn't handle 4 days. Your management simply didn't want to give you 4 day work weeks, because very few would accept that shitty deal.
It only works in certain industries and with knowledge workers. An extra day of might help you code faster but it won’t help you build a wall any faster.
Yes it will… 4 day work week with people on alternating schedules? Fresh people ready to rock out some physical labor are going to build faster and make less mistakes. This applies to pretty much everything
I really don’t think it works like that with physical labour, I don’t think the workers can safely move 25% faster. There are also plenty of jobs that are reactive and just need someone to be there at all times. Think about a security guard or emergency worker, even a cashiers. These type of jobs can’t have a total workload that can be done faster, they just need someone to be available during certain hours.
You haven’t done much physical labor if you don’t think there’s that much different between someone rested and ready and someone overworked and run ragged. The rested guys don’t magically work faster, but the tired guys absolutely do move slower.
We need to change the 7-day week while we're at it. 7 days is just stupid for a 365 day planet. The work week is balanced around the 7-day week. Why not 5 or 6 day weeks with a 5-day end of year holiday? 5 days gives 73 weeks, or 72 weeks of 12 6-week months and one 5-day holiday. 6 days gives 60 weeks of 12 5-week months and one 5-day holiday. Leap year, only the holiday length changes. Then we can have a work week of 3 days on 2 days off for 5-day weeks or 4 days on 2 days off for 6-day weeks. A five day working span among seven days always leads to exhaustion by the end of the work week. Energy levels are shot by Wednesday or Thursday. Everyone is phoning it in on Friday. Saturday you don't want to do anything but recharge from the week. Sunday has the feeling of "well fuck, tomorrow is work day." There's never any rest because of the length of the week. Mondays, people are just annoyed to be back at work. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are really the only productive days.
Isnt that basically the Ptolemic calendar?
13 months of 4 weeks of 7 days = 364 days. +1 day international holiday for new year and we're at 365, make new year's a 2-day event for leap years. Best of all? It involves disliked numbers for more than one culture. 13 is considered unlucky in much of the Anglosphere, 4 is a homophone/near-homophone with death in Japanese, Korean and multiple Chinese languages.
“Here to stay” like 100% WFH and Child Labor laws
This is purely anecdotal but 100% WFH has stayed at my company. It’s set up where if you want to go in the office you can but you always have the option to WFH anywhere you want. There are maybe two days a month where it’s recommended to go in and most people in the area do but it still isn’t a requirement. My manager is in a whole separate state from me. I know of a fair few other jobs like this, so while many may have gone back to the old way, COVID definitely had some sort of a positive lasting impact on a portion of the workforce. At the very least, the idea is no longer deemed crazy or “impossible”.
Yeah. At the very least WFH/Remote jobs are still a lot more common compared to pre-pandemic times.
My old office isn’t even owned by my employer anymore. We have a new flex office with like 10 desks for people who need to do stuff on site from time to time, but my department has over 100 employees so they couldn’t mandate on-site hours if they wanted to anymore. A couple of those desks are basically occupied full-time play people who didn’t like working from home.
Same here, I heard from my coworkers that my company was in person before covid, I joined after covid hit and it’s been fully remote since then. I’ve not even seen my office building yet!
I chuckled when I read that line too. I mean, I’m hopeful that any meaningful change will happen, but it won’t. Workers need to focus on higher wages and lower income gaps. We can fight for a 4 day week after that. We have a large population that work full time and still need government assistance, looking at you Walmart, Amazon, McDonald’s etc.
Por que no los dos?
We can easily fight for both
Depends on the industry… I work in tech and WFH is now the norm. I actually don’t know anyone who works in tech that doesn’t WFH most of the time. My last company absolutely did not allow WFH pre-pandemic and now Hybrid working with only 2 days in the office is standard across the company, with many teams allowing more days at home. I wouldn’t even entertain a job offer that wasn’t Hybrid working. I get why some industries aren’t though. Not like you can make a Big Mac remotely…
Depends on who is in charge. If enough people had the common sense to vote in their own best interest those things would be here to stay.
And if I could just stop eating pop tarts before bed…
[удалено]
100% WFH is here to stay. That phrase doesn't mean it will be done by every company, all the time, forever. It was never like that even in the earliest pandemic days, some jobs simply have to be done in person. But we're never creeping back to the rate of in-office work from before, there's a new balance.
I love how every response to this is like "well MY company still does WFH so you're wrong" but not a single person said "well MY state still has child labor laws". It's as if everyone got the point but wanted to argue anyway.
Pity the company I work for is gaslighting it's staff into thinking 9-5 with no compressed hours and being in the office 2 days a week is beneficial to us. But then still promotes itself as being one of the most flexable employers.
I would love to only be in the office 2 days a week-I just found out I’m going to go from 3 days to 4 days in September.
But think about all that office culture you will be missing! Like Mark from accounting standing at the coffee machine all day bitching about Susan from communication not doing anything! Don't you see what you're missing out on?! Don't you miss Mark from accounting?? Don't you want to bitch about Susan?? Don't you want to smell Rick from IT as he unplugs you PC because it's frozen again?? Beter come into office! Better sit in traffic for hours!! Don't you miss it? I sure miss micro managing every little thing about every little thing. Come on down to down town office culture! When you're here you're family!
[удалено]
Don't forget student loans! He's got lots invested in that bank that treats loans as a security, because after all, if someone is paying interest for life and only seeing their balance go up it's basically just free money.
I dont see that element most executives dont have commercial real estate side gig. I see various other stuff. People that hate home People that cant perform People that exist to socially climb People that want to watch/make the world burn. Micro souls that NEED Lordship. No where treats you better than where your the boss. Better a king of small country than a general an Empire. At home your Bosses are mostly the same sorry sacks you are. Laundry over due. Someone like a life partner that is sick of your shit. Long term relationships:-) They run away from stuff or towards other things.
There's also a pretty good chunk of people who actually enjoy working in the office because they like the flow better For some things, it is just straight up easier and quicker for all parties involved to have a 90 second face-to-face conversation instead of several back-and-forth emails dragged out across the course of the day. Note I said "open door", for those who will immediately lambast me as "one of the bad guys", characterizing me as the person in their office who has no concept of other peoples time. The decision to have an in person, face-to-face conversation should be one that considers saving time and effort for both parties, not just one.
Zoom and MS Teams exist, as so webcams. I’m not saying they are as good as an in person meeting but this is the problem, assuming issues have to be solved via email, shows more modern tools have not been adopted in your workplace.
[удалено]
What’s crazy is that my company is big enough it owns its own HQ, so commercial real estate isn’t a factor. But we’re in Retail, so I think it’s that all the folks in stores and field leadership get salty that we corporate types can WFH when they can’t.
it’s already happening. New York is turning some into residential.
Management loves this one simple trick! “Employees talking shit about other employees keeps me busy and my job justified!” “Mr. Manager, Jack touched Sarah inappropriately on the shoulder because she was in the way of the restroom. This is becoming a toxic and hostile work environment!” “Okay I will have a little talk with Jack about touching female coworkers.” “Thank you. Now I feel better!”
Nothing says “collaboration” then killing a few hours with your coworkers in the office talking smack about others, spending extra time in the bathroom, making sure to interrupt other team members who are trying to get stuff done. Thats “culture building” as decreed by the highest levels of the C Suite.
Accounts Payable..please hold…
Nothing can beat the proximity learning you get sitting in a cube and hearing other people work all day…makes you so much more efficient. Not to mention when you get to drive 1-2 hours everyday to get to the office, wake up earlier, have a sad office lunch it really helps you have those social interactions we all missed during Covid.
By the next year, I’m sure they’ll make it 5 days in office again.
They better not. Even pre-Covid it was 4 in the office and one WFH.
Time to start looking for a new job. A company that actually respects your time should get your labor
Alas, it’s not that easy. I’m paid pretty well and my work life balance is good, even if I do have to commute.
Even better than your work life balance at a fully remote company? Idk I think the hours saved on commute time every week is pretty valuable. Also, buying work clothes, gas, takeout… you’re paying a lot of money to LARP in office for your company.
That’s the thing, the company is EXCEPTIONALLY stable, my leadership aren’t assholes, and I’ve already sunk cash on clothes. Plus, PHEV means I don’t spend cash on gas. Compared to the stress of a new company and culture, the uncertainty of a completely unprecedented economy, and the potential political turmoil of the coming year, I prefer to stick with the devil I know right now. Not to mention, my career field (supply chain) isn’t nearly as available fully remote as something in IT.
They call that virtue signaling.
And gas lighting, as they said.
They didn’t say anything about gaslighting
First sentence buddy.
I think it was a gaslighting meta joke, but reddit was not in the mood for it today.
How was getting the ol' woooosh?
The most dangerous thing to companies is shit management and MBA's unfortunately. There's been so many companies I've seen fail due to poor decisions and general greed or ego that could have just coasted while slowly keeping up with technological advances instead.
MBAs… the postgrad degree that makes you look dumber
"MBAs are dumb" is a bit like the Army trope about officers being bad at navigation. It's not true at all. But if the person leading makes a mistake, it's a big thing that everyone notices. If a team member makes a daft suggestion in the break room about what the company should do, no one cares.
Mine calls 4 days in the office flexibility….sooooooo I am not holding my breath on this.
Lol, ours is 1 day WFH, with supervisor approval (which almost nobody ever gets) every other week, cannot be on the same week as your 9/80 (we work 9 hours a day to get every other Friday off).
Here’s the thing, it’s good people can be as productive in a 4-day work week, **but as long as “company makes more money”**
Early last year we tested a four day work week for a month. We told the staff that if they could find ways to be 20% more efficient, we could go to a 4 day work week. One easy win was that we all try our best to schedule personal stuff on Fridays (the weekday we don’t work). We sometimes work slightly longer hours but overall, we have felt that we were just as efficient. Everyone loves it. Some of us still do occasionally work on Fridays if we just have something that needs to be get done but there are no meetings of course and it’s never a full day.
We have a "no meeting Thursday". I could easily not work on Friday thanks to this.
Funny. We have "no meeting Thursday" as well, and somehow every week, Thursday fills up with meetings...
Because that’s the day where you know everyone is going to be available
We have “no meeting Tuesday”, which directly results in “all meeting Wednesday”…
It doesn't matter how many studies say the contrary, upper management gung ho on the 9-5 grind will stick their fingers in their ears and ignore it. It isn't about facts and evidence-based policy. It's about middle managers whose entire lives revolve around escaping their broken family lives for 10 hours a day and micromanaging their peons. My last company was like that. The owner straight up said "While some have said working remotely improves productivity, I do not think this is the case, therefore we will continue our no remote policy." More than half the company quit and they haven't been able to hire anyone to replace most of those who left.
Back in 2008 I looked around our office and noticed that it was half empty. The intention had been to hire people and move them to Austin but most of the time that didn’t happen we are a tech company so it was easy enough for them to work from home. I realized that half our staff worked remotely from home. I then came across an article that talked about how the 98% staff of MySQL worked from home. So I sat down with the Austin-based team and asked them how they would feel about working from home permanently. Most likely the idea but some had reservations. We decided to try it for a month. I knew that we’d need a sublease tenant for our office space and we started to identify systems that would need to change to make to work should our one month trial work out. A month later we concluded that it did work. We closed the office and have been working from home ever since. I personally love it. I can’t imagine ever working in an office again. I was there every morning to see my kids leave for school and I was there every afternoon when they got home. I had lunch with my wife. There was also an unexpected beneficial side effect we had not anticipated. It turned out that while we had the office, we had two forms of communication. One with those that worked in the office and one with those that did not. It was easy to end up having meetings in the office and unintentionally not including the remote staff because it was sometimes hard to coordinate with them. Once we all went remote, that disappeared. We have all of our meetings on Zoom now. We have staff in 5 different time zones on two continents and it all works quite well. Of course I’m very rational and try to base all of my decisions on empirical evidence and reason. That’s just the core of who I am as a person. I also decided a long time ago that I needed to hire people with whom I could trust to do their jobs without me having to manage them. That helps. We also have an unlimited paid time off policy. You’d think people would be prone to abusing that bit actually it’s the opposite. No one takes more time off and some take less. Why? Because it results in people taking time off when they need it instead of taking if off when they don’t because they are treating it as an asset that will go away if they don’t use it. Hire smart, reliable, trustworthy people who are a good fit for your company culture. Give them what they need to get their job done. Treat them like the adults they are. Running a business is so much easier if you do this.
You seem to have empathy and a trusting org but I have seen unlimited PTO used nefariously to not provide those benefits to employees and to then look down upon anyone actually using PTO. The ambiguity of it’s “unlimited" nature can also lead employees to take less time off, resulting in burnout, engagement, and turnover issues if not communicated properly. But it sounds like your hiring practices help this not be an issue
I want people to be at their best and the only way that happens is if they can take time away from work when they feel they need it. Thus I never ever put pressure on anyone when they need time off. Most of the time it’s just a mental health day here or there. And of course people plan vacations. The four day work week helps with this because the longer weekends give people time to refresh properly. We also close between Christmas and New Years usually giving staff about 10 essentially mandatory days off. That’s just about right. At the end of that period I’m completely refreshed and ready to jump back into work.
You pay them for that 10 day period, right? Or does that come from the PTO since it’s negligible?
I’ve been running my company for over two decades and I have never, ever asked nor told a member of my team, even those who are technically full-time contractors, that their time off would be without pay. Maternity and paternity leave is also paid time off. We leave it up to the team member to decide how much time the need. I’m not trying to pat myself on the back when I say this but now that we are talking about it, it feels to me like we have a culture that no team member wishes to abuse. So they take only the time off they need and we don’t question it. We also have a fair number of holidays throughout the year. PTO is not evenly dispersed either. We have some members that take very little time off. We have others that take a lot. We are not all the same. Our lives are not all the same. So our needs are thus not all the same. This is why I dislike unions. They make it impossible to see people as they really are: individuals, with all the pros and cons that go along with that. The goal is to treat everyone the same but the problem is, we aren’t all the same. A good manager knows this and accounts for it. You want your team to work hard, be productive, be honest, be reliable, think about the health of the company in everything they do at work? Then treat them in ways that foster that. It’s pretty simple and yet so many don’t see it. People who actually enjoy power are probably the last people who should ever be allowed to have it.
Lol, you are a one in a million boss, that's for sure. People need unions because 99% of companies are not ran like that.
I hope not. I guess a lot of managers are shortsighted. If you’re playing the long game and if you care about being a descent human being, it’s not hard to do.
Tell me you're not publicly traded without telling me you're not publicly traded.
>You seem to have empathy and a trusting org but I have seen unlimited PTO used nefariously to not provide those benefits to employees and to then look down upon anyone actually using PTO. I have seen plenty of places with tracked PTO do the same.
Yes, but tracked PTO, at least in some states, still belongs to the employee upon separation. Unlimited PTO means you lose that.
Thank you for sharing this. Most stories here are about people saying “my boss does not get it”. It’s good to get the side of someone who actually implemented it (as senior management ) and made it work,
I didn’t spend a lot of time working for other people but I had my share of bosses that didn’t get it. When I worked in Silicon Valley I realized one day that my boss was a sociopath. That’s when I began planning my exit. I never set out to be a boss. I don’t really even like the distance it creates between me and my coworkers even though I do everything I can to keep that distance to a minimum. When I see bosses that get drunk and stupid from having that authority, I feel sorry for both them and those who work for them. That’s no way to live. I like what we do. I like the team we have. Everyone is productive and there’s almost no drama at all. It hasn’t always been that way. I have had to fire people and I never enjoyed it. It always feels like a personal failure to me. In fact I would give people chance after chance but very few ever changed. At this point, while it’s not official policy, I basically work on a three strikes rule. If you make a mistake, not big deal. I expect mistakes. If you make it a second time, people are human. I’m certainly not perfect. If you make that same mistake a third time, that means you’re incompetent or just don’t care and at that point I’m going to let you go. Fortunately that’s been pretty rare. I think we have gotten better at vetting people before we hire them. Hire slowly, fire quickly. No matter how desperate you are in either situation, that’s very good advice.
>We also have an unlimited paid time off policy. You’d think people would be prone to abusing that bit actually it’s the opposite I find this is always the case with "unlimited" PTO. No one wants to be the one to take too much, because it looks bad.
I got this idea from a friend who had implemented it at his company where half his employees are *hourly delivery drivers*. I asked him what he does if someone is taking too much time off. He said, “So far that’s never happened. But if it does, you have a different problem. You have an employee who doesn’t like their job.”
But they always manage to pile MORE work onto the loyal people who are left, keeping the company going!
I have wondered how much of the "you need to be back in the office" stuff is because they miss strolling around with a cup of coffee getting to feel like a big boss. If I am working from home no one gets to see that I am in charge.
Some may be like that, but others are too busy "working" from their vacation home in New Zealand or flying here or there in their private jet.
I wish it was easy to find a venn diagram of people insisting their employees get back to the office and people who actually enjoy their time being rich instead of being at the office.
Was there a reduction in personal time off, since you're generally scheduling stuff for Fridays? Or harder to get approval if you do need to schedule it during M-Th?
While we keep track of the time off people take, I haven’t actually looked at it since we implemented the policy. The reason we track it is so that if we ever *think* someone is abusing it, we can look and see if they really are. So far that’s never been the case. Some take a lot and others take very little but those patterns didn’t change after the policy was implemented. I don’t understand managers that try to put the screws to their employees. Relationships are relationships. Just because you’re in a position of authority doesn’t change the basic dynamics. Treat people with dignity and respect, show that you care about them and they will work hard and be loyal. Treat them like shit and they will do the bare minimum to get by and leave the moment something just slightly better comes along. It’s not hard to figure out. Our basic rule is try to do personal stuff on Friday when you can. If you need to take time off, take it. If it’s a day here or there you don’t need to ask. If it’s a week or two just let us know in advance. Honestly people don’t really ask. They just tell us. That works. I don’t need or want to feel like I’m controlling people. We are a team. I know I’m the boss and they will always see me differently because of that but for me it’s a necessary evil rather than something I enjoy.
Aha! So you've proven that you've been slacking off by 20% all this time!
> Everyone loves it. Some of us still do occasionally work on Fridays if we just have something that needs to be get done but there are no meetings of course and it’s never a full day. I was expecting this to go, "It was a huge success all around, and management decided to scrap the idea anyway."
Well I am the CEO so while I want and need the advice of the senior management team, at the end of the day, decisions of this magnitude are ultimately mine. I think it boils down to how I see people. Hire the right people, provide them with a good work environment and you should be able to depend upon them without the need to micromanage. When I worked in Silicon Valley, a member of my then team thanked me for not micromanaging her. The fact is, I have no desire to do that and very much prefer not to do so. I told her, “I appreciate what you are saying but if I did have to micromanage you, I’d have to fire you. I can’t afford to micromanage anyone.” Bosses need to learn to spend their time finding people that are a great fit and then treat them as the adults they are. It’s not hard. It’s the old Golden Rule: treat others the way you want to be treated. For me, anything else would be an enormous personal failure.
Well look at what we have here, a CEO that's actually a good leader and can think beyond "average business class 101." Quite refreshing. I started my own company with a very similar attitude ie disenfranchisement with the status quo. Thankfully the last time I worked for someone else I actually had bosses that had that kind of mindset too. I still keep in touch with them from time to time.
I’m glad to hear I’m not the only one. We are perhaps not as profitable as we might otherwise be had I been more tyrannical but that is not who I ever have been nor could be. Regardless, we have created a place where our team loves to work. Most have been with me for over a decade, unheard of in tech. I’m proud of that.
So many managers and execs just don’t understand that about micromanagement. For my team I was there for them to be a blocker for outside interruptions as well as my other duties but I let them be. Vacation time was never denied and I just told them to drop it into our calendar so everyone knew they would be out and have a good time. Unfortunately I had too many people above me that liked to micromanage and it was stressful beyond belief keeping that away from my team. It’s one of the reasons I was just let go. One of my bosses that was slipped into place due to a merger didn’t like how I did things so I was cut, now the team is in worst shape, and morale is in the tank. Oh and I’m out of a job after 12 years of exceptional reviews, promotions, raises and praise.
I did something similar at my job in Silicon Valley. I shielded my team from the nonsense of the upper management. When I realized that my boss was a serious sociopath, I made plans to leave. When the day arrived to announce my plans, I told my team first. One member told me that if I was leaving, he was leaving. Since making my plans there had been a restructuring and now I reported to someone who reported to me old boss but that did not change my plans. So I went to my new boss to say I had some bad news and some worse news. I told her about the member of team that was quitting. She asked if it was due to salary and that we could raise it if that was the case. I took delight in telling her that money was not the issue. I then told her I was leaving. A few weeks later she took me to lunch. She told me that I had a reputation in the company. I asked her to elaborate. “No one ever hears you scream, yell or get upset.” I told her that I do sometimes get upset but not at work because that would be inappropriate. That I had to say that at all made it clear that she hadn’t noticed how inappropriate such behavior is in a professional environment. I’d witnessed my share of outbursts and had had a few aimed at me. For me, getting angry is a bit of a personal failure. It only happens when I’m caught off guard, when I’m unprepared and that is the true failure on my part. I’m so sorry that you’ve had to go through what you have and are going through. It is my hope that a day will come when you will be in a much better place and thus grateful it happened. It’s hard to see that now but I will continue to hope that the sun rises soon for you.
Thanks for the kindness. I keep telling myself and family that it is for the best and it’ll work out so we are just trying to ride it out and work on getting something new and better.
Indeed. A friend called me years ago to tell me that he had discovered that his wife was having an affair and that as a result, they are divorcing. He was devastated. I told him how sorry I was but that as much as he couldn’t imagine it now, one day he would be glad it happened. A few years went by and one day my phone rang. My friend had met someone who he was madly in love with and he had remembered what I told him back on that difficult day years earlier. He had just called to tell me I was right. I was so glad to hear joy in his voice again. We will continue progressing towards our goals as long as we keep moving forward.
I do 4x10 and taking Wed off is _sooo_ much better than Friday.
"One lawmaker"... that means absolutely nothing. Next!
Cries in blue collar
Absolutely. Because I am one of those blue collar workers.
same here I’ve always wondered what having federal holidays off was like rather than slaving 24/7
> 24/7 Found the robot
Man I keep seeing these sentiments. People who work in tech sometimes seem soooo…… just……. Sheltered from the world. So many people going “well of course! The world would function just fine if I didn’t show up to my job!” meanwhile *skilled* blue collar workers literally are what makes their cities functional and there isn’t a big enough pool of workers to keep things running 24/7 and give the most necessary workers 4 day work weeks lol
The pool of available workers is not the limiting factor here. Deliberate and coordinated cross-industry wage suppression has been a thing for 40 years.
I'm a white collar professional field worker. Same for us, takes time to visit facilities. I can't be more efficient than I already am. Someone has to do the visit.
I’m sorry if I generalized too much, my own bias reeks in my viewpoint of the importance of the trades when really, many industries within blue and white collar descriptions have necessary roles, and skill sets, that are hard to master and train across the board. I think there will always be highly skilled workers in surprising places that are important cogs in society. And I appreciate the hard work any of these skilled workers put in, day after day. Wish the average corporate executives had the same capabilities and abilities to contribute.
Oh all good, I just agree, and following up. There's a whole bunch of folks who need to actually do stuff, and we need to be there to do it!
> there isn’t a big enough pool of workers to keep things running 24/7 Pay better and I'm sure you will get there.
That would definitely help. Currently you get paid shit 5-10 years before you can make a good thriving wage. That alone probably deters a lot of people who’d become a quality, skilled mechanic over time but need to make a better wage, faster. Or, easier work that pays the same. The work is hard and the lowest workers have it rough and don’t get a lot of chances to *really* grow their skills. I’d say overall it’s probably just a trickle down effect of corporate greed plus the issue of trade schools and other higher education being just too expensive. So, I mean, what’s that leave us at? Can we declare a class war yet orrrrr lol
Do you ever consider that if your work was forced to commit to a 4 day work week by a union then you would only work 4 days a week like office workers? I know the excuse is always that the processes won't work on that schedule but then you can just make adjustments to the process to make it work with that schedule.
My husband *does* have four days a week as his schedule restriction, but there are emergency situations (constantly- and time sensitive), due to the fact that he is often the only one legally cleared to work on that specific piece of equipment. Specialty work is one of those situations where there simply isn’t enough of a skilled workforce to perform those jobs. And there’s a lots of reasons that’s the case, most of it comes down to the fact that work force needs to be paid better and treated better in the training process to get there. Be that by affordable education, better wages, better schedules, or all of it. Mostly just has to do with workers being treated better, properly, in the end, huh?
There’s no reason this couldn’t apply to blue collar. Many jobs that require 24/7 shift coverage already do 4-day weeks to accomplish that.
its usually only implimented when 12 hour shifts are involved and with the rolling 8 day week you end up working through weekends. completely diffenent to 9-5 monday to thursday white collar jobs that the article is talking about.
[удалено]
I haven’t worked four tens in 15 years. More like five tens.
Even just stuff like retail or hospitality or all kinds of industries where you need to have people physically there during certain hours, and giving staff an extra day off means either hiring more staff or cutting hours. Like a security guard or a hotel front desk. You can't just cut hours from a place that needs to be monitored 24/7.
Then hire more staff, needing more workers puts labor in the position to negotiate for higher wages
You do understand that not every workplace is an evil gigacorporation that could afford to hire more staff and pay them better but chooses not to? If a 4 day work week is going to become the standard for everyone, it needs to come with support for small and independent and nonprofit employers that can't afford to be mandated to hire 20% more staff just to maintain their current hours.
Treat your people better and they are happier. Huh. You don’t say?
Most corporations have making money as first priority. “Our people are our first priority” is great HR marketing, but it’s not really their first priority. If they can make money making employees happy, great. They can survive with a disgruntled workforce too.
Get real. This is never happening for 99% of people
you better fucking pay me as if it was a 5 day work week
It would definitely be an either or. There is zero chance companies would pay the same, and would almost certainly start playing the full time vs part time game, or just straight start treating more employees like contractors. It truly belongs on the long list of things that the ruling elite cannot allow to happen. An educated, happy, and healthy workforce/electorate with free time to pursue enriching activities is the biggest threat to the ultra rich and always has been.
No, the point of the study was 100/80/100, so 100% of pay for 80% of hours to determine if they can keep up or above 100% productivity. Iirc the results were that all participating firms saw increases in productivity.
Been hearing this for at least 7 years now. Yet i see that happening nowhere
I will never be happy but will take a 4 day week.
IT Department, of course, will not be eligible.
I work at a place with 3 day and 4 day alternating work weeks. Always the same days on and off so no scheduling disasters. Actually having time to have a life outside of work and sleep has been a huge game changer for me.
What do you do? If you don’t mind sharing, ofc.
I drive a semi truck, just local work. Load at a plant, drive about 8 miles to unload at a railyard. Repeat that process for as many rotations I can fit before it's time to clock out. Shifts are 12 hours, but work is so easy they don't feel longer than any other 8 hour shift somewhere. Plus they are Union now, so it's 10 hours of 1x pay, and 2 hours of 1.5x overtime pay every shift. To have a 3 day or 4 day weekend EVERY WEEK never seemed possible before I found this gig. Pay is nice at $28/hr...and if for any reason I wanted more money, they're always begging drivers to pick up extra shifts with no caps on that.
We’re working on a 4 on 4 off 12hr shift setup where I work. I have enough seniority that I’ll be straight day shift. Pretty excited to try it.
I'm not against this but I just don't see it working everywhere. I build houses. Guys on our crews (subcontractora,not my employees) work their asses off all day 5, sometimes 6, days a week. The more jobs they get done, the more money they make. How would mandated 4 day work week benefit them, the companies they work for or those of us contracting them?
It doesn't benefit workers who have 40 (or more) hours worth of work to do in a week. It benefits workers who have 32 (or less) hours of work to do in a week.
That seems to indicate a far different problem then.
[удалено]
They can already pretty much choose how much they want to work. I don't see any way they'd actually get 20% more done in a 4 day week, not without working extra hours each day which kind of defeats the point.
When I bring this idea up to people, some have a bad reaction. Typicallyyy the ones that lean right. I usually tell them to take the politics out of it. I just ask them if they’re genuinely okay with working so much? Then I ask why they personally wouldn’t want more free time? So, instead of pointing out all of the reasons they’re told shortening the work week is a bad idea , I try to get them to think for themselves. I mention other successful countries that thrive on shorter work weeks. If it can be done then why not? I just don’t get the brainwashing and the accepting of life as it is rather than what it could be.
[удалено]
Here in the UK there have been several promising 6-month trials over the last few years, each with a few tens of companies and most seem happy to extend the trail or stick with it - https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/03/four-day-work-week-uk-trial/ The small company I work (software development) for has just started a 6-month trial starting a month ago and all seems good so far. I don't think it is an official trial though so won't be counted in national stats and presumably nor will many others.
>"with exploding technology and increased worker productivity, it's time to move toward a four-day work week with no loss of pay. Workers must benefit from technology, not just corporate CEOs." yea, that's a hard sell to those CEOs 😀
The people who fight this the most vigorously usually have no idea who to manage workers without fear, and exploitation as a virtue. Certainly plenty of industries where this isn’t possible in the same sense as knowledge workers getting a solid three day weekend. But we gotta start somewhere, and the people fighting to keep commercial real estate investments alive are a good first target.
I do 3d drafting for a construction company 6:30 to 5 Monday - Friday, no way would they even think about this, at least I can dream.
Try this: Offer to do 4d drafting in exchange for 4 day work week.
Can confirm. 4 day work week rocks. I went back to 5 days this year just to test the difference, but I'm going back to 4 days a week (this time permanent) next year. My job allows choice of workday off - so I picked wednesdays. For one there are no day-linked public holidays that fall on a wendesday where I live and for another whenever there is a public holiday it just takes me one additional vacation day to have 5 days off in a row. Enough for a mini-vacation.
Am I the only one who sees this as a way to not pay people the full 40 hours? Idk maybe I’m cynical at this point
These studies are useless because companies who sign up for them are the ones with no heavy load and no new projects or deadlines coming up. That and that fact that employees know they're on a trial, they know it's temporary and their performance is being monitored. So yeah of course the study is going to be positive.
I can't see it taking off anywhere except in companies which are *actually* about the bottom line, as opposed to being about power trips.
It must be nice to work in an industry where things can just be pushed into 4 days. What fun. Wow.
Heavy industry here. ~3 and 4 day weeks are the norm and we must literally run 24/7/365. Don't let your employer lie to you that it's impossible, but do question if the trade-offs are worthwhile. Edit: And if others are getting better working conditions than you, such as 4 days vs your 5, you should use it to argue for more pay to compensate. Not blame your fellows for improving their lives slightly.
A lot of jobs are bullshit. Mine sure is. I write software for a living, but if I didn’t do it then society would keep rolling just fine. Most people just have jobs because they have to, not because they’re actually doing any good for society.
>I write software for a living, but if I didn’t do it then society would keep rolling just fine. That doesn't make the job bullshit. It's just not a critical job. Not every job is a critical job. >Most people just have jobs because they have to, not because they’re actually doing any good for society. Humanity has worked very hard to get to this point. We have enough excess resources from the critical roles that people can do other stuff. Would you rather go back to substance farming?
I’d rather make art half time and volunteer half time. But I have bills to pay, so I do a job I don’t care about or like very much because it pays well.
Thats why they pay you. ;)
Yeah "essential" workers won't be given this option.
No one is 'essential'. If you have business where one guy getting sick for a day (or even a month) crashes the entire enterprise then you're doing it wrong.
Yep. There are essential roles for society like nurses/doctors, farmers, grocers, etc, but if one individual being temporarily out of commission brings a whole chunk to the ground, many mistakes were made before that point.
I love my job and love repairing shit, but seven days a week gets old.
Why does the same repair guy need to be working seven days a week? Why can't there just be a different repair guy working different days?
Not the same commenter but my husband is an HVAC tech that has more certifications and licenses than most of the people he works with. He often is the only one they can legally send to work on certain units. Hence why no one else can go on a call to fix the equipment. He’s the main guy at our local dam that powers a lot of our local region, as well as the the default guy for many local grocery stores. My dad is an elevator mechanic and it’s similar- you’d be surprised how much an area can rely on just a handful of skilled blue collar workers that are keeping everything functional and *very* difficult workers to replace in this labor market.
Sounds like they have a lot of leverage to negotiate a better schedule.
Too much work and not enough workers probably
Yeah but why should that be the repair guy's problem? When my last job tried to force me to work outside of my agreed-upon availability a year after I was hired, due to staff shortage issues, I quit. Now their staff shortage issues are worse.
Amazing how giving people more time to do what they want leads to happiness.
It’ll be great for workers when this becomes the norm, maybe 30-50 years from now.
The CEOs who required a return to office are sure to get on board with this right away.
It's amazing how much more efficient a worker can be when they are not exhausted all the time.
Here comes the Republicans to outlaw a four day work week
Their entire platform is stopping change and if it’s already happened, rolling it back. So you comment tracks.
Meanwhile mechanics, welders, delivery drivers are all working 60 plus hour weeks because some genius MBA figured out that if he just works us to death they only have to pay 2/3 the benefits. I'll keep holding my breath on this one. Until we stop having to compete with Chinese slave labor working 60 hours a week for 1.50 an hour.
This will only apply to white collar workers . The rest of the world will still be working 5+ days
Why wouldn’t it apply to blue collar workers?
Explain that to r/antiwork. They seem to think everyone has a white collar job. And most still live in their parents basements
The part of the movement that supports living wages and employer accountability is great . The part that thinks everything should be paid for and no one should work ever is a joke .
Even if the employers start collecting more revenue, the employees will be paid less.
🙃 I wish I could stop seeing studies like this. It won’t ever help people who actually need shorter work weeks. If you work at dollar general or McDonald’s you’ll still work 6~7 days a week. That won’t change.
4x10 is a pass for me. Been there done that. 4x8 and I’m down to see whats up. I bet what really happened was 4x10 in office + 7x2 fielding the never ending flow of emails and taskers.
To stay like wfh, or pensions, or healthcare?
Unfortunately it will never happen in my industry. Concrete takes time to cure so you literally just can’t match what you do in 5 days in 4 with more hours. You work until it’s poured (we try to get it to 8 hours but sometimes it doesn’t work) and then there’s nothing left to do that day. No way could we just increase lead times 20%. It’ll be cool seeing everyone else enjoy it.
I enjoy everyone that works an office job discussing the idea of moving to 4 days a week but let’s lot forget the essential jobs like plumbing and electric that this really would never work for.
Not if auto manufacturers have anything to say about that
Funny when companies decide to choose making their workers unhappy over making move money. Lol, oh they will!
It’s a trap. This is how they kill the 8-hour day.
4 days means 32 hours with the same pay, not 4 twelve hour days, and on call weekends.
*sighs in blue collar worker*
This is just a pipe dream in the USA. Where you will be worked mercilessly until you can be replaced by a cheaper (read younger) alternative.
It's never going to happen in America. Republicans would argue tooth and nail it goes against a capitalist market.
What horse shit....no company will ever pay for a full salary for 4 day week....it will always be 40+ hours a week, no matter how many days.
I got on a 4-10 schedule at work for about 2 years. Off every sat, sun and monday. They took it away from me and i was bitter about it every day up until i quit. That extra day makes all the difference in the world.
[удалено]
Roughly 12-13% of the US workforce is already remote and another 28% in a hybrid. It's even expected that WFH will be 22% of the workforce by 2025. Staggering 98% of folks want wfh or a remote hybrid as well. It's totally fine that you don't like or work well in a remote setting. But the majority of folks don't feel the way you do. https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/remote-work-statistics/#:~:text=By%202025%2C%2032.6%20million%20Americans,about%2022%25%20of%20the%20workforce.
4 day school weeks got me through my bull shit “associates degree” that isn’t worth the fucking paper it’s printed on.
And in 10 years a 4 day work week will be bashed as too much.
As a service plumber, I have news for you, some of us are on call 24/7 for emergencies etc. I can promise you 4 days work week aint happening in my world anytime soon, we cant even find enough people that want to do service plumbing to begin with, and the ones that are are working long hours often to maintain the infrastructure that all of the rest of you would literally not be able to function without. Same for service electricians, hvac techs etc. Some of us dont go by any real kind of set schedule like that like the folks that sit in front of computers all day long do. Somebody has to maintain all of the plumbing and electrical in order for everything else to happen. And that my friends does not go by any set schedule, much less a 4 day one, period.