I’ve told this story before, but about a decade ago I had banked enough PTO days that I was able to take off every Wednesday in the summer (with my boss’s permission, natch). So I effectively worked no more than two days in a row for four straight months. Off weekends, work monday/tuesday, off Wednesday, then back to work Thursday/Friday.
The first month went about as expected - “yay! Wednesday off!!”. But I wasn’t expecting to experience what I did by the second month of my experiment: my mental health and attitude towards work had changed. That “Monday blues” you get was gone. Every work day felt like a “Thursday” or a “Friday” to me - because the “weekend” was no more than a day away. The dread of Sunday evenings knowing work was starting the following day disappeared.
By halfway through my experiment, I was happy to go to work because there was stuff I wanted to accomplish and thus was more efficient at my job. Nobody ever complained that I was gone every Wednesday for four months, my work always got finished on time (or ahead of schedule).
But I really was shocked at how my mental health improved by NOT working five days in a row.
I fully support a four day work week and wish everyone has the opportunity to experience what I did.
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Just started a new gig and trying to save up PTO for travel, but damn this is a tempting set up. Last gig working (4) 10-hour days with perpetual Fridays off already felt pretty damn good. Same amount of time physically in the office, but that extra free day felt so much more liberating. Really gives you time to run errands, get into shenanigans, and actually decompress before Monday kicks off.
Yup! That was another thing - since I had Wednesdays off, I scheduled my appointments and errands for that day so I didn’t have to run out of the office to get stuff done during the week. It really did make me a more efficient employee.
Alas, that’s too progressive for boomers to even think about. They’d rather us work 7 days a week without any breaks!
I had a 4 day-10hr shift working in insurance when I was younger and having sat / sun / wed off was amazing. It’s been like 15 yrs since I had that schedule and I miss it. A lot of what you wrote is how I felt.
They moved me off that shift and I quit a few months later. Would love to go back to that schedule. Another good part was being able to do stuff during the week instead of trying to cram appointments in during the weekend or after work.
Now imagine those 4 days were only 8 hours shifts…
Yeah, that’s the goal. My current job is going to try 4 10s next year, they’re undecided on 4 8s for some reason
I am lucky to work in a country with paid parental leave (and unpaid leave after the first year they can’t refuse). I have been working 4 days a week for almost 2 years now and I’m not planning on stopping that soon.
Just wish they would pay me for the 5 days a week efficiency that I am achieving…
Its probably similar in other places, but where I live, between public holidays, 10 sick days a year, shutdowns over Christmas and New Years, and annual leave you will be working four day weeks and paid for five days for significantly more than half the year anyway.
Jokes on my employer, I have been effectively working less than 3 days a week in active hours actually doing something productive beyond meetings and forced chit chat for years.
Most employers in my experience care far more about the appearance of working than they do actually working. Once you realize this it is amazing how little actual work you need to do to make them happy.
Almost as if upper management and middle management aren’t actually good leaders. Almost as if everything they do is not only complete bullshit but also actively harms the company by causing inefficiencies directly.
They should get better training then. Most managers and leadership actually get virtually zero genuine management training at all. This is what I teach and it blows my mind people just totally wing a job like that.
The Peter Principle is a very real thing.
I need to look that up what is the Peter principle?
Everyone more or less rises to the point of incompetence. It comes from the idea that skilled people keep getting promoted and at some point they are no longer skilled enough for that new job.
I’m a workforce planning BP and it’s hard to implement obvious improvements to the workforce, even with solid data backing you. There is often one or two aithorative figures that are too scared to “gamble” on trialing something as, despite the data, it doesn’t sit right with them.
So the turnover rates, costs, and absenteeism stay higher while employee satisfaction, efficient capacity, and revenue stay lower.
Those are rookie numbers. Gotta get on Peter Gibbons’ level of doing fifteen minutes of real, actual work every week
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Yeah, the blue collar workers who have to pick up your slack are very well aware of your useless position. Bragging about it like this is frankly disgusting.
hahaha, what blue collar workers do you imagine are picking up the slack from my sysadmin position of managing servers? Trying to white night for a third party like this is frankly pathetic. I’m sure they appreciate your service oh Nobel savior of their pride.
The fact you can’t even imagine how a server could host something like a warehouse management system says a lot.
The blue collar workers aren’t “picking up the slack” of a sysadmin who manages the warehouse system, are they? no, they don’t have the desire or skills to manage a server and that’s fine. But you cannot pick up slack for people who do uniquely different work?
Wait, do you think I am saying I just straight up do not do my job of keeping those systems running, healthy, and accessible for those that need those services? Do you think that is what everyone is saying with these types of discussions? If you do, then you my friend need to learn about this thing called sarcasm. It is almost the default tone on the internet.
The fact that you may think any of what I said means I am neglecting the core functions of my job says a lot about how much you know about this subject, and the modern working office compared to how much you think you know.
What I am saying, that you seem to not be able to grasp for whatever reason, is that the actual core functions of a lot jobs do not take 40-60 hours to do competently. There is an enormous amount of time wasted in the modern “office setting workplace” on things that serve no purpose other than to make the boss look like they are adding value. If you and the blue collar folks are getting mad at the white collar office worker for that then you have been tricked into supporting positions that work against your own interests.
For example using your warehouse management system: If part of my job is insuring the health an availability of an auto scaling cluster of EC2 instances or ECS containers , some Lamda functions, a DB cluster, etc (or the GCP/Azure equivalents) so the warehouse management system is up and running 24/7, and I can get that done in ~5 hours a week, including monitoring, maintenance and planning for upgrades and whatnot what value is spending say 2 additional hours a week in a team meeting to give my boss a status update on that adding for me, the warehouse workers, etc? He gets the project update messages on work completed as it is , but he still wants to hear the same thing in a meeting anyway. Multiply that by a bunch of other systems and services for things that are not the warehouse management system and you can get a picture of how the bosses meetings are wasting hours a week to give him information he is already getting in written for anyway.
If you are coming to these kinds of discussions with the assumption that time spent “on the clock” directly relates to amount of valuable work done across the board then you are sadly mistaken.
It amazes me that “made more money” doesn’t immediately sell this to every company across the world. But no, making people work longer hours to feel like the company is more productive is more important than making money and actually being more productive.
The idea of meritocracy is being exposed as the complete bullshit that it is. For the most part, the folks at the top of the company were born there. And the folks at the bottom of the ladder were also born there.
The owner class is not some group of genius businessmen. It’s just that if you have a lot of money, you can make a lot more money with it even if you are really stupid.
Imagine you own a couch you can sit on for forty hours a week, and it’s decoratively on display in your living room, but generally completely unused.
You’re not going to want to pay the same amount to be able to sit on it less, even if you never do.
The analogy here is that management basically sees you as furniture they literally own. They don’t want to give up ownership of that time for any reason.
Interesting. I think you’re right. Management sees employment as an exchange of money for time. If productivity drops, the common response is more pressure to perform and reminding you of your place as the employee, and that your time is bought and paid for.
This would be amazing, which is why it’ll never happen in the US.
I run a company in the U.S. I have about 50 employees, and I’m going to do it for our team. I believe it’s going to give us a competitive advantage, and by demonstrating that my hope is that more organizations will follow suit. I don’t expect it to become law, but I’m not giving in to despair either. If you want change, make change unavoidable.
Honestly if I saw a job description that said the company has a 4-day workweek it would definitely stand out. Hopefully your employees will see that you genuinely care about them, which is such a rare thing it seems.
I could happen here! Four 12-hour days…
That’s exactly it. 8 hours a day is too long as it is.
Not legally maybe, but its absolutely the kind of thing tech companies will notice and start to take advantage of. They can hire more staff if needed, no big deal.
They will start offering 4 day work weeks and reduce salaries accordingly.
You just work 4 10’s
I work 4 10s and while it’s not perfect, it is sooooo much better than 5 8s. The key to making it doable though is working from home and having no commute. When I was in consulting a 9 hour day with commute was doable, but 10 was rough and reserved for special occasions. Now that I’m full work from home, 10.5 (because I have to take a 30 min lunch) is fairly easy.
I totally agree! Even in a “worst case” of 4-10, instead of 4-8 for the same pay, quality of life skyrockets.
Yeah that’s what they said about work from home before they about faced and demanded everybody come back to office, even those who worked remote before all this. I’ll not believe it even if I see it.
Meanwhile in Belgium:
We have this! You just work your 5 day hours (38) in 4 days!
Of course they got it wrong :'(
4-day work week, WFH, and other things make people more productive. More productive means less people can do the same amount of work. Less people means the middle managers have less people to manage and less chances to justify their job. Everyone who isn’t at the top or bottom of the tree will fight this tooth and nail.
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This. 100% this.
Doesn’t more productive in this case mean it makes up for the fact they are working less hours?
So same amount of people but working fewer hours?
It definitely depends. I generally do work from home on fridays, but I give barely any fucks about work on Friday. I am way more productive in the office. That’s said, my commute is literally 7 minutes so I don’t really care. It’s actually kind of nice to mentally transition myself from work to home.
Also, when I leave my work laptop at work I don’t feel compelled to do any more work after I leave the office. When I take it home with me I have a constant feeling that usually ends up with me checking emails or finishing stuff at 9:00 or 10:00 p.m.
It’s like homework that never ever ever gets finished and I’m tired of pretending that it’s not literally homework.
I agree. Its super important not have “that feeling”. It means I’m not ever really not working if I’m still planning what work I have to do later in the day.
I’ve been WFH from most of my career. I have the luxury of a home office and am very aware that its not where I go to hang out or do personal projects. When I’m done with work for the day I close that space off and call it done.
Yes, sometimes I have to work late or come back to it at 9p etc. I treat these as an exception the same as i’d treat going back to the office after dinner.
Future state: “We’re so productive with 4 days a week. Imagine how good things would be if we did an extra day?”
Lmao yeah that would def happen, with -25% income as well right?
Have you not been reading articles on this topic? Yes, we are talking about a 32 hour work week with no loss in pay.
We can then spend the other 3 days of the week working a second job for +75% pay, hurray!
Options should be 40 hours, 10 hour days, not 32 hours total. That ends up a lot less income.
Did you even read the article you shared? It’s still 8 hour days, the workweek would become 32 hours
There were a few stories today on this. 32 hours is too short. I’d be bored.
Do you have any hobbies? I’d rather be doing anything but working.
I already spend 20 hours a week on hobbies.
Now you could spend 28 hours on them! Bonus!
Let me tell you about this wonderful invention called video games…
Or pick up Masturbation (lol) Or go outside and make fists with your toes with bare grass (aka “touching grass” as the zoomers say) or Marijuana which is now legal in some states.
Lots of thing’s you can do in those extra 8 hours.
pick up Masturbation
Lmao “taking matters into your own hands”
You sound like a corporate shill, gtfoh
I don’t work for a corporation but I do enjoy my career. I spend 20 hours a week on hobbies.
Weird flex but ok. I work for a state organization and enjoy my career too but I’m not pining to give them more of my time than is necessary.
It’s a flex to say I don’t work for a corporation to a comment about being ‘a corporate shrill’?
Some people enjoy their career.
Weird flex but ok. I work for a state organization and enjoy my career too but I’m not pining to give them more of my time than is necessary.
Bro you need a hobby
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This entire topic is about shortening the work week without any loss in pay.
…I don’t see how that would be better in any way than what we currently have, I wouldn’t be up for that at least
I’ll believe it when I see it. Many jobs do not work well on this schedule, such as logistics or manufacturing plants that house multiple customers. Not to mention if you have overtime you either get in at 3am or work Friday.
This comes off as yet another article written by and advocated by office workers who likely have never had a floor job in their life. That’s a privilege, and one most people do not have.
So pay the people that need to work 5 day weeks more without cutting the pay of those who can do all their work in 4 days. or OR crazy idea, hire more people.
Everyone would be working 40 hours regardless, it’s not like you’re getting more pay for working 5 eights compared to 4 tens, but if even one customer in a building of 5 customers has overtime, you’re going to need support that 5th day.
You can’t just throw people and money at logistical problems, they just causes FAR more issues than it solves. Likewise while higher pay is always a good thing for workers, it does not solve any logistical issues surrounding supporting multiple manufacturing lines with a materials deployment that works 4 tens.
Why would everyone be working 40 hours? The whole point of the study is that they reduced working hours to 32 hours a week without loss in pay.
Logistics mainly. There’s tons of jobs that you cannot just throw more people at to accomplish something, especially in complex manufacturing.
I also don’t see how you get paid the same if you’re taking 6 hours off. I don’t bring congress can mandate private companies to increase wages (other than minimum), and even if they did, businesses will not give that elevated wage to any new hires, making it so people like me have to take a significant wage cut if we wanted to switch jobs.
I know office workers love to brag about how much money they make over bluecollar workers, but that doesn’t mean it should ignore how legislation is going to affect people like us who don’t have a nice bundle of cash to fall back on. That’s how you get people like Trump and DeSantis.
If any legislation was to happen, it would be to mandate the standard work week to 32 hours, so if a company wanted to have you for 40 they would have to pay overtime. This has happened several times in history already by the way (6 to 5 day work week and 12 to 8 hour work day), so I don’t see how it would be any different.
Companies don’t pay out of the goodness of their hearts, they pay what the market demands, so if they cannot get new hires at a certain salary, they will have to increase it.
Why would my company pay me overtime rather than telling me to go home after 32 hours? My wage will be cut, the only benefit I get is a better work life balance, but that doesn’t mean much when I’ll no longer be able to afford rent.
I remember people telling us here in the rust belt that bills like NAFTA would benefit us greatly by reducing the cost of living, yet 30 years later we’re still suffering and being told to trust the same pencil pushers who promised not to screw us over last time.
Thankfully I don’t see republicans letting this bill though. We’ve suffered enough of this economic experimentation.
The same reason you said a 32 hour work week is impossible, “because manufacturing”
Why does overtime exist already? The question you are asking on the face is so asinine it barely merits a response.
And? Good for them!
I am absolutely in favour of the four day (30-32 hour) week with no loss of pay but the discussion always centres on salaried office workers. I have not yet seen anyone explicitly state that workers on hourly pay would need a 25% pay rise to make it equitable, including in jobs where it simply isn’t possible to do the same amount of work in 80% of the time (security, delivery, retail, hospitality, customer service, etc).
That piece does link to a Chik-Fil-A 3-day week offer but it’s for 14 hour days, so 42 hours work and nothing to do with what this piece is talking about.
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Do they pay them 80% of their salary?
No.
