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If productivity increased then you had some slackers before
Productivity also increases when people are allowed to work from home. Turns out hostile work environments are not conducive to productivity.
Yeah because people are more well rested with 3 days off. So they can focus better during the workday.
4 day work weeks often means working four 10hr shifts. Same hours but less start and stop adds to productivity, and that extra day off during the work week means you can schedule things that day that otherwise would require time off during work hours. That extra day off really helps both employer and employee.
4 tens is so much better than 5 eights.
That’s not what they mean by the 4 day work week. I’ve had the 4 10 hour days and friending in the work you’re but very productive with a day that long. It’s hard to be in the zone thinking hard for 10 hours.
I’ve tried that before. I get less done on a 10 hour shift than I do in 8. Have to wake up too early and go home too late. It’s torturous.
Now a 32 hour week for the same pay is peak. Doesn’t even need to be three continuous days off. A weekend and a Wednesday is good enough.
4 tens is so much better than 5 eights.
Going to need a citation for that, because that is not what the research I’ve seen suggests.
From this paper:
This paper studies the link between working hours and productivity using daily information on working hours and performance of a sample of call centre agents. We exploit variation in the number of hours worked by the same employee across days and weeks due to central scheduling, enabling us to estimate the effect of working hours on productivity. We find that as the number of hours worked increases, the average handling time for a call increases, meaning that agents become less productive. This result suggests that fatigue can play an important role, even in jobs with mostly part-time workers.
The full article is behind a paywall, but the discussion paper is available in full here.
Another paper suggests that, while same-day performance can sometimes increase with number of hours, next-day performance suffers. And, more importantly, routinely working shifts that are longer than 8 hours reduces productivity over time:
To start, we elucidate the tension between a widely held assumption grounded in the ideal worker norm that working long hours boosts performance and recovery research suggesting the opposite. Our findings reveal that, although working a long day is associated with a same-day performance boost, working long hours hinders overnight recovery by reducing sleep, hindering next-day performance. Our results also cautiously suggest that regularly working longer than 8-h days results in fatigue and a lack of resilience, making it difficult for employees to sustain high levels of performance over time.
I have consistently seen the four-day workweek defined as 32 hours per week (4x8hr), not 4x10hrs.
That’s why we need to end the push for the 4-day week.
And start the push for the 32-hour week.
It’s Taco Bell logic. You love our chicken nuggets and caramel empanadas? We sold out in 3 days? Well they’re discontinued so fuck you. Ok guys, sales are down and we can’t figure out why, we need ideas.
they got rid of the quesarito just so they can bring it back for a week. and there is NOTHING in the quesarito that isnt already on the menu, so you can still get it if you customize a beefy 5 layer
What’s the “logic” here?
“So we went back to five days, and now productivity is down to effectively three days, what when wrong?”
Executives, everywhere.
Maybe Pizza Friday is the answer
The management quietly dropped/forgot it lol
One slice each only, obviously.
The study stops when the executives get what they want.
Which is objectively stupid as fuck, btw
“so I started
blastingfiring people”Anyone else remember the scene in Schindler’s list where the Nazis make a work camp Jew show how quickly he can make a part (a hinge I think), and then look at his completed parts bin and decide to kill him because he clearly hasn’t been working that speed the entire time?
Crack that whip!
Give the past a slip
Step on a crack
Break your momma’s back.
When a problem comes along
You must whip it!
Whip it Good!
Whip it real good
as a manufacturing worker, this argument doesn’t work for us. every second of our day is already mapped out anyway, we’re struggling to keep the breaks we have
When I was in the navy my command did this. We were out by 2pm, 4 day work weeks and had the best productivity of the whole navy.
The problem is the workplaces don’t want that. if you’re happier and have more energy, it also makes you more uppity and harder to control. You might even find options for other work!
If it means keeping you tired and broken, that’s worth the cost of a little productivity.
You might even find options for other work!
Not many other places offer a 4-day week for same salary.
This to give up would be a major strong point…And to be honest…I’d actually work an hour more a day (36h week) to have a monday - thursday week just for the same or higher wage.
But is that really so? i would think that a better work life balance makes the employees inclined to remain at their job instead of hopping elsewhere. Probably even at the expense of a higher salary at another place that would instead demand the grind again.
Take a look at are little friend remote work. Almost all employees love it. Retention is thru the roof at places that offer it. More than half of workers say they’d even take a pay cut to keep it. Productivity isn’t affected in most cases (ymmv obviously). Buuuuut guess who absolutely can’t stand it? Management. They’ll go to the ends of the earth to make sure you don’t get it. Ask yourself why.
Mostly it’s because they all own commercial real estate and are colluding with each other to keep it occupied.
It’s because management doesn’t only care about those numbers and stats you cited. They also have emotional needs. Like feeling important. Like being the boot.
They also often don’t really understand how work gets done. They do a lot of meetings and schmoozing and think that’s how a web server gets build. They’re self centered, unimaginative, idiots.
We are ruled by the worst among us.
Edit: I realized I already wrote the same kind of thing in this thread the other day. I’m an old broken record!
You’re not accounting for the emotional needs of management. Many of them are cruel. They put value in making their workers squirm.
We should have worker owned things instead of the petty tyranny of capitalism, but here we are.
People, generally speaking, have an absolutely infuriating tendency to adapt to good things. They eventually look for more. The best way to prevent this, from an employer’s perspective, is to break their spirit. Learned helplessness is one of the only ways to permanently keep a free person in a bad situation.
Productivity isn’t a straight line, which is where most businesses fail in their thinking. Yeah I can do five days of work in four days, with the right incentives. I can also do it in five with no incentives.
I can do three days of work in five days with the wrong incentives :)
I kinda see it lol, at work I see people dragging themselves to Friday. And on Friday, they’d do so much work and wrap up things that would otherwise take time. The excitement of “there’s no office tomorrow” and the motivation to clock out on time on a Friday evening is like the adrenalin rush!
Just think about WFH, exactly the same logic.
Three days in office was a perfect balance for me and my team. Everyone came in Wednesday so anytime we needed in person stuff, it was scheduled for that day. Folks were happy, saving on the commute, desk space and parking was plentiful. Then higher said folks like me were to be in five days a week while everyone else was four. Cue nosedive in productivity.
If people are happy, something is wrong. Misery is a virtue/s
This is why cruelty is the point, because they prioritize it even above profit.
If you’re not miserable, you’re not working hard enough/s
This is genuinely how MBAs think
MBAs have systematically been drilled to view the world as numbers, rather than social or psychological dynamics. Empathy is an obstacle when your focus is on generating higher numbers.
If you estimate a project in hours of work, a shorter work-week looks like projects will take longer. Imagine you’ve planned 60h and are billing for 60h, but instead of devoting 20h per week and delivering in three weeks, your developer now only spends 16h and you’ll be delivering in four weeks instead! That’s wasting a week they could’ve spent on other projects, slow down turnaround times and essentially cut your revenue per week by 33%.
Worse, you’re also supposed to pay them 20% more per hour, so you have less revenue for more pay. You can see how that’ll cut into profits.
Never mind that the increased productivity messes with your estimate, so the same work might now get done in, say, 48h instead, keeping the same turnaround time, at the same price you were paying before. Even if you consider that, you’d also have to charge the customer more per hour of work, which seems like a tougher sell than just keeping things as they were, which everyone is already used to.
It’s an idiotic and soulless way to think about labour instead of people, and it’s neither sustainable nor really reasonable, but if the only tool you have is a calculator, everything becomes numbers.
It’s also that so much work is pointless and doesn’t serve a proper purpose for humanity. Things like ads, a lot of office jobs where people sit in endless meetings, and so on.
I think humanity has realized it’s wasting our lives but we can’t think of another system that will work.
Maybe universal income but the downside of that is that it comes with AI and transhumanism, which will remove what is human about humans.
I hate how a big chunk of my work has become to write reports nobody should read. Our team produces a report every January, that gets passed to our director, that gets compiled into a yearly lab wide report, that gets combined into a 5-year report, that get sent to the government to ensure continuous funding… so much time wasted by everyone
I’m 51 now and I learned from 25 years of working that wasting time is not a problem for large corporations år governments. Even in smaller companies, they value people being forced into office much higher than employees producing work.
So the conclusion for me is that its just a system to keep everyone busy and conform to rules set by the corporation.
Only thing that is human about humans is primitive urges, jealousy, mistakes, and irrationality.
Sure we can think of better. It’s just that the only people with the power to change or implement any of it are financially incentivized not to. So they don’t.
Why would universal income come with AI and transhumanism?
Because the alternatives are pointless toil or perishing (spoilers: neither of these are off the table)
You’re going to have to elaborate on that. Why are those the alternatives?
If the corporate fantasy of replacing all jobs with AI were to actually come to pass, what are all the now jobless people supposed to do? Quietly wait in a back alley to starve to death?
So either universal income happens, or the one percent learn that there’s no level of technology that will overcome a two orders of magnitude disadvantage in numbers.
So, nothing but fearmongering.
I have worked in the mining industry for over 20 years. Before Covid happened my monthly schedule was set up so that we were given seven days off every month. At the end of 2021 management decided to change it so that we worked 5 days and 4 off with them saying that this was a “safer”and more beneficial to employees, since the schedule change there have been more people quitting and more people getting hurt on the job I myself along with others have voiced our opinion to go back to the original schedule and management looks down upon us as if we said a dirty word.
7 days off a month, as in, accruing 7 days each month that you can take off later (in a bigger chunk, for example)? Or like, 3 weeks on, ~1.3 weeks off, repeat…?
The 7 days off was built into the normal schedule monthly. The schedule was, 4 days on the 3 off, then 3 days on and 2 off, then 3 on 3 off then 4 on then a week off. The schedule was also divided into half a month day shift and half night shift.
Yeah, I’d go with the option that has the least incidences. Mining is already environment prone so we don’t need to add any more human error than we need.
