Workers at companies that tested out a 4-day workweek are happier and more efficient — and firms made more money. One lawmaker says it’s ‘here to stay.’::The latest data shows that workers and companies prosper under a four-day workweek. Rep. Mark Takano wants to make it law.
The major problem is to overcome the “More work hours = more production” mindset. In subdeveloped worlds, this is so engraved in society that news like that seems “communist propaganda”
The problem is separating out the work that does rely on hours worked vs ones that don’t.
Running a stamping machine? Yeah, your run time is going to be pretty much proportional to your output.
Working a desk job doing research and generating reports? The better you are at it, the more you can do, and eventually you just outrun the workload. Then you shit twiddling your thumbs for no reason.
And not even all desk jobs. My job is supporting a manufacturing client with their imports. Until both them and the courier/shipping lines decide to change to a four day work week, I’m going to need to be ready to field urgent HTS and document requests, even though I work a remote desk job.
This. It almost only applies to desk jobs. Production workers can’t just work a day less and keep the same output, and if they can’t do it, people like me who are responsible for keeping the production running as part of their job(electrician in my case) also can’t work a day less.
If companies wanted to do this, they’d have to hire more workers to give everyone a 4 day week. But all this would do is create more costs for the company
In the IT world, if you really count the actual hours we do actual work, you’d probably end up with 2 or 3 days worth of work. This will help both companies and employees. But I’m not gonna hold my breath.
Depends at what level in IT. Definitely lessens as you go up. I remember being a grunt and working 50 hour weeks and being oncall, scared to leave my house for fear I would get called. Now after 20 years of experience I only get called in when stuff is REALLY broken and have a lot more free time to better myself. I use down time to learn new skills or work in my homelab.
As everything can be implemented in a good or bad way. As a worker, I may prefer to have my weekly activities “distributed” in more days because making everything fit into a shorter amount of time does not allow me to deal with interruptions or unforeseen accidents. Having less time would give me more anxiety, rather than less. Instead of imposing schedules by law, allowing everyone to choose would be better. Plus, why is everything so politicized?
I have a coworker that dreads working from home, since the partner and child would disturb - tried my hardest to not reveal any gender. That said, this person is overworked and loads on their shoulders weights and responsibilities that are not expected of their role. Result: a couple databases seriously compromised - while this person was in holiday, hundreds of km far away from workplace, they released in production code they personally developed or reviewed. Next week is the fourth week people is working their asses overtime to figure out what the fuck happened to code base and database. Could WFH resolve this issue? I dunno, anxious humans are unpredictable; but who knows, maybe this person could use some more time for their hobbies? Look at what they’re doing with all of these responsibilities and expectations? Could WFH help prevent these scenarios? Definitely yes
This seems like a problem not having anything to do with work@home?
Sounds like the coworker is stretched too thin if they’re working while on ‘vacation’.