At a place I used to work for, the four day week question was put to the CEO at an all-hands company town hall.<p>Not a fan of the idea, he scoffed and said something like, ‘I pay you to be at your desk from 9am-5.30pm Monday-Friday. Why should I pay you the same for a day less?’<p>I don’t think he realised it at the time, but that answer was devastating to company productivity and morale. He’d just demonstrated to everyone that he didn’t value results and all that was important was bums on seats.<p>People stopped putting in extra effort, waited out their hours as that was all that was required and started brushing up their CVs. I left not long after and so did many others.
In the US nuclear navy, the power plants have to be manned 24 hours a day both operating and shutdown. Ships in maintenance periods also generally go through a phase where ship personnel have to support maintenance work around the clock. Additionally, some parts of the training pipeline are run 24 hours a day.<p>I say all that to say that while I am not a subject matter expert, I have a significantly above average amount of experience working various types of rotating shift work as well as duty rotations (a duty rotation is working 24 hours every 2, 3, 4, or 5 days depending on available manpower. Yes, you read that right - for a month, I was at work 28 to 32 out of every 48 hours).<p>Forget 4 8 hour days, I would work 4 10 hour days right now in a heartbeat with no discussion or regrets.<p>1) it is invaluable to have a normal working day where you can do tasks - change your oil, get your haircut, go grocery shopping without a crowd, see a matinee, the list is endless.<p>2) the scope of weekend trip you can plan across 3 days instead of two is exponentially higher. So much room for activities.<p>3) time after the working day just isn't that useful. Drive home, eat dinner, now it's 630/7pm. Waste a couple hours, go to sleep. After a 10hour day, the time after work is precious and useful to relax, but then you get a whole other day off.<p>It surely isn't for everyone, but it surely is for a lot of people. The thing that blows my mind is no one is even willing to try.
The key to this in my view is having it be an officially "approved" option. Working at a FAANG company in the UK, I could already afford to take a 20% pay cut and work a 4 day week. I would love to do so in fact - but since that working pattern is relatively uncommon, I don't have the confidence that colleagues would respect or acknowledge it - basically I see myself spending an excessive amount of time telling people that I am not available on Friday for that meeting, and no I won't make an exception just for this week. Or, I would make an exception and get sucked into work - and now the company is getting 20% of my time for free.<p>If a 4-day week was more widespread, I would have more confidence in maintaining it - and on the odd occasion I have to work the extra day, I wouldn't feel so bad given the 100% pay model described here.
I expect to be downvoted for saying this, as some people are really precious about the idea of 4-day work week, but I really struggle to understand how working fewer hours will not result in loss of productivity. If for some reason it is true that working 4 days a week results in the same amount of productivity, then why are 3 days a week not even more productive? Or 2? This is obviously reductio ad absurdum but that would mean that people who work 0 hours are the most productive ones.<p>I know that there is the argument about "if I have fewer hours they will be more focused", but that to me sounds like it's entirely wishful thinking and in a few years will be having the same amount of wasted hours in those days too, as people start thinking of Thursday as the new Friday.<p>I assume there is some sort of middle ground between working too much and working too little. Are there any actual evidence that that optimum middle ground is 4 days and not 3, or 5?<p>I would find the whole idea much more palatable if it wasn't sold by claiming something likely isn't true (people working fewer hours do more work), and instead someone was honest and admitted that this is a political project.<p>What I find much more interesting is switching from a 7 day week to something else entirely, for example working on: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday is free, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday is free. I can see how that might result in people being more productive, as they still work the same amount of hours, but they don't get as exhausted as before.
I live in Poland. We are recently being recognized as a developed economy most often. Still, we earn 1/3 in dollar terms per Capita compared to the US or Germany.<p>I think 4 days week would result in people having two jobs regularly. I wonder if the situation is simalar with basic job workers in more advanced economies.<p>One interesing point is that people in my IT company were willing to put 5-10% of their income in exchange for work from home. But this is IT.<p>I think that the right way to go is not to reduce the number of hours but just allow people to work 4 days per week with hourly rate intact. This might be a very welcomed option by many people.<p>Also - signing up for this in the high inflation time might work well instead of raising compensations. So this is a good time to carry such experiments.
I live in Vietnam.<p>The first time I saw this, I asked my colleagues: Who would want to work one day more per week, for half what someone makes in the UK?<p>We were all willing to do it without hesitation (actually many of us already do this for less revenue -- side gigs are fairly ubiquitous here).<p>One of us added that they hope the West shifts to a three day week soon, so we can get 2 more days of work!<p>I know this misses the point about time vs. productivity, but thought I'd share that the attitude here is very different.
I think some industries are going to be "better suited" to this than others. But it doesn't have to be that way. If we could shift ever so slightly away from "Biggest Number at end of year - bigger than last years number - at all costs" we could increase staff by just a little bit and move just about any industry to 4 or even 3 day work week.<p>This and worker-cooperative-businesses. I've yet to hear a legitimately compelling argument against, especially when we see the results. (I mean, the arguments are typically, "They have problems, too!" and "Bob Votes to be CEO") Theory is great but how can you hold onto the theory when the experimental data is at least promising?
I never really understood the push for a 4 day work week here. As things stand, part time work seems really common in the UK anyway. Loads of people I know work 2-4 days per week for a variety of reasons. There's no stigma. It's already pretty normal?
From a macroeconomic perspective, this doesn’t seem like the best time to be trying this sort of thing. We already have a labour shortage and a lot of inflationary pressure!<p>If we had high productivity, high unemployment, and low inflation, then introducing a 4 day week would be a great solution.
I find the work week is often short to get bigger multi-person things done, and when doing them over 2 weeks the weekend in the middle really breaks the rhythm. A lot of the discussion centers on individual productivity - but so little of what companies do is individual! My dream scenario in terms of getting stuff done would be something like a 10 day work week, 10h per day (nice round 100h block) - and then something like a 5 day weekend
I've loved the idea of moving to an 8 day week, where two 4-day a week people share the same 7-day a week job, and use the surplus day to coordinate with each other or work on tasks that would be better with two.
> They argue that a four-day week would drive companies to improve their productivity, meaning they can create the same output using fewer hours.<p>The idea that there is a population-wide 25% productivity boost just lying unnoticed on the sidewalk sounds asinine to me. Strong claims require strong evidence and I don’t see it.<p>That said, I have worked a 4-day week before and it was great, but I took a proportional pay cut and wasn’t expected to somehow become super-productive.<p>Some more charitable interpretations of why this approach might be great:<p>* We can afford to take the pay cut and would be happier (and perhaps a little more productive) working fewer hours;<p>* Companies with a 50-60 hour work week might have pervasive burnout and therefore get a substantial performance boost by decreasing their workload by 20%, with “4-day workweek” being a better coordination point than “only work 9-5”;<p>* Optionality will be a good perk for employees allowing the small number of companies deploying this to get better employees (this doesn’t work if 4-day is widely adopted).
You're being sold "work less hours, get paid the same". In actual fact:<p>> “With many businesses struggling to afford 10% inflation pay rises, we’re starting to see increasing evidence that a four-day week with no loss of pay is being offered as an alternative solution.”<p>When compared to inflation, you'll get paid less. It says 10%, but wages have been frozen for <i>years</i>.<p>Worse still, you will still be expected to achieve the same amount in less time. The only difference is that they will expect your most productive hours without also paying for your less productive hours.<p>_You_ may be in a position to take a 20% pay cut, but as they mention, they want this to become the norm for everybody. As the cost of living increases less and less will be in this position.
My under-informed perception is that the UK is suffering from an overall productivity crisis, having prioritized other things for the last decade.<p>This resulting in inflation and a weakening of the pound, and with a lower quality of life on average than they would have otherwise.<p>When people produce less, then there is obviously less to go around. Will these folks produce as much in 4 days as 5? Maybe, I guess we'll see. Maybe they'll produce MORE. But unless they do, or find something economically productive to do with their extra time, the UK will have less as a result.<p>Will the farmers work less? How about those in the energy sector? Or medicine? Or construction?<p>I'll be happy to hear from people with better information who can corroborate or refute my perception.
At the startup that I work at the biggest complaint from customers is no 24 hour support, but my company doesn’t want people to work on weekends or work overnight. Doesn’t four hour week mean even less support? You’d have to deal with crappy AI - automated bots with canned response, awful self checkouts at groceries and restaurants, waiting even longer at DMV for an appointment, etc.
There seems an unnecessary presumption that this means 4/5th of the work hours, with an implication of 4/5ths of the output.<p>But a 4 day week can also be four 9 hour days. So long as management adjusts daily expectations to match, there's no need to expect lower productivity, or to demand a salary cut.<p>Overall though it's a fairly open secret that, especially in big companies, you can set a 40hr work week, but you're not getting 40hrs of actual work from them. And for some jobs this is just beyond people's fatigue limits anyway.<p>To hazard a guess, for in-office, the average would likely be around 25 to 30 hours. The rest goes into the ping pong table, chatting, morning coffee, reading HN etc.<p>So there's plenty of margin to lower scheduled hours and raise expectations during those hours. There's also plenty of room to give 3 days of rest in exchange for 4 days all-hands-on-deck.
You can already try that by taking 4-8 days (depending how many bank holidays are around) out of your 28 days and work for two months 4-days a week. I did so in July and June and it was a blast.<p>From my tests, as long as you manage other people expectations, nobody will notice or care if you’re not there in IT.<p>And it’s not only 4 days of work. It’s also 3 days of rest. It’s obviously for the same reason but still… it does feel more powerful once you feel it on yourself. Distressing is amazing.<p>Once you try you will never want to go back.<p>Tbh I already work 100% remotely with flexible hours I want, and as long as I deliver nobody cares how much I work. Why anyone would? Seriously, who cares? As long as value is delivered: nobody.
I suspect some of the gains found in the trial companies will be short-lived if /all/ companies transition to a four day week.<p>At the moment, trial companies offer a rare and coveted perk. They’ll attract a large pool of candidates for their roles, and they’ll choose the best. Generally speaking, the best from a larger pool are better than the best from a smaller pool.<p>Trial companies will also retain their staff more easily. Four day week employers are hard to find, so no one would want to give up such a rare perk.<p>But the playing field levels off when all companies offer this perk.<p>So I’d be suspicious of the results of this trial. I don’t think four day week companies will enjoy the same success forever.
There are likely several hundreds, if not thousands of companies already offering a 4-day work week or something similar.<p>For example, I work at a company called Forestreet (<a href="https://forestreet.com" rel="nofollow">https://forestreet.com</a>) and we already offer a 9-day fortnight.<p>The idea is that you condense your work week into 9 days, and take the 10th day off.<p>There are pros and cons to this model, but overall it's working very well.
An oft overlook topic is childcare.<p>And I'm not just talking about little kids, big kids too.<p>For those companies that went from 5 days x 8 Hours ... to now 4 days x 10 hours (8am to 6/7pm), what happens to children during this extra time?<p>Our entire society is based on the assumption parents end work by 5pm.<p>Who's going to feed and get kids ready for bed if the parent are now arriving home 2-hours later, which might be the kids bedtime.
One of the things I wondered was: if everyone generally works Mon-Fri 9-5pm. Then a large part of consumers are at work while everyone is hoping to meet their needs.<p>Maybe a roughly equal split of Mon-Thurs and Tues-Fri business will allow more freedom for consumers to consume on Mondays and Fridays.<p>Thus benefitting the <i>precious</i> GDP numbers by which everything seems to be judged.
I think it was Henry Ford that originally came up with the concept of a weekend because he wanted everyday people to buy motorcars for leisure time. So they needed to have some leisure time.
I wonder if a five/two day cycle is the balance that optimises production and consumption in a modern economy? Maybe the weekends should be longer… or shorter?
This type of discussion always leads me to believe that the current model does not work. I always had the impression that, on average, we are all or will be enslaved in some way, what differentiates are values and benefits. So, one additional day to do my activities, be with my family, or just do nothing, seems very fair to me.
> They argue that a four-day week would drive companies to improve their productivity, meaning they can create the same output using fewer hours.<p>I am very new to this subject. I am also skeptical of the claim above.<p>However, one assumes that if Guardian is printing the above, there is some ‘evidence’ that it might be true.<p>Is there any?
At my previous place we did half day Fridays. But there was MASSIVE overtime from Monday to Thursday. I don't want a four-day week where I'm expected to "compensate" by working for free. Companies should stop bullshitting their employees before offering a four-day week.
I think more companies should sign up for this. It would really help the employees. Others might say it's just one added day to the days of rest you have. But an additional day can go a long way.
So instead of developers working 3 hours a day for 4 days, they work 3 hours a day for 3 days. Because Thursday become the new Friday, which was already an "off" day.
Some progressive stuff coming out of the UK; there isn't much of it, as political chaos unleashed by Brexit remains all consuming for the party that runs the country, but this experiment was the largest of its type, and so far, looks a great success. Remains to be seen whether firms who make this commitment will be able to outcompete traditional '5-day-ers' in a recessionary environment, you hope they will but that will be the big test
"4-day work week brings no loss of productivity" -employee<p>"3-day work week brings no loss of productivity" -employee<p>"2-day work week brings no loss of productivity" -employee<p>"1-day work week brings no loss of productivity" -employee<p>"0-day work week brings no loss of productivity" -employee<p>"Yeah, that's why we're firing you." -Boss
Contrast the attitude here with the attitude from this guy:<p><a href="https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/12821/making-steam-the-life-and-times-of-a-u-s-navy-chief-engineer" rel="nofollow">https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/12821/making-steam-the...</a>
Having worked at a company that did a four-day week, I'll chime in that it was both amazing and eye opening. I say that as someone who had read Tom DeMarco's now-classic book Slack[1] long ago, after a lot of up-close and personal with the antipatterns described therein. Intellectually, I expected something(??) good but the reality was even more suprising. With a four-day work week, I was able to complete (solo!) a production website application upgrade (Rails 2.x to 4.5) in a very reasonable timeline, and <i>less</i> than I'd heard competent teams failing the same task elsewhere. This wasn't because of any "10x developer" nonsense - it was clearly because I had a /three-day weekend/ every week and came in on Monday clear headed and ready to HIT IT, BABY.<p>Let me be clear: I later realized that this project would have been a soul-draining death march at many other places I'd worked in my career. Exhausted just a few weeks in, with management hounding the team for schedule estimates <i>that can't possibly exist because management failed to fund maintenance for years</i>.[2] (There were actually rational reasons for this, in this case. tl;dr the project got renewed interest and investment due to a new business case.)<p>To those who lament on this topic about "devs (in country X) just aren't motivated these days" or whatever, let me suggest something. If you have poor clarity of purpose, poor giving-a-fsck about humans, or a number of other culture failings then yes, you may encounter problems. Your solution is <i>still</i> not to tie your knowledge workers to their desks. You need to fix the root causes of your underlying productivity debt, not pave over them with an overwork-butts-in-seats mentality which just makes things worse in the long run (<--- read DeMarco).<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Slack-Getting-Burnout-Busywork-Efficiency/dp/0767907698" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Slack-Getting-Burnout-Busywork-Effici...</a><p>[2]: Pro tip: "evergreen" ecosystems, especially young and rapidly changing ones like early-mid Ruby/Rails and a lot of current npm/JS-based stuff, often have a wickedly non-linear cost curve if/when maintenance and dependency updates fall off. Some of the most expensive I've encountered of this ilk is when /test infrastructure/ incurred a lot of past churn that wasn't tracked, but suddenly (cough) <i>needs</i> to be updated.
The UK wages are laughably low, so these corporations are doing no favours. The still enjoy record profits and their board members probably laugh that serfs even think that these corporations are being so "generous".
I want to support this, but I guess I just don't understand how the economics of it works?<p>Firstly, I would just note that wealth can't be legislated into existence. It has to be created against entropy, with effort. If something is effortless then there is no value in it.<p>So in an efficient economy where all labour was being used productively at all times it's basically just physics that a 4 day work week would reduce total economic output, and as a consequence lower per-capita wealth.<p>However, being charitable here, I think there are some nuances in the real world because labour isn't always used productively -- especially when companies are unprofitable due to high energy bills.<p>> “With many businesses struggling to afford 10% inflation pay rises, we’re starting to see increasing evidence that a four-day week with no loss of pay is being offered as an alternative solution.”<p>I used to work on the a high street in the UK and we'd often close an hour or two early in the winter if it was quiet. Reason being it made little sense keeping the shop heated and powered for us just to be sat around doing nothing until close of business. In those few hours (late on the day in winter, often when raining) the company was briefly unprofitable to operate and therefore closing early made economic sense.<p>I can only assume a lot of shops and restaurants are in a similar position in the UK today. So if you can do 95% of your typical business over just 4 days then this probably makes a lot of sense. But what I don't understand is that surely in the vast majority of cases it would make far more sense to close a bit earlier instead of closing for an entire day? If you're a restaurant for example, just operating at peak times could be a good idea.<p>But whether this is good or bad will massively vary from business to business. Companies which don't have peak days or times will see little benefit from something like this. Perhaps some companies could neglect certain customers and clients for more profitable ones. A plumber might just focus on jobs for wealthier clients for example then perhaps they can take the Friday off.<p>But what I don't understand here is this idea that we can reduce the work week to 4 days without cost as a general rule. Let's take a fairly typical company which has a 5% profit margin and where 50% of costs are labour costs. Eg, for every £100 in sales, £50 goes to labour and £5 is profit. Lets now increase the hourly cost of that labour by 20% as suggested... Now for every £100 in sales, £60 goes to labour and -£5 is made in profit.<p>Of course, big business with better margins will probably be fine but a move like this would likely bankrupt most typical highstreet businesses. The economics just doesn't make any sense without some plan to increase productivity by 20%.<p>And then how would something like this work in the NHS? Can we even afford to reduce nurses hours by 20%? Are we really suggesting that would have no economic impact or would we need to increase the NHS workforce by 20%? Could we even afford that?<p>But if you really want to reduce your work week by 20% the correct way to do it (imo) is to find more productive uses for your labour. If you can increase your income by 20% you can spend 20% less time working at no cost to your annual income. Or you can just take a 20% hit to your annual income. Most of us here could probably afford to do that now. We just choose to work because we're greedy.
I'm curious how much of the 4-day workweek movement is driven by religious obligation.<p>Jews rest on the Sabbath which typically falls on Saturdays, plus high holy days.<p>Christians rest on the Lord's Day, which falls on Sundays, plus holy days of obligation for Orthodox, Catholic, etc.<p>Up until now in the Western business world we've standardized on a five-day week which allows Jews and Christians to have their rests, and soccer moms to have their bloody soccer matches.<p>But with an increasing number of Muslims in the mix, there is a demand from Muslim faithful to rest and pray on Fridays.<p>Create a four-day work week and now you've got 3 days of rest, 1 for each type of Abrahamic faithful person to go pray.<p>Muslims already have won major concessions in terms of prayer times and spaces in office buildings, college campuses, etc.
Currency collapses a bit and the government plans to print money to subsidize 4 day work week. The world sounds more and more like a Ayn Rand novel by the day.
This will only work if the labor laws allow for easy firing. The 4-day week at a regular market salary will be very attractive and will attract top performers as long as the company has the flexibility to remove the underperformers.
I'll repeat a comment I saw here on HN some time ago about the productivity issue: if an asteroid were to hit the earth in one month, and there were a team of NASA engineers working to stop it, would you rather say them to work 4 days per week, or 6-7?