We're moving to a four-day work week at Beacon

I&#x27;ve been working 4 day workweeks for well over a decade now, took the pay cut myself.<p>As for the goal to maintain 100% productivity whilst cutting back on hours, I&#x27;m confident that they will succeed. In fact, they&#x27;ll succeed in this without requiring some kind of brilliant plan, as this recalibration happens automatically.<p>When you start working one day less, nobody will reduce your workload by 20%. You&#x27;ll have the exact same workload as before and now need to achieve it in less time.<p>There&#x27;s many ways to cross this gap. An obvious one is that a typical 5 day work week has moments of slack, depending on the culture. Friday after lunch is where productivity sinks in many offices. Wednesdays are also slower as it&#x27;s typically the first moment in the week where things are running (planned, prepared, on track). In a 4 day work week you sacrifice this breathing room, the 4 days become more compressed.<p>Another natural change is to take a more aggressive stand in rejecting non-sense. Excess meetings, unimportant emails, etc. This works very well and is extremely effective for the simple reason that you MUST. As such this time compression is a blessing, a cleansing mechanism for yourself and the organization.<p>You&#x27;ll be amazed at how much time you can win back. Let&#x27;s say you do need to attend a meeting. It&#x27;s a 1 hour meeting. You&#x27;re needed in the meeting. Go in and say you only have 20 mins. As if by sheer magic, what needed to be discussed gets done in 20 mins. Without this forced &quot;budgeting&quot;, people would just fill the hour with bullshit.<p>Counter intuitive, but by being rigid instead of elastic, you maximize value.

This is part of a wider scheme in the UK whereby 60 firms and 3000 employees are piloting 4 day weeks.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;2022&#x2F;apr&#x2F;04&#x2F;thousands-of-uk-workers-to-take-part-in-four-day-week-trial" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;2022&#x2F;apr&#x2F;04&#x2F;thousands-o...</a><p>From the article:<p>Employees from a wide range of businesses and charities are expected to take part in the scheme, which will run initially from June to December, including the Royal Society of Biology, the London-based brewing company Pressure Drop, a Manchester-based medical devices firm, and a fish and chip shop in Norfolk.<p>It comes as the push for companies to adopt a shorter working week – crucially with no loss of pay while aiming for higher productivity – gains momentum as a way of improving working conditions.

I wish them luck. I understand their need to have folks in the office, and this is one way to make that more attractive.<p>But it is only <i>one</i> factor. Good management, strong teams, and a whole lot of &quot;soft&quot; stuff is even more important than beanbag chairs and foozball tables. The &quot;good management&quot; part is where most companies go pear-shaped. I wouldn&#x27;t want to go to Buckingham Palace every day, if I hated the people I worked with&#x2F;for, and felt like my work was being treated badly[0].<p>Although I work exclusively at home, and have no desire to ever dress &quot;business casual&quot; again, I think that a <i>good</i>* office environment can be extremely conducive to great work.<p>* <i>As in &quot;not like 99% of today&#x27;s offices.&quot;</i><p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dilbert.com&#x2F;strip&#x2F;1996-06-02" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dilbert.com&#x2F;strip&#x2F;1996-06-02</a>

I work a four-day week (80% time, not imagining 4-10s) as a software engineer at a non-profit academic organization. For a paycut basically, I make 80% of what I think of as my &quot;actual&quot; salary.<p>I have managed to do this at a succession of several jobs now. When I briefly tried to go back to 5 days, it was really hard. It seems insane to me now that anyone works 5 days a week. (And I do know plenty of people work even more, and I am very lucky).<p>Fridays are for doctor&#x27;s appointments and car repair and grocery shopping and errands. Which probably does mean I&#x27;m away from &quot;work hours&quot; for these things less than I would be full-time, I just schedule such things for Fridays where possible. In general, I am pretty convinced that I&#x27;m at least 90% as productive on 80% time as I would be on 100%, maybe more.<p>Working at non-profit academic, I&#x27;m definitely not making my &quot;market&quot; salary. I could be making a lot more than I am now, even at 80% of a salary, at various more typical organizations. But I&#x27;m not sure how viable the 4-day week is with potential employers -- even if I&#x27;m willing to take a paycut to 80% of salary, which I am! Unlike the OP which is giving everyone a 4-day week at full salary? My impression is that most high-paying software engineering jobs&#x2F;organizations are not going to let you do 4-days a week? Which is crazy when they could get me for 80% of the cost with most of the productivity -- but I guess the high-paying organizations aren&#x27;t exactly trying to save money on salary.<p>I really don&#x27;t think I&#x27;d go back to 40-hour-a-week-standard unless I had to.

If you were explaining the world to an alien, it would be hard to justify the lack of diversity in working arrangements. I applaud any such non standard option in the labor market - may your office be full of good fits!

We&#x27;ve been doing this (4day x 8hr) at Monograph (monograph.com) for much longer than I&#x27;ve been at the company. I like to think we&#x27;re a bit of an outlier since we take Wednesdays off. While this seems strange, it means that I never work more than two days at a time, I have time in the middle of the week to recharge, and I don&#x27;t totally lose context on problems I&#x27;m working on. We could argue that this means it&#x27;s not a true &quot;off&quot; day which may be true but I&#x27;m completely happy with this setup.<p>Tuesdays are the new Fridays, y&#x27;all.

Strange how many orgs discover that working less hours or remote increases productivity for most people. It’s almost as if unstressed “workers” produce better quality work. There was an experiment whereby cows were shown to give more milk if not stressed. Certainly the same applies to humans. When will companies learn that milking their “workforce” of their energy doesnt yield the expected results but quite the opposite.

Quick refresher on productivity in economic terms: decreasing inputs = decreasing outputs UNLESS tech or technique improves. During supply and&#x2F;or debt driven inflationary periods (eg. now), increased productivity = increased supply and&#x2F;or decreased debt.<p>What do these maxims of economics mean for a 4 day work week?<p>At Beacon, nothing*. But implement this at Tyson Foods, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Waste Management, the FX trading desk at JP Morgan Chase, etc. and you get 2-6% productivity declines &amp; some amount of increased supply-driven inflation unless you offset with new technology (eg. software, robotics) or techniques.<p>Celebrate work from home, 4 day weeks, flex-time, etc.... but understand that as these benefits carry costs in important (not all) industries. Also, the migration to jobs having these benefits, from those important jobs that do not, drives inflation and&#x2F;or illegal immigration and so-called &quot;white collar&quot; top-heavy joblessness risk during recession.<p>No free lunch, even on Fridays.<p>** Note: UK small business situation is concerning, even if it doesn&#x27;t apply to Beacon: &quot;Office for National Statistics (ONS) data, showing that 2 million (or about 40%) of the UK&#x27;s small businesses had less than three months of cash in reserves to support operations. He noted that 10% (or 200,000) were in grave danger, and 300,000 only had a few weeks of cash left.&quot;

I really can&#x27;t wrap my head around this four-day week trend. If the organization is focused on KPI&#x27;s so why does it matter if people work one day or four-days?<p>If the organization is focused on time spend no work (either in office or remotely) how can work be done in 80% of the time?<p>Really don&#x27;t understand how it works in day-to-day. It resembles the unlimited vacation days policy which was later found out to be unhelpful to employees.

I’ve mentioned this before, but when moving my team (design agency that helps B2B SaaS)to a 4-day work week, productivity increased dramatically.<p>Most businesses can move to a 4-day work week. If you’re an employer and you read this, just give it a try for a month and measure output.<p>Your limiting beliefs will most likely become weak opinions.

Four day work weeks sound good but since being remote from 2019 I could never go back to working in an office.<p>Seems like a case of one step forward, two steps back

Four days in the office :(<p>I mean you do you, but Bleck. &quot;You don&#x27;t have to come to work on Friday but we still want you to spend 12 hours a week crammed onto a bus or train.&quot; How else could you possibly write code or sit in front of a computer all day?

&gt; in the same way that nobody wants to go to a wedding over Zoom, we don&#x27;t want to build our product over Zoom.<p>It&#x27;s absurd to compare a once-in-a-lifetime event to everyday work meetings.

Sincere question: is this 4-day work week mostly an inflation hedge?<p>Anticipating huge real CPI cost increases, weighed against net productivity of people working from home, is the bet that you can net the same amount of value and productivity from existing employees in a 20% shorter period, and compensate for inflation by giving them time &quot;off&quot; instead of spending cash on a raise?<p>Not cynical, just a very wise hedge. I will probably ask this on other 4-day threads, as it seems like a very economical way to retain staff at the same net productivity without paying out cost of living increases. If the economy ever finds a new equillibrium and your company is still profitable, it becomes a tempting private equity target, as they could buy it and simply remove the 4-day week compensation and reap easy growth benefits.

My employer has been fully remote with half-day Fridays for 2 years. In practice, those half-days are worth maybe 20% of a regular work day, not 50%. I feel like we&#x27;ve already proven a 4-day work week can be effective and the only thing holding us back is an adherence to convention and expectations (by managers, execs and investors).

They say it&#x27;s 100% of the full-time salary, but the one open position they have is a full-stack JS engineer for the equivalent of about $66k USD. Is the market really that bad in the UK? That&#x27;s not even a good new grad offer in the US.

In quite a few countries the 32 hour workweek is already very normal, it creates a bit of extra scheduling work but nothing you can&#x27;t handle in a larger organization. For smaller companies this is a bigger problem because they don&#x27;t usually have the headcount to fill the resulting gaps and things tend to rely more on personal relationships.

I still don’t understand the 100% as productive in 80% of the time. The math doesn’t check out there unless the expectation is people are working 10 hr days Mon-Thurs. Even in that scenario, not everyone has the stamina to execute at that pace and it also makes it hard to recruit anyone with a kid who needs to navigate school dropoffs&#x2F;pickups etc.

I feel many people in tech and other office jobs have implicitly worked 4 day workweeks for years. During an average workday, how much time do you spend doing personal things at your desk (texting friends, reading non work-related online articles, etc.)? I bet that time aggregated across Monday to Friday adds up to at least a full 8 hour day.

In other words, another management team fails to understand that many of the best software engineers work most effectively in silence, and on their own for large periods of time, and that this is best done at home.<p>The obstinacy, arrogance, and stupidity of managers from these guys to Musk and Sandberg is incredibly disappointing.

Any large profitable public companies doing this? These guys raised $56M less than a year ago. Just curious who has proved the concept is sustainable without burning VC money.

I believe that a company that does 6-day work week for 25% higher pay would completely put competitors out of business... and considering the world economy, NOW is the time to do THAT.<p>Changing to 4-day work week at this time just shows how out of touch some people are. It&#x27;s only a matter of time before reality catches up to them.

So if this becomes the new ‘standard’ work week, which day becomes part of the weekend? Friday?<p>I see these stories all the time. I’m pro the idea. But it’s not going to work if one industry works Tue-Fri and another Mon-Thu and their customers are taking off Wednesday. That standard work week being _standard_ is a feature.

My last job (America’s Test Kitchen in case they’re hiring) did&#x2F;does 4.5 day work weeks. Friday afternoons off. Zero loss of productivity. For me it was a built in zero-guilt place to schedule my dentist appointments, rare in-person tasks at the bank, take cats to the vet, etc.<p>Of course, 4.0 days would be even better!

Is this better than a results oriented work week? And figure out your own schedule as individual or team.

Not sure what the big deal is with working a 4 day week. I&#x27;ve done it for years, but at 40 hours. It not hard at all to work 40 hours in 4 days, and I am very productive.<p>Advocating for working 32 hours a week as if 40 is hard? I don&#x27;t really get that at all. I know lots of people in other areas who easily work 60+ hours a week for years on end.<p>I suppose if all you want to do is coast along at a company that will likely get wiped out by the competition when TSHTF, it would be nice to work 32 hours, but if you want to get ahead, don&#x27;t set your sights so low.

France tried to limit work week to 35 hours thinking that all hours are equal and it would lead to reduced productivity and a need to hire more workers. It failed to have the intended effect except for factory workers. We are starting to have plenty of signals saying that 4 day work week is good for morale, happiness and not at all detrimental to productivity.

80% of work time at 100% pay doesn’t really add up when you’re paying £53k for a office-based role in London. For a mid level role, £66k at 0.8FTE would just be the same.<p>Sure, some benefits sound decent but also deceiving… pension match is nice but 6 weeks of holiday (+BH) is actually 24 days and getting £60 for each holiday day taken is £1440 a year that won’t rise with pay rises.

I would love to hear some stories of startups that have tried to implement a 4 day week… any examples?

Is taking the Monday or Friday off better?<p>I’ve always found Monday is a slow day for me to reload everything back into my working memory and get back into flow.<p>I wonder if this is why Monday meetings are good. So that everyone can be reinvigorated for the week ahead.

it sounds all nice except you will end up with company splitted to two parts working Mo-Th and Tu-Fr, because customers&#x2F;clients&#x2F;partners want to reach you at least 5 days a week<p>so while I would not mind having 20% income cut considering I work most projects for company which embrace more likely 996 scheme this would either mean I would have on Monday twice as much work as usual or i would lose these projects<p>this can&#x27;t work unless you are isolated company (hard to imagine the field) or there is nationwide law making this standard

4 day work weeks are clearly here to stay and a huge quality of life improvement but taking a 20% pay check reduction for it is absurd.<p>You are doing the same amount of work in less time, not less work. Company goals do not change, nor do their deliverables or expectations of you.<p>A reduction would only make sense for hourly employees (though I think the hourly rate should go up so the total weekly pay is the same) but if you are being paid full time, it should not matter how much time it takes you to complete your work.<p>You are paid for your knowledge, skill, and ability to deliver. You are not paid to be working a set amount of hours or days.

Wonder if school will ever switch to four days a week.

Can we spend the spare day going to school to learn about all the new stuff since we left school, or stuff we&#x27;ve forgotten?

The 4 day workweek. This is life just laughing at me for having the gall to try &amp; start my own company. 30 years on I&#x27;m still trying. Everybody else who just went &amp; got a job are now millionaires &amp; retired. I wrote a news publishing system 2 years before Elon sold them. I wrote the first Taxi app on iPhone. On my todo list for 2 years before Instagram was &quot;twitter with photos&quot;.

too bad they don&#x27;t do four-day <i>and</i> remote.

What I don&#x27;t understand about Europe is<p>1. They are facing a huge negative demographic dividend.<p>2. They are facing steep inflation, low energy and food security and lower economic growth.<p>3. High social security costs may not be sustainable in the long term.<p>4. Finance is crumbling and real economy is taking over. Monetary expansion had its run and is no longer the panacea.<p>How will they handle this and still emerge unscathed while competing with China and India and Indonesia and the likes.

This is escalating like the Gilette wars (3 blades, 4 blades...12 blades).<p>Soon you&#x27;ll only stand out by announcing the 3 day work week.<p>...and get killed by a team that just outworks you. How many pro-sports teams have switched to less and less training :)<p>I do hope all our competitors switch to 0 day workweeks...

Lol, what a scam, 4 day work week but you have to be in the office.<p>I live close to Shoreditch but preparation time and travel both ways is easily 2 hours a day (for some of my colleagues that would be 3+ hours a day).<p>If you went from working from home 100% 5 days a week to working from the office 100% 4 days a week results in the exact same amount of time, except you remove all the monetary savings from working from home (~100GBP in travel alone).<p>No thank you.

At <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.waiterio.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.waiterio.com</a> we are fully remote and we introduced 32 hours work weeks except for customer support which still does 40 hours a week. We track hours with hubstaff.com which takes a random screenshot every 10 minutes. It&#x27;s been a mixed bag. Half of the team kept productivity up and logged those 32 hours stably. Another half of the team, when left unchecked went down to 14 hours a week and very low output. I have still a lot to learn and I&#x27;m far from a great manager. I know perfectly well I might be the reason why a part of my team is underperforming and not working while I don&#x27;t watch. I too have dreamt of giving autonomy and see the team reach great goals on their own. Those dreams seem naive now given the much harsher reality I&#x27;ve faced so far. Given how all this announcement of reduce hours look more like self-advertisement rather than a justly curious trial in something new that might or might not work, I&#x27;m a bit skeptic the others are getting things done with the same budget and efficiency that I do. What if the others have a larger budget and hiring more senior team-mates? What if their efficiency is actually lower than mine? What if they have already fired all the employees that were not absolute workaholics? Frankly I&#x27;m not so confident of my ways. I&#x27;ll keep hustling and crawling my way up in the mud though. At least I know I&#x27;m not sugar-coating it.