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List of 200 UK companies that moved to 4-day working week

116 points by timermore 2y ago

timthorn 2y ago
Interesting quite how many of them are third sector organisations rather than for-profit businesses.
benjamoon 2y ago
Do these companies close on a week day, like they just don’t open on a Monday. Or do the staff just do 4 out of the 5 days, but the company operates all week and the team need coordinating so they have coverage all week? I’d love to do this at my place, but would want to close the whole business and I don’t think our clients would be happy.
- IneffablePigeon 2y ago
  There’s a mix of both approaches. I suspect most are the latter at least for customer facing roles.
- barryvan 2y ago
  The company I work for, Wonde, allows staff to choose the day. There's negotiation with the manager to ensure appropriate coverage across the week, and a fair bit of flexibility around swapping days around as and when necessary too.
- CapeTheory 2y ago
  Most of my consulting clients do barely any work on Fridays anyway and so wouldn't mind me reducing to 4 days at all.
- chgs 2y ago
  My company works 24/7. I don’t. Nobody does. Vast majority work “office hours”. Those working shifts tend to do 3 or 4x 12 hour days, those working flexible hours work when required. I might work on a Saturday morning to deliver a specific part of a project, or get a fault escalated at 11pm after the runbooks have run out, but then I will obviously be off for a day or two in the week in exchange.
janosch_123 2y ago
Lunio.ai also 4 day week but didn't find them on the list.
comprev 2y ago
Rather cynically I see this as "Companies who continue to operate at 100% but with 20% less staff wages"
- lfourunderscore 2y ago
  The subheader claims that they have done this without reducing wages.
  - comprev 2y ago
    When it comes to new positions the reduction in wages bill kicks in. Those employed during the transition phase benefit from full salary yet work 80% hours. New employees will get 100% for the four days they work while the company operates for five days. Employee wages are usually the largest expense in any business.
    - waihtis 2y ago
      Gee, are you saying wages are somehow tied to output? Why didn't anyone think of this before suggesting a 4 day workweek?
      - scarab92 2y ago
        Proponents pretend like 4 day work weeks don’t reduce output with all sorts of dubious motivated reasoning. A lot of it is “we can be more efficient” and therefore we don’t need to work as many hours, overlooking the obvious fact that if everyone can be 20% more efficient then logical thing to do is downside headcount by 20%, not keep 100% of the workforce at 80% of capacity.
        Arch-TK 2y ago
        It takes so long for a woman to go through the gestation period before giving birth. But when you get 9 women you can get 9 babies in the same period. But it still takes 9 months. I think the women just aren't working at full capacity for those 9 months. It should be possible to just get the 9 women to produce 1 baby in 1/9th of the period.
4ndrewl 2y ago
It wasn't clear as to whether this also included companies that allow you to work 'compressed hours' - ie a normal 37.5 hour week but in 4 days (start earlier, finish later), which is increasingly common.
MortyWaves 2y ago
I’m starting to believe the obfuscation and lack of information regarding “four days but actually working longer” or “four days with reduced hours” models is deliberate.
- scarab92 2y ago
  The “studies” surrounding this topic are laughably bad. The authors almost always have conflicts of interest. The studies are often funded and/or staffed by proponents of the 4 day work week. The outcomes are mostly subjective and self reported, which is problematic because employees clearly have a vested interest in claiming they are more productive than they really might be. They’re also short term, and dont address the doubt every executive has which is whether employees eventually mean revert back to their historical hourly productivity levels. Then there is the fact that they don’t bother controlling for how much work the employees were previously doing. Many white collar workers are underworked. If you cut their hours it won’t impact output, because they were bottlenecking on work availability not time. What employers want to know is not what happens in over resourced offices, but rather what happens in well managed offices where employee workload was already optimised.
  - lukan 2y ago
    "What employers want to know is not what happens in poorly managed offices, but what happens in well managed offices where employee workload was already optimised." What I want to know is, whether we can manage a society, where one part is not always overworked and the other part bored to death. But rather a healthy balance. 4 days workweek might help as a step in that direction, but I agree that there is way too much wishful thinking involved in those studies proposing them.
    - typewithrhythm 2y ago
      International competition is the interesting thing for me, if we can prove a 4 day week in any form would be similarly efficient, that could give a great incentive to hiring the top talent and convincing them to migrate to the nation's that standardized it. If it turns out that it's less efficient in the long run, then it would cause the whole nation to fall behind, reducing total comp possible, and leading to the most capable leaving.
skirge 2y ago
I guess companies were you already worked 30 hours (6 hours per day of effective work as in many "mental work" jobs). I'm not from UK, are any manufacturing companies on the list?
- PaulRobinson 2y ago
  They're either unrecognisable (so quite small), or where they are recognisable they seem to be charities or CIC (community interest companies). That latter group of companies are structured so that profit is not the raison d'être of the organisation, so work/life balance is likely to be considered a higher priority than squeezing every last bit of utility out of an exhausted workforce.
  - skirge 2y ago
    if you don't feel exhausted from time to time it means you potential is wasted. Community interest is important so it's important that employees at such companies utilize their full potential. If decision was made because of signs of burnout it means they needed more employees.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
sAggymEllenZ 2y ago
[dead]
herghost 2y ago
Speaking as a worker this seems like a positive move. Stepping outside that though - how is this going to impact the wider economy? The UK is in a tough spot. Partially self-inflicted, partially political, partially just the way things are now. Will this improve things? Will it help or hinder?
- yurishimo 2y ago
  Personally, I don’t see how it helps in their current political climate. Inflation and energy costs are a huge problem in the UK right now and that would lead to the assumption that people need to earn more. Going to a 4 day work week seems counter to the idea of earning more. Perhaps at the very high end (corporate management, etc) where companies can afford keep salaries the same without expecting more output, but at the low end of the workforce, there’s no way in hell that employers will pay employees for “unworked” days. So some people might have an extra day off, but if they can’t pay their rent, it doesn’t really help anything. Those workers will pick up a 3rd or 4th job and nothing will change. Unfortunate, but I think the UK has still a ways to sink before it comes to grips with the current reality and starts to climb out of it.
  - varispeed 2y ago
    There is also aspect of having 1 extra day and no money to do anything meaningful with it. UK wages are already poor and cost of living is insane. Are you going to spend that day in your sorry mould ridden flat with other housemates also skint with nothing else to do? Where do you even go? Shops are dead, public transport is unaffordable and state of it resembles soviet union near its collapse, entertainment, attractions out of reach. Sure there are some free things, but how many times you will go there before it is boring? So I don't know, 4 days at main employer and 1 day doing Deliveroo? Selling weed? Only Fans? You can tell UK is going downhill fast.
    - ojhughes 2y ago
      This is a bit dramatic, sure some people have to share a mouldy flat but most software engineers I know are doing ok
djtango 2y ago
Personally, I think some of the reality is that in a dual income household if both individuals work full time there's limited time to do life admin and some life admin can only be done during business hours. So in aggregate, many companies aren't getting 5 full days of work from their employees. Sure when you're in your twenties it's easy to give 6.5 days a week. But when you're two working parents with no help? Good luck getting 10 days of work consistently out of that family. I think parents in a 4 day work week probably have better focus because they know they have one day ring fenced for catching up on non-work things (when the weekend then becomes full time parenting)
- varispeed 2y ago
  It always amazes me that, for example, shops are open when everyone is at work. In my town, the shopping high street closes at 5pm. So when I finished work, I'd be back in my town at 6pm, where everything is dead. The only way to do any shopping is to drive to a supermarket that’s open until 10pm or shop online. It's like everything is catered to people who don't work.
  - barnabee 2y ago
    It's almost like rigidly enforced hours and a requirement to be in a specific building the whole (or most of) the time don't make sense…
  - truckerbill 2y ago
    It never changed from the single-income household era. And people wonder why the high street is dying.
  - Yeul 2y ago
    As they say in the Netherlands: Sunday is my fun day. Something astonishing happened in 1994: the first time a government coalition was installed that excluded any Christian party. Capitalism prevailed.
  - matwood 2y ago
    One of the complaints I hear about Italy is the shops aren't open all day in smaller towns. But, they are open in the morning and in the evening. Exactly the time you want them to be open. Until you internalize this clock it can sometimes be annoying, but makes a lot of sense.
varispeed 2y ago
4 days week sounds great, if you hate your job and you already earn less than you deserve. If you feel like you are underpaid, 4 days for the same money may actually sound like a win, until after a while you realise you are still underpaid and extra day is probably not enough to do proper moonlighting. Depend of work, 3 days break often means a lot of effort to catch up and refresh memory on Monday, that could lead to staying late anyways and probably create false economy. Almost like being smacked with a carrot.
rsavage 2y ago
I am co-founder of a 5 year old tech startup with 50 staff that introduced a 4dww / 32hr work week a little over 2 years ago. Since are a lot of questions surrounding 4dww - Thought I might be able to offer some insights. 1. “four days but actually working longer” or “four days with reduced hours”. -- We offer 32hrs work week, rather than the standard 40hrs in our home country. This is generally taken as 4 days, but some work 5 days with less ours (especially those with school aged children). 2. "What employers want to know is not what happens in poorly managed offices, but what happens in well managed offices where employee workload was already optimised." -- I am going to be biased but we spent 3 year with standard work week, and I think we were highly productive as an organisation, our internal metrics, output and surveys agreed with this assessment. After 2 years, we haven't seen any noticeable / measurable decrease in output or performance compared to 5dww, or since we started. 3. "Do these companies close on a week day, like they just don’t open on a Monday." -- We generally allow people to choose any day off they want, put have them put it in ~4 weeks before hand. Most people take either Monday or Friday, which means we always have some staff covering the days others have off. In smaller teams that speak with customers (sales/cs) they agree among the team who takes what days, and can trade, as long as we always have coverage. 4. "4 days week sounds great, if you hate your job and you already earn less than you deserve." -- We pay top percentile as other startup/tech companies in our country's HQ. Anyone joining us shouldn't feel they are being paid any less than someone on 5dww -- and that is because we expect their output to match those of others working 5dww. Overall we've found the move to be extremely successful at attracting and retaining talent with I believe helps us be significantly more productive than other startups I know doing 5dww. We have a few things that I think help with our 4dww, include remote async with very flexible hours, hiring worldwide, transparent salaries and virtually no meetings in engineering. One thing this flexibility allows us to do is ask our staff to be 'switched on' when they are working -- if for any reason they aren't being productive, we encourage them stop working, do something else, and come back later. We expect our staff aren't reading reddit, posting on hacker news, etc during work-time -- in return for the 32hrs we want to see it (almost) all productive. I believe this, along with staff dropped the least important work gives us a similar/same output as 40hrs. With the benefit that we've been able to attract talent that otherwise may have gone elsewhere, with a turnover of virtually 0%. Happy to answer any specifics about how we've implemented thing, or what I've seen as a co-founder leading a small (16 people) engineering team.
rednafi 2y ago
Just give me five days of remote work—that’s all I ask. My job doesn’t require me to add to the traffic, yet there are middle managers rallying for RTO to maintain their relevance.
- InfiniteRand 2y ago
  Unless your strictly monitored, 5 day work from home can become work when you feel like but respond quickly during office hours as long as you get things done, which is fine by me and my employer as long as the get things done and respond during office hours actually happens
- rednafi 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - scarab92 2y ago
    Companies don’t like RTO because most employees are less productive at home and will pretend to work rather than actually work. It has nothing to do with middle managers.
    - rednafi 2y ago
      Companies made record profit during the covid lockdown.
      - scarab92 2y ago
        Because demand and prices went up. Honestly, you’re approaching on conspiracy theory territory with some of your beliefs about how the world works.
Yeul 2y ago
36 hours is the standard in my country- it's called progress. A century ago it was probably 80 hours for everyone over 12 lol.
- amelius 2y ago
  However, the free market dictates that you will be outcompeted by anyone who is willing to work 40+ hours. So much for progress.
  - malfist 2y ago
    Please provide a citation for that
  - nemomarx 2y ago
    would you be twice as productive working 80 hours a week as you are at 40? surely there's diminishing returns, and it doesn't seem obvious that 40 is the sweet spot.
    - scarab92 2y ago
      Diminishing returns doesn’t invalidate their point. Working more hours will always produce more output, even if the marginal increase in output decreases.
      - michaelteter 2y ago
        That doesn’t consider the greater picture and all the costs. If the harder worker becomes dissatisfied sooner and leaves the position sooner than the worker putting in fewer hours, that increased employee turnover will result in lower company productivity and higher overhead. The net result may be far worse.
      - iterateoften 2y ago
        It invalidates their point because what’s stopping you from saying say “you can be outcompeted by someone willing to work 168 hours a week.” it’s not diminishing positive returns. Eventually you work so much the returns go negative. According to you it doesn’t matter if on the 49th consecutive hour the worker is basically dead and unable to come into work the next week. Overwork leads to loss of productivity and possible negative outcomes for the business if mistakes happen because of exhaustion. In the real world there is probably some equilibrium for maximizing productivity vs hours work vs supply of workers capable of working those hours to that quality consistently.
wslh 2y ago
Since 2003, my companies have always been structured to support a 5-day, 30-hour workweek, and most employees follow this model. I was fortunate to implement this approach long before it became a widely discussed topic. The reasoning was straightforward: many employees were also studying, and the complexity, and intense focus of our work, such as reverse engineering, made adding two extra artificial hours unnecessary. However, shifting to a four-day workweek would be challenging in our context due to synchronization issues. That said, some employees do work full-time, particularly those in operations and other roles that require broader availability to communicate with external parties. There are also situations where someone needs to stay longer to complete a critical task, these exceptions are inevitable, but having clear guidelines helps ensure they remain just that: exceptions. A related challenge, as highlighted by @rsavage, is the use of social media during work hours, especially in a remote setting. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to fully control, but what matters is cultivating a company culture that balances flexibility with accountability. The key is staying aware and making adjustments before things get out of hand.
crimsoneer 2y ago
Just like remote work, this turns into a culture war issue every time (and the comments turn into a cesspit). I really wish people would stop arguing and let the market show us what's actually more effective.
- IshKebab 2y ago
  The market is strongly influenced by the culture though. For example nothing now is actually different to before covid. The only thing that has changed is the culture - people like working from home and are less willing to give it up. Working hours is simply a negotiation between employers (who obviously want more hours for the same price), and workers (who want the opposite). Again culture has a large influence on that - it's very difficult to persuade people to work 6 days a week (in the West) because culturally we no longer do that. You can't ignore culture and just say "let the market decide" because culture is part of the market.
  - crimsoneer 2y ago
    Sure, but the point I'm making is that figuring out whether this stuff works is easy - you let companies decide, you let them fairly pay employees, and you see which companies turn out on top.
- isthatafact 2y ago
  > "let the market show us what's actually more effective" I am not sure what are the mechanisms for that. Would that simply be what maximizes short term profits? It sort of sounds like a suggestion to remove all restrictions on the work week so that the free market can choose the winning system. Why not decide instead to take a more human approach where people can work productively and still have enough workless time to rest and be healthy and also have time and energy for hobbies, family, exercise, etc.?
Neuronaut 2y ago
I recently saw a company that uses the 4-day week with 9 hours a day. Skipped right there.
- swarnie 2y ago
  That's the point... You cover your normal working hours in a shorter number of days and get an extra day off. My work offer the same scheduling option and i'd say 80% of the the tech team take it.
  - IshKebab 2y ago
    That's not the point. Most proponents of a "4 day working week" mean 4/5 of the hours.
ksec 2y ago
I think the UK Government should start first as trial and have 5 days working hours compressed into 4 days taking Monday off.
- nopelynopington 2y ago
  Well Keir Starmer famously said he would only work until 6pm on a Friday and the opposition were all over it accusing him of being a part time PM. The govt doing this would be political suicide, especially in the UK. Although we may see it as progressive, political opposition would absolutely leap on it
nopelynopington 2y ago
That link is giving me fake "file is ready for download" pop-ups and one scammy redirect the first time I visited. I think it may have had a malware injection
penguin_booze 2y ago
I'm personally indifferent to 4-day working week. If that works for people, and if that improves their lives, I'm here to root for you. What I root for even strongly, is for WFH to be written into law: what can be done from home, MUST be done from home. Treat people like adults. Office work for the sake of office work -- fuck that.

116 points by timermore 2y ago

Interesting quite how many of them are third sector organisations rather than for-profit businesses.

Do these companies close on a week day, like they just don’t open on a Monday. Or do the staff just do 4 out of the 5 days, but the company operates all week and the team need coordinating so they have coverage all week? I’d love to do this at my place, but would want to close the whole business and I don’t think our clients would be happy.

IneffablePigeon 2y ago
There’s a mix of both approaches. I suspect most are the latter at least for customer facing roles.
barryvan 2y ago
The company I work for, Wonde, allows staff to choose the day. There's negotiation with the manager to ensure appropriate coverage across the week, and a fair bit of flexibility around swapping days around as and when necessary too.
CapeTheory 2y ago
Most of my consulting clients do barely any work on Fridays anyway and so wouldn't mind me reducing to 4 days at all.
chgs 2y ago
My company works 24/7. I don’t. Nobody does. Vast majority work “office hours”. Those working shifts tend to do 3 or 4x 12 hour days, those working flexible hours work when required. I might work on a Saturday morning to deliver a specific part of a project, or get a fault escalated at 11pm after the runbooks have run out, but then I will obviously be off for a day or two in the week in exchange.

janosch_123 2y ago

Lunio.ai also 4 day week but didn't find them on the list.

comprev 2y ago

Rather cynically I see this as "Companies who continue to operate at 100% but with 20% less staff wages"

lfourunderscore 2y ago
The subheader claims that they have done this without reducing wages.
- comprev 2y ago
  When it comes to new positions the reduction in wages bill kicks in. Those employed during the transition phase benefit from full salary yet work 80% hours. New employees will get 100% for the four days they work while the company operates for five days. Employee wages are usually the largest expense in any business.
  - waihtis 2y ago
    Gee, are you saying wages are somehow tied to output? Why didn't anyone think of this before suggesting a 4 day workweek?
    - scarab92 2y ago
      Proponents pretend like 4 day work weeks don’t reduce output with all sorts of dubious motivated reasoning. A lot of it is “we can be more efficient” and therefore we don’t need to work as many hours, overlooking the obvious fact that if everyone can be 20% more efficient then logical thing to do is downside headcount by 20%, not keep 100% of the workforce at 80% of capacity.
      - Arch-TK 2y ago
        It takes so long for a woman to go through the gestation period before giving birth. But when you get 9 women you can get 9 babies in the same period. But it still takes 9 months. I think the women just aren't working at full capacity for those 9 months. It should be possible to just get the 9 women to produce 1 baby in 1/9th of the period.

4ndrewl 2y ago

It wasn't clear as to whether this also included companies that allow you to work 'compressed hours' - ie a normal 37.5 hour week but in 4 days (start earlier, finish later), which is increasingly common.

MortyWaves 2y ago

I’m starting to believe the obfuscation and lack of information regarding “four days but actually working longer” or “four days with reduced hours” models is deliberate.

scarab92 2y ago
The “studies” surrounding this topic are laughably bad. The authors almost always have conflicts of interest. The studies are often funded and/or staffed by proponents of the 4 day work week. The outcomes are mostly subjective and self reported, which is problematic because employees clearly have a vested interest in claiming they are more productive than they really might be. They’re also short term, and dont address the doubt every executive has which is whether employees eventually mean revert back to their historical hourly productivity levels. Then there is the fact that they don’t bother controlling for how much work the employees were previously doing. Many white collar workers are underworked. If you cut their hours it won’t impact output, because they were bottlenecking on work availability not time. What employers want to know is not what happens in over resourced offices, but rather what happens in well managed offices where employee workload was already optimised.
- lukan 2y ago
  "What employers want to know is not what happens in poorly managed offices, but what happens in well managed offices where employee workload was already optimised." What I want to know is, whether we can manage a society, where one part is not always overworked and the other part bored to death. But rather a healthy balance. 4 days workweek might help as a step in that direction, but I agree that there is way too much wishful thinking involved in those studies proposing them.
  - typewithrhythm 2y ago
    International competition is the interesting thing for me, if we can prove a 4 day week in any form would be similarly efficient, that could give a great incentive to hiring the top talent and convincing them to migrate to the nation's that standardized it. If it turns out that it's less efficient in the long run, then it would cause the whole nation to fall behind, reducing total comp possible, and leading to the most capable leaving.

skirge 2y ago

I guess companies were you already worked 30 hours (6 hours per day of effective work as in many "mental work" jobs). I'm not from UK, are any manufacturing companies on the list?

PaulRobinson 2y ago
They're either unrecognisable (so quite small), or where they are recognisable they seem to be charities or CIC (community interest companies). That latter group of companies are structured so that profit is not the raison d'être of the organisation, so work/life balance is likely to be considered a higher priority than squeezing every last bit of utility out of an exhausted workforce.
- skirge 2y ago
  if you don't feel exhausted from time to time it means you potential is wasted. Community interest is important so it's important that employees at such companies utilize their full potential. If decision was made because of signs of burnout it means they needed more employees.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

sAggymEllenZ 2y ago

[dead]

herghost 2y ago

Speaking as a worker this seems like a positive move. Stepping outside that though - how is this going to impact the wider economy? The UK is in a tough spot. Partially self-inflicted, partially political, partially just the way things are now. Will this improve things? Will it help or hinder?

yurishimo 2y ago
Personally, I don’t see how it helps in their current political climate. Inflation and energy costs are a huge problem in the UK right now and that would lead to the assumption that people need to earn more. Going to a 4 day work week seems counter to the idea of earning more. Perhaps at the very high end (corporate management, etc) where companies can afford keep salaries the same without expecting more output, but at the low end of the workforce, there’s no way in hell that employers will pay employees for “unworked” days. So some people might have an extra day off, but if they can’t pay their rent, it doesn’t really help anything. Those workers will pick up a 3rd or 4th job and nothing will change. Unfortunate, but I think the UK has still a ways to sink before it comes to grips with the current reality and starts to climb out of it.
- varispeed 2y ago
  There is also aspect of having 1 extra day and no money to do anything meaningful with it. UK wages are already poor and cost of living is insane. Are you going to spend that day in your sorry mould ridden flat with other housemates also skint with nothing else to do? Where do you even go? Shops are dead, public transport is unaffordable and state of it resembles soviet union near its collapse, entertainment, attractions out of reach. Sure there are some free things, but how many times you will go there before it is boring? So I don't know, 4 days at main employer and 1 day doing Deliveroo? Selling weed? Only Fans? You can tell UK is going downhill fast.
  - ojhughes 2y ago
    This is a bit dramatic, sure some people have to share a mouldy flat but most software engineers I know are doing ok

djtango 2y ago

Personally, I think some of the reality is that in a dual income household if both individuals work full time there's limited time to do life admin and some life admin can only be done during business hours. So in aggregate, many companies aren't getting 5 full days of work from their employees. Sure when you're in your twenties it's easy to give 6.5 days a week. But when you're two working parents with no help? Good luck getting 10 days of work consistently out of that family. I think parents in a 4 day work week probably have better focus because they know they have one day ring fenced for catching up on non-work things (when the weekend then becomes full time parenting)

varispeed 2y ago
It always amazes me that, for example, shops are open when everyone is at work. In my town, the shopping high street closes at 5pm. So when I finished work, I'd be back in my town at 6pm, where everything is dead. The only way to do any shopping is to drive to a supermarket that’s open until 10pm or shop online. It's like everything is catered to people who don't work.
- barnabee 2y ago
  It's almost like rigidly enforced hours and a requirement to be in a specific building the whole (or most of) the time don't make sense…
- truckerbill 2y ago
  It never changed from the single-income household era. And people wonder why the high street is dying.
- Yeul 2y ago
  As they say in the Netherlands: Sunday is my fun day. Something astonishing happened in 1994: the first time a government coalition was installed that excluded any Christian party. Capitalism prevailed.
- matwood 2y ago
  One of the complaints I hear about Italy is the shops aren't open all day in smaller towns. But, they are open in the morning and in the evening. Exactly the time you want them to be open. Until you internalize this clock it can sometimes be annoying, but makes a lot of sense.

varispeed 2y ago

4 days week sounds great, if you hate your job and you already earn less than you deserve. If you feel like you are underpaid, 4 days for the same money may actually sound like a win, until after a while you realise you are still underpaid and extra day is probably not enough to do proper moonlighting. Depend of work, 3 days break often means a lot of effort to catch up and refresh memory on Monday, that could lead to staying late anyways and probably create false economy. Almost like being smacked with a carrot.

rsavage 2y ago

I am co-founder of a 5 year old tech startup with 50 staff that introduced a 4dww / 32hr work week a little over 2 years ago. Since are a lot of questions surrounding 4dww - Thought I might be able to offer some insights. 1. “four days but actually working longer” or “four days with reduced hours”. -- We offer 32hrs work week, rather than the standard 40hrs in our home country. This is generally taken as 4 days, but some work 5 days with less ours (especially those with school aged children). 2. "What employers want to know is not what happens in poorly managed offices, but what happens in well managed offices where employee workload was already optimised." -- I am going to be biased but we spent 3 year with standard work week, and I think we were highly productive as an organisation, our internal metrics, output and surveys agreed with this assessment. After 2 years, we haven't seen any noticeable / measurable decrease in output or performance compared to 5dww, or since we started. 3. "Do these companies close on a week day, like they just don’t open on a Monday." -- We generally allow people to choose any day off they want, put have them put it in ~4 weeks before hand. Most people take either Monday or Friday, which means we always have some staff covering the days others have off. In smaller teams that speak with customers (sales/cs) they agree among the team who takes what days, and can trade, as long as we always have coverage. 4. "4 days week sounds great, if you hate your job and you already earn less than you deserve." -- We pay top percentile as other startup/tech companies in our country's HQ. Anyone joining us shouldn't feel they are being paid any less than someone on 5dww -- and that is because we expect their output to match those of others working 5dww. Overall we've found the move to be extremely successful at attracting and retaining talent with I believe helps us be significantly more productive than other startups I know doing 5dww. We have a few things that I think help with our 4dww, include remote async with very flexible hours, hiring worldwide, transparent salaries and virtually no meetings in engineering. One thing this flexibility allows us to do is ask our staff to be 'switched on' when they are working -- if for any reason they aren't being productive, we encourage them stop working, do something else, and come back later. We expect our staff aren't reading reddit, posting on hacker news, etc during work-time -- in return for the 32hrs we want to see it (almost) all productive. I believe this, along with staff dropped the least important work gives us a similar/same output as 40hrs. With the benefit that we've been able to attract talent that otherwise may have gone elsewhere, with a turnover of virtually 0%. Happy to answer any specifics about how we've implemented thing, or what I've seen as a co-founder leading a small (16 people) engineering team.

rednafi 2y ago

Just give me five days of remote work—that’s all I ask. My job doesn’t require me to add to the traffic, yet there are middle managers rallying for RTO to maintain their relevance.

InfiniteRand 2y ago
Unless your strictly monitored, 5 day work from home can become work when you feel like but respond quickly during office hours as long as you get things done, which is fine by me and my employer as long as the get things done and respond during office hours actually happens
rednafi 2y ago
[flagged]
- scarab92 2y ago
  Companies don’t like RTO because most employees are less productive at home and will pretend to work rather than actually work. It has nothing to do with middle managers.
  - rednafi 2y ago
    Companies made record profit during the covid lockdown.
    - scarab92 2y ago
      Because demand and prices went up. Honestly, you’re approaching on conspiracy theory territory with some of your beliefs about how the world works.

Yeul 2y ago

36 hours is the standard in my country- it's called progress. A century ago it was probably 80 hours for everyone over 12 lol.

amelius 2y ago
However, the free market dictates that you will be outcompeted by anyone who is willing to work 40+ hours. So much for progress.
- malfist 2y ago
  Please provide a citation for that
- nemomarx 2y ago
  would you be twice as productive working 80 hours a week as you are at 40? surely there's diminishing returns, and it doesn't seem obvious that 40 is the sweet spot.
  - scarab92 2y ago
    Diminishing returns doesn’t invalidate their point. Working more hours will always produce more output, even if the marginal increase in output decreases.
    - michaelteter 2y ago
      That doesn’t consider the greater picture and all the costs. If the harder worker becomes dissatisfied sooner and leaves the position sooner than the worker putting in fewer hours, that increased employee turnover will result in lower company productivity and higher overhead. The net result may be far worse.
    - iterateoften 2y ago
      It invalidates their point because what’s stopping you from saying say “you can be outcompeted by someone willing to work 168 hours a week.” it’s not diminishing positive returns. Eventually you work so much the returns go negative. According to you it doesn’t matter if on the 49th consecutive hour the worker is basically dead and unable to come into work the next week. Overwork leads to loss of productivity and possible negative outcomes for the business if mistakes happen because of exhaustion. In the real world there is probably some equilibrium for maximizing productivity vs hours work vs supply of workers capable of working those hours to that quality consistently.

wslh 2y ago

Since 2003, my companies have always been structured to support a 5-day, 30-hour workweek, and most employees follow this model. I was fortunate to implement this approach long before it became a widely discussed topic. The reasoning was straightforward: many employees were also studying, and the complexity, and intense focus of our work, such as reverse engineering, made adding two extra artificial hours unnecessary. However, shifting to a four-day workweek would be challenging in our context due to synchronization issues. That said, some employees do work full-time, particularly those in operations and other roles that require broader availability to communicate with external parties. There are also situations where someone needs to stay longer to complete a critical task, these exceptions are inevitable, but having clear guidelines helps ensure they remain just that: exceptions. A related challenge, as highlighted by @rsavage, is the use of social media during work hours, especially in a remote setting. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to fully control, but what matters is cultivating a company culture that balances flexibility with accountability. The key is staying aware and making adjustments before things get out of hand.

crimsoneer 2y ago

Just like remote work, this turns into a culture war issue every time (and the comments turn into a cesspit). I really wish people would stop arguing and let the market show us what's actually more effective.

IshKebab 2y ago
The market is strongly influenced by the culture though. For example nothing now is actually different to before covid. The only thing that has changed is the culture - people like working from home and are less willing to give it up. Working hours is simply a negotiation between employers (who obviously want more hours for the same price), and workers (who want the opposite). Again culture has a large influence on that - it's very difficult to persuade people to work 6 days a week (in the West) because culturally we no longer do that. You can't ignore culture and just say "let the market decide" because culture is part of the market.
- crimsoneer 2y ago
  Sure, but the point I'm making is that figuring out whether this stuff works is easy - you let companies decide, you let them fairly pay employees, and you see which companies turn out on top.
isthatafact 2y ago
> "let the market show us what's actually more effective" I am not sure what are the mechanisms for that. Would that simply be what maximizes short term profits? It sort of sounds like a suggestion to remove all restrictions on the work week so that the free market can choose the winning system. Why not decide instead to take a more human approach where people can work productively and still have enough workless time to rest and be healthy and also have time and energy for hobbies, family, exercise, etc.?

Neuronaut 2y ago

I recently saw a company that uses the 4-day week with 9 hours a day. Skipped right there.

swarnie 2y ago
That's the point... You cover your normal working hours in a shorter number of days and get an extra day off. My work offer the same scheduling option and i'd say 80% of the the tech team take it.
- IshKebab 2y ago
  That's not the point. Most proponents of a "4 day working week" mean 4/5 of the hours.

ksec 2y ago

I think the UK Government should start first as trial and have 5 days working hours compressed into 4 days taking Monday off.

nopelynopington 2y ago
Well Keir Starmer famously said he would only work until 6pm on a Friday and the opposition were all over it accusing him of being a part time PM. The govt doing this would be political suicide, especially in the UK. Although we may see it as progressive, political opposition would absolutely leap on it

nopelynopington 2y ago

That link is giving me fake "file is ready for download" pop-ups and one scammy redirect the first time I visited. I think it may have had a malware injection

penguin_booze 2y ago

I'm personally indifferent to 4-day working week. If that works for people, and if that improves their lives, I'm here to root for you. What I root for even strongly, is for WFH to be written into law: what can be done from home, MUST be done from home. Treat people like adults. Office work for the sake of office work -- fuck that.