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.
Up next: companies continue 5-day workweeks anyway, because they’re not even rational in their mandates. (See also: forced RTO).
This. I’ve been at my job for a year as a remote out of state employee. All of the sudden, they decided we needed weekly team meetings and virtual team building when we had none before. My job is not collaborative, everyone on the team has a different role and most things can be handled over email/teams. I like my coworkers, but we’ve been working great together without all this crap. Even my manager doesn’t like it but it’s being forced on her from higher up, half the time she doesn’t have anything to share at the team meeting that couldn’t have been a one sentence email.
Edit to add: oh and these weekly team meetings have cameras on required, when before any of the few meetings we had never required this. Seems like one of the higher up read some article about ‘building virtual teams’ and went to town without actually stopping to think whether it fits.
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.
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
I’ll believe the “it’s here to stay” shit when I see it. From where I sit I only see managers that want people in cubicles again 5-6 days a week while they can work remotely or hybrid.
There are some good ones out there. Where I work, they believe me to be irreplaceable. The truth is that I’m sure there are thousands of competent engineers that could replace me, just not for my salary, and certainly not also willing to move to a small town. They don’t want to pay full market rate for what I do, but they convince me to stay on by letting me work my own hours, full-remote, great vacation and benefits, etc. Ive been so productive since leaving office work that the entire organization now has remote work policies.
They’ve figured out that it’s cheaper to just make your employees not hate their lives and I’m absolutely here for it.
