‘A telecoms firm, a video games developer and a training company have become the latest businesses to join a four-day working week trial as scrutiny increases of work/life balance during the pandemic.’
In my experience most office based roles are more or less four days anyway. Friday’s always seem a very low productive day with people leaving early for the weekend. Very different if you’re in manufacturing or construction.
Nobody can be bothered with work on Friday. Might as well just chin it.
> They will start a 32-hour working week – down from 40 hours – in June, without loss of pay.
This is positive to hear – many of these “four working day” ideas seem to instead increase your hours per day just to balance it out. Actually having less working hours with the same pay will benefit people in immeasurable ways. There is more to life than work.
4 day working weeks are good in firms where your productive output is not directly correlated to the amount of time you spend, e.g. 2 hours writing good code is far more valuable than 20 hours of shitty buggy code that needs even more time spent to fix it. You can easily pay people the same to work less time and you might even get more output from them.
However it ain’t very good in jobs where time and output are correlated strongly, e.g. being a cashier in a shop where your physical presence at all times is very important. There you can’t cut hours without cutting pay.
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‘A telecoms firm, a video games developer and a training company have become the latest businesses to join a four-day working week trial as scrutiny increases of work/life balance during the pandemic.’
In my experience most office based roles are more or less four days anyway. Friday’s always seem a very low productive day with people leaving early for the weekend. Very different if you’re in manufacturing or construction.
Nobody can be bothered with work on Friday. Might as well just chin it.
> They will start a 32-hour working week – down from 40 hours – in June, without loss of pay.
This is positive to hear – many of these “four working day” ideas seem to instead increase your hours per day just to balance it out. Actually having less working hours with the same pay will benefit people in immeasurable ways. There is more to life than work.
4 day working weeks are good in firms where your productive output is not directly correlated to the amount of time you spend, e.g. 2 hours writing good code is far more valuable than 20 hours of shitty buggy code that needs even more time spent to fix it. You can easily pay people the same to work less time and you might even get more output from them.
However it ain’t very good in jobs where time and output are correlated strongly, e.g. being a cashier in a shop where your physical presence at all times is very important. There you can’t cut hours without cutting pay.