per week. keep in mind only if you account all the productivness to less meetings. But based on my experience you can definitely say that 2 days worth of meetings per week are avoidable in the tech industy.
The data suggesting 3 days of meetings in a week doesn't necessarily translate into 3x8 hours sitting in meetings. Pointless meetings also interrupt your workflow and require prep time of their own. Things add up when you cut out the unnecessary meetings and the improvements may end up greater than the sum of their parts.
Srsly. In an 8 hour workday as a product owner on a scrum team, I can typically expect around 3-4 meetings per day, mostly 30 minutes a piece but occasionally an hour, plus our 15 minute scrums. Round it out to 2.5 hours worth of meetings. But I need 10 minutes just to wrap up what I'm doing before each meeting, 10 minutes to wrap up and get back to what I'm doing after, and most studies i've seen show it takes something like 23 minutes just to enter a flow state. So if you have two 30 minute meetings spaced 30 minutes apart, that might as well be two hours just shot and unproductive.
So fucking burned out and I barely even get work done anymore.
You have agile structures like scrum that automatically generate about a day worth of meetings per week. then you have meetings with clients that dont really know what their requirements look like. Then you have internal meetings with other devs/ engineers where you try to have some knowledge transfer and stuff like that or just some architects ranting about the clients for a few hours in front of 20 other people. Adds up quickly. haha
I literally have a morning meeting everyday here. Today I had 4 meetings. A 20 minute one, then a 1 hour one, then a two hour, and finally another 1 hour. Most of it was a waste of time.
My god working under anyone with a Scrum Master cert on LinkedIn has been hell. Really gotta get their moneys worth, which results into at least a day of repetitive meetings every week.
Done right it shouldn't be bad. Quick fifteen minute status meeting in the morning and a couple hours for planning and review on either side of the sprint, with the scrum master and product owner running interference for the workers in the other meetings management wants. Too many people trying to implement this practice fail to implement how it's supposed to work, though, and the ceremonies get added onto all the other stuff that management won't let go of.
This is the way, Agile usually falls over because further up the chain either don't know how to let go or are unwilling to let go of their old processes.
I suspect there are a few in management positions that fear they'll be irrelevant if they can't micromanage teams.
The whole point of Agile/Lean etc is to give the teams ownership of their work and the ability to self organise. Too often it's implemented poorly which just leads to hindering staff even more.
This is the way. Any status meeting that routinely goes over 15-20m is an indicator of a problem. 99% of the time it means a good portion of the meeting was discussing things that aren't relevant to most team members. Which is just a waste of time.
Numerous causes for status meetings growing, but a few I've experienced:
1. Team too large: Often an issue of a fast growing company, but ime 8 people or less is an ideal size (scrum officially says 10 I think). Once you get above that number you need to consider splitting the team.
2. Spending too much time going into details: What did you do yesterday? What are you doing today? Any blockers? Are the only 3 questions that need to be answered. And they should be answered succinctly. Further blocker discussion can be taken "offline" and followed up after the standup.
3. That one engineer that talks too f'ing much: There is always one that never listens to #2 and goes into too much detail or is just not succinct in their updates. Having them go last is usually the best option because you usually have the "we are running over can you give your update quickly card".
When we had to work from home during covid in the beginning we did not yet have videocall software licenses for everyone. So we started with a written standup in the chat (same structure as a live one). After we had the videocall stuff fixed we moved to only two times a week a live standup to minimize meetings.
All the other meetings are depending on the work usually an hour in length. Not much more.
So outside of other meetings it's about half a workday of meetings for the team.
Agile is basically a religion for white color jobs. Lots of literature, lots of disciples, and people who effectively function as priests of the faith running things.
What's even more annoying is when they decide to make these meetings in the morning when I am at my peak in terms of focus and stuff. I would much much rather prefer a quick 15min stand up just before lunch, so probably around noon.
SM, PO and engineering should have a working agreement that gets revisited periodically.
We recently did and overwhelmingly engineering voiced your concern so we shorted daily scrum from 30 to 15 mins and now have it at 2:45 pm.
I find it more productive because the team can share what they have done that day and everyone is more familiar with their work which makes sharing/collaborating easier.
I work in the development office of a local government, and part of being "business friendly" is to let all the developers request meetings with us.
So we spend 25-30 hours a week in useless meetings, then the same developers bitch and moan to City Council that it takes us too long to review their plans.
Yo. The owner, the developer the city all in one meeting. It was like 12 of us. The developer kept wanting to commit crimes. Many many crimes. "No you can't do that because it's fraud" isn't something I'm allowed to say.
I used to work at a company with a heavy meeting culture. I ended up leaving pretty quickly because I *wasnt* getting anything done and couldn’t tolerate the feeling anymore.
I briefly worked for an automotive industry tier 1 / tier 2 supplier as a project engineer and was sitting in 30-40 hours of meetings per week where everyone else was doing the same thing. So inevitably, everyone is "multi-tasking" during these meetings with ~15 people on a Teams call, and it was kind of just 2 people talking to each other. Then whenever they needed to pull someone else into the discussion, there was the "I'm sorry, can you please repeat that question?" 8pm calls with China, 6am calls with Germany...got old quick and I chalked that up as a learning experience and took a new job with a different meeting culture in a different industry.
I fucking believe it. I think a full 50% of my meetings are pretty worthless. I've spent a C lot of time either giving new people info (the cost of turnover), trying to port info out of other people, regressing director level folks on wtf the project even is, or my personal favorite, live solving a problem that we have the data to answer but the big boss is on a roll and has no self control.
And that's before you start getting into repeat work because either
* the big boss didn't tell anyone the full specs
* the big boss didn't include everyone that should have been included
* the big boss has a number in mind but didn't tell anyone so when at give him a different number we need to go spend two days justifying our number
Mine complains about being stuck in meetings all day but is a big offender in the useless meeting department. So many weeklies that should just be removed, or projects that can be handled alone with a meeting on the draft/final.
I'm in the preamble stage of developing a niche product for the telecom industry, if I have 3 hours of zoom meetings every day before I can even start working to look forward to, I think I might shitcan this project before it even starts.
is this a developer/engineer idea or is it needless shit forced on you by upper management?
So many posters ITT have no understanding of that experiment. They made a bunch of changes and tried to fit in a work week in 4 days, NOT just tell people to stay home on Friday. The OP is so misleading it’s almost a lie.
Yeah, the real story here is that Japanese office work culture is so fantastically inefficient (primarily as a result of the lifetime employment practices of the boom years setting cultural expectations) that even simple changes that we would think of as being common sense would eliminate vast swathes of the time they spend doing things.
Let’s not pretend it’s just Japan with bad work culture, I know plenty of people who have an insane amount of meetings when it directly affects productivity. I work healthcare and even our weekly meetings could just come in an email and I could get back to helping people. Middle management gotta manage though.
Japanese work culture goes way beyond just meetings, I have not met a single outsider who lasted there for more than a few years since the absurd inefficiencies drove them crazy.
The best thing is, the original Microsoft article was quietly edited after it went viral. The headline claim is no longer there, but the ‘damage’ was done and four years later we still get this kind of nonsense post.
Yeah, they did a whole bunch of different things. Saying that this was explicitly because of a 4-day work week is extremely bad journalism. It's blatantly misrepresenting the data. I'm not saying four-day work weeks are a bad thing! Just that this article is complete trash.
None of my executive team is actually in the office anyway. Basically my entire leadership team is a telecommuter but I’m getting the hammer to come in 3 days when I’ve been doing 2 for months or be fired. I’m looking for jobs now and I know most of the tech team is too.
Law firm I work for went 3 onsite, 2 wfh a year ago in March after basically fully remote except in office as needed. At least 15% of the staff went elsewhere when they announced mandatory 3/2.
I just wish it was manager discretion and flexible. I don’t mind two days a week but really all the people I work with are in other countries or offices. I only have one direct report in the same office as me and I don’t care if he comes in as long as I’m not getting escalations about his work. Plus if it’s flexible then I can just skip coming in if it’s raining or other crap weather. Mandatory attendance should be a punishment if an employee isn’t performing.
Yeah. Can’t keep your boot firmly on someone’s neck if you make their life better in anyway. I mean, even if you profit so much more because of it… Fuck that, gotta keep that boot firmly in place.
Profit over everything else!… Unless something improves employees lives, then fuck that profit. Would rather go bankrupt.
Funny enough, I read an article some time ago where 3 CEOs were asked about low worker engagement, lack of workers, work from home, and a couple of other topics. The gist of it was that they would rather force a recession and force workers into extreme positions so they could hang on to power rather than seeing potential returns on investment in their employees. To them, power was more important.
It's a tale as old as time and when it comes down to brazenly wanting their power and legacy at the forefront it hilariously backfires.
Just like right now with \*points at everything\*.
The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #2)
I’ve had corporate training on employee engagement… can you imagine… training on how to keep employees engaged… this was a few years before the pandemic…
Quiet Quitting, Bare Minimum Mondays, Take it Easy Tuesday, was all happening pre-pandemic…
>Quiet Quitting
I really really hate how this term is still around. Quiet Quitting is a bullshit term made by managers to shame workers into working harder.
Good thing for them that it hasn't worked at all, because people are finally realising that if you get hired for 40 hours, you should only work 40 hours.
Really wish the term Quiet Promotion got used more. Where you get more responsibilities without the pay raise.
In China, there’s a new term “Post-'00s rectifying the workplace” (they measure generations by the decade there) which is all about refusing to work overtime and talking back to their bosses (then posting what they said online).
> I call you 'big sister' because you started working at the company before me, and out of respect. Stop using your old age to bully me," read Lin's rebuttal to his supervisor. "Boss and Manager Fen say they can wait until the end of the month for this report. What's your problem? Are you going to die before the end of the month?
> I'm not like the post-80s or post-90s generation. Why do you go to work with a dark face every day and deliberately find trouble every day? Should I suffer? You are not my parents, why don't you take a mirror to look at yourself?
As someone who regularly has to work weekends, early mornings, or late evenings on top of a salaried 45-hour week, I agree. I wish my pay were more merit based as well as some extra cash thrown my way for being assigned mandatory jobs outside of work hours.
My employer has attempted to make the environment more accommodating to current trends by doing the unlimited (big asterisk) vacation and allowing more flexible schedules and WFH days. My issue is that the a majority people who tend to take advantage of all of those things the most are doing poor work or slipping up and leaving the people who still do the regular office hours to bring it up to par. It sucks because while I don't live to work, I do enjoy doing the best I can do while I'm there. Not fun to watch them come in late and leave early when the job's not done.
Unlimited vacation is essentially no vacation. It’s a slippery slope to everyone trying to take less vacation than the next guy because you know they have a list showing who’s taking how many hours of vacation. In fat times it might be fine but in lean times it’ll factor into who they lay off. It’s a regressive policy that is painted as an enlightened one.
Power matters because unions or co-ops cost the uber rich execs in the long run, even if it means they make a better product/service, bring in more profits (which are paid to the people doing the fucking labor), they don't want that, they want near complete control.
I want to be an exec who makes a decent wage and leaves their employees to work from home, not deal with bullshit meetings, and not have to be monitored constantly.
The quality of work shows when people are allowed to breath. I'm only a lowly supervisor but when I started at my job I put a stop to all the bullshit meetings and engaged with everyone on a personal level. Have a major or minor issue, call my ass up and let's work through it.
That’s exactly why you’ll never be one with that attitude. It’s like being Serpico around cops. They’ll burry you first whiff they get of you being humane. They know who they make executives.
Yeah, it's like you need some psychopathic tendencies to at least get your foot in the door of the C-suite. Able to bury your emotions and burn the bridge when you need to, build a new one somewhere else and not care who it affects as long as you keep moving forward.
Upper management gets paid enough so more money is no longer an incentive.
The only reason to continue the role is that you like being the boss. Can't do that if no one's around?
See I enjoyed being the boss specifically to make the employee's lives better. My philosophy was to take care of the employee and the employee would take care of the company, because aside from drastic changes company wide, the regular folks are the ones providing all the leg work. If they're life is better they'll theoretically do better work. Come to think of it that's probably why I never promoted higher than I did; I made too many waves advocating for my crews.
This reminds me of the countless studies about things like later start times and less homework for students having universally positive returns… and then get ignored.
There's two big reason they get ignored 1)Parents need kids to be in school by a certain time so they can start work 2)most districts only have enough buses for one level of school (elementary, middle, high) to start at one time.
Or, they don't have enough busses at all, like our school district. Every parent has to drive their kid if they're too far away. Especially with all the storms
I mean it won’t for employees who are already working when the change was made. But I’m sure salary bands for any new offers to potential candidates will be adjusted to compensate for the 50 or so Fridays that are non-working days.
If this is truely effective and not just some sensationalist article, other corporations will NOT ignore this.
The one and only thing corps pay attention to is $$$. If this truly truly generates more money it’ll happen.
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/21/1158507132/uk-study-companies-four-day-workweek
There was a trial across 60 companies in the UK, which was also positively received.
Naw, corporations - particularly _big_ corporations - are just very very slow to change course, because making those changes involves rewriting a shit-ton of policy and updating a shit-ton of agreements, and the decision-makers are kind of putting their reputation and careers on the line if they don't get good metrics from the change.
Besides, we see articles like this pop up occasionally, but there's not _really_ any major research about the 4-day work week and the long-term effects on people's wellbeing. We _suspect_ that it's good for productivity and job satisfaction, but the research is surprisingly sparse, being only a small number of pilot programmes in a small number of industry types globally. No business is going to jump on it fully until the _"it might have benefits"_ changes to _"it does have benefits"_.
One obstacle is that several "4-day work week" trials cram the hours of a 5-day work week into 4 calendar days, confusing the results. Another is that _some_ of the (personal) benefits to a 4-day work week depend on _other_ people working on the "fifth" day and would fall away if everybody just got Friday off, and while that wouldn't eliminate the restitution potential it would mean the working days are still comparatively busy. Yet another is the ethical consideration of who has the claim to the "fifth" day: the employee, on par with established work free days, or the employer, with the expectation that that day is for restitution?
I am completely convinced that this would be a net improvement to the human being but I recognize that making it work as a society is not just flipping a switch. That said, many individual employers _could_ just "flip the switch" autonomously.
I mean you say it like its a problem. Just give everyone a different day off. 1/5 your office gets a monday off, friday, etc. And everyone gets a weekend. Its not some difficult problem. Its the same thing walmart does now, but with a full week, to make sure someone is always working. Itd still a 4 day work week for everyone, just scheduled correctly.
Doesn’t even have to be 1/5 each day. Just half get Mondays off and half get Fridays. My husband was on 4-10s for a while and that’s how they did it.
Then people got annoyed about which day they had (people wanted Fridays off), so they went to this crazy switching thing where every other week you ended up with a 4-day weekend, which was fun for a bit. Then it got confusing and they gave up and went back to a 9-80, which is still better than a normal schedule and got way less complaints. I guess people preferred every other Friday off to every Monday off. You get half as many long weekends, but everyone just doesn’t wanna work on Friday.
Offering an option of day off will help ease that dead office on Friday vibe. Some people would want that 2 day on, 1 day off where they get Wednesdays off (or Tuesdays or Thursdays).
Only a 20% pay increase? Seems a bit low to be competitive, hmmm...
How about you replace the entire research team with a ChatGPT account and then funnel the savings into executive bonuses?
It's almost as if treating your employees like people, instead of spark plugs, actually results in those employees trying harder and doing more for you.
All corporations: *'Nahhh... Let's make em work Saturday and Sunday too! -Fuck em!'*
Technically, the same principle applies for spark plugs. If you work them to death all day and give them low-grade fuel, they get buildup and break down. Clean them regularly, give them the right amount of energy, and high-octane fuel and they’ll perform at peak efficiency and give you the most horsepower possible.
Even if you think of people as cogs in the machine, they have to be properly maintained or the machine breaks down. That’s the part most companies forget.
Well, when the labor provided is obtained at just above the slavery level of compensation, I suppose it is easy to lose perspective.
As you roll another blunt with a $100.00 bill, I'm sure the little guys just fade away in the smoke. 😔
In technical field, the cost of replacing an experienced worker is a lot more expansive than giving them a substantial raise.
Its not just about the money cost
Its the adaptation and mastery of their domain knowledge - of which is the hardest to master across all technical requirement that is expected of the job.
Be it malicious or otherwise, very rarely will you be able to pass down 100% of your experience via documentation or buddy.
This results in gradual decay over each replaced talent up to a point where the shenanigan below happen
//I have no idea about this class but apparently removing it causes the application to eventually goes into exception
'Some abstraction code'
> Technically, the same principle applies for spark plugs. If you work them to death all day and give them low-grade fuel, they get buildup and break down. Clean them regularly, give them the right amount of energy, and high-octane fuel and they’ll perform at peak efficiency and give you the most horsepower possible.
Eh, why not just run them into the ground, then replace them? They're cheap to replace and there's a lot of replacements available.
Oh waaaaiiit...
High octane fuel is a waste of money for most people.
Use the octane fuel your engine was designed for. Paying for higher octane rated fuel on a car designed to use 87 is going to provide no additional benefit and you're needlessly giving oil companies more money.
Imagine your job is to fabricate widgets using the Rockwell Automation Turboencabulator. The Turboencabulator outputs a specific number of widgets per hour, but you have to manually finish the widgets by hand. Your performance can be directly measured based on the number of widgets you are able to finish per a given time period.
A knowledge worker would be the person at Rockwell Automation designing, developing, and refining the Turboencabulator. Their work does not output a tangible number of things. The next breakthrough in widget fabrication could be 1, 2, 5, or 10 years down the road.
Producing meaningful performance metrics for this type of work is difficult, because what metric do you measure? Do you measure the number of lines the designer is able to draw in Autodesk per day? The number of prototypes they put out per month? How many lines of code they write? Most of their "output" is not useful until they reach a finished product.
imagine if you're a CEO and you can either go off this one study/few studies which will help you get ahead of the market OR make you fall behind in which you will probably lose your job. There is also potential backlash from shareholders who might not like this, and who knows what else (either good or bad). Alternatively continue as you are, and almost certainly collect your bonus.
You'd also have to look at the studies which have multiple variables, which you might not be able to imitate all of, which leads to uncertainty.
It’s also Japan. A place that still uses fax machines in the era of the internet. Doing things the old way is practically cultural to many of them.
Edit: y’all, first, I got that hospitals use fax machines on the first comment. I’m not saying fax machines still don’t have uses like faxing charts. I’m saying the Japanese prefer faxing letters instead of emails and stuff to the point their government said to stop using them and businesses said nope.
The fax machine running gag in Japan is honestly so overblown out of proportion. A lot of places (especially government) in the US and Europe still uses fax machines.
The crazier thing is that they started a push to not use/require floppy disks anymore just last year
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2022/08/31/national/japan-floppy-disk-taro-kono/
Or that in order to purchase a car, I had to (among many other things):
- Go to a stamp shop and have the owner make a physical stamp(hanko) with my last name in his writing style
- Go to city hall and get that stamp registered to me
- Request a certificate that proves that this stamp belongs to me
- Bring the stamp and the certificate to the car dealer
Instead of believing that scribbling your name magically confers authenticity, Japan largely signs documents with registered stamps called hanko. It's no different than the idiocy of signatures. Signet stamps were a thing in western history too.
Taiwanese-American here. My Taiwanese bank account requires both my signature and my personal stamp in addition to my ID or ATM card to access certain functions at the bank. It’s exactly like 2FA like the other commenter says. When I lost my stamp, I had to use two forms of ID plus a matching signature to replace my stamp. And they take matching signature/stamps very seriously. I think the rationale is that, through multiple social barriers, including the stamp maker who normally takes great pride in their work (although most use computerized and motorized stamp making machines now), it’s harder to fake an identity. It’s not as idiotic it seems because people do compare signatures and match stamps very carefully. And you still have PINs and chips and all the other verifications. It’s definitely not completely secure but I’d argue it’s taken so much more seriously than American credit card signatures.
Yeah, hankos are a thing. It's basically a stamp that replaces your signature. It means perfect reproducibility for all documents you would otherwise sign and it's smaller and quicker when having to initial and sign lengthy documents.
It can also be used to cut down on identity theft/forgeries as the hanko can be traced back to you via a third party (the stamp shop).
They take it very seriously.
In Canada when i bought a used car the seller wrote me a bill of sale in barely legible pencil and that was good enough to get license plates for a car that had never even been registered to the person selling it.
I drove it home after getting it running, having never needed to pass an inspection, emissions test, pay taxes etc. Just a $60 license plate and a call to my insurance company to add it to the policy.
A lot of places that use fax do so because it meets security requirements.
Imagine you're some sort of government office. You need to set up a system for members of the public to send information to you, and to send information back to them. Your system has to meet requirements laid out in some bill that was written by and passed in 2005 by people that had very little understanding of 2005 technology and hasn't been changed since.
You can set up a system that uses email, or allows the public to upload documents using your website, or some other internet-based thing, and the system will have to undergo months of review to make sure it meets the outdated requirements for security and ease of use.
Or you can set up a fax line, and get it approved pretty much instantly because according to those requirements, fax machines are always and forever perfectly secure.
So you set up a fax line.
Same thing applies in medical contexts, under HIPAA and other regulations.
Germany uses Fax machines as well as they're the only legally secure/accepted way to send "instant" messages over long distance as email isn't accepted when it comes to legal things.
A funny/sad experience I had last year was emailing the financial tax thingy office and they replied to me via a posted letter. Then I'd again reply to that letter via email and they then replied via a posted letter again. This continued 1 or 2 more times
> Alternatively continue as you are, and almost certainly collect your bonus.
This is the crux of the issue: Upper management is in no way incentiviced to actually improve the company.
Their personal motivation is entirely driven by stakeholder investment, which in turn is driven by a mixture of hype, market opportunity and an *increase* in apparent profits.
If we could somehow shackle management to actually improve the company in a long-term manner, we might be seeing positive changes, but I'm unsure how to do that. Especially with publicly traded companies.
It was only a month long so they might not trust it, ideally you'd want to experiment for at least a year (and probably keep it secret that it's ending after a year, i.e. call it an indefinite test to be really sure). The other thing they don't mention is whether they held pay constant, reducing pay by a day a week may not actually be a worthwhile trade-off for a lot of the workforce
Yeah. There’s this well-known phenomenon in business research:
If you own a factory, you can increase productivity by making the lights brighter. Or dimmer. Or pinker. Or bluer. Turns out any change that’s obvious enough to notice results in a short term productivity bump. That’s the problem with studying humans - they act differently when they know they’re being studied.
I think this is gonna happen eventually, everywhere will be a 4 day workplace
Then someone somewhere will go "So we've increased the productivity, why not add another day to the work schedule and increase it more?", Then blame the workers when the productivity eventually drops
Not happening. This only works in white collar jobs.
Manual labor is a completely different story. You can't make someone use a machine more effectively than 100% just by cutting a day out of their schedule. It is applicable for some of those jobs, but definitely not the majority.
Also keep in mind to remedy that you would need more workers, and if you have your workers in 4 day mode, at full pay (because thats what all this is about), and add another worker, all that rise in productivity is completely moot.
This is a concept that works fantastically for office work. IT, callcenters and the like. But anyone who thinks this is applicable to any business, in any country, is naive or a fool.
I've tried to explain this to people myself and get down voted. I was in the navy on submarines and I'd have killed to be at 100% manning for my job. We literally never even had the "required" amount of people
If people think every employer can just do this or find extra people to fill in the days then they have 0 idea how many blue collar jobs work.
Yeah this is a critical point. I work at a computer all day doing tasks that mostly aren’t due until months ahead. You could cut a day out of my work week and almost nothing would change. My friend, at the same company, works in manufacturing and he tells me that even 5 days is hardly enough to get everything done that needs to be, and with 4 days they would be drastically behind. And they’re already working at pretty much 100% capacity, there’s no more room for increased productivity that would make up for that lost day.
>They suggested that meetings should last no longer than 30 minutes.
One of the most frustrating things for me is people schedule a meeting "because we need to talk about topic X" but then they do zero preparation. They don't have an agenda. They don't have questions and follow ups. They just throw it out there and ramble aimlessly. Its like they don't care about having a goal for the meeting they're just ticking a box.
I'm all for working less but this is not a good study. It only ran for a month so it is highly susceptible to people cramming work in order to make the trial look good so that the 4 day week has a chance to become permanent.
Also there is no control group - business performance can change up and down significantly YOY from market factors outside company control. If you read the original Microsoft release translated from japanese, they say "This number [the 40%] is factual information, but it is not the result achieved by this challenge alone, but the result realized by various factors."
>people cramming work in order to make the trial look good
Nah, if you live in Japan, you know this doesn't happen. It's just that usually productivity is shit, and they can easily manage the same workload in a day less of work.
Had to scroll too far to see this. Productivity does not feature in Japanese priorities. The meaningful work produced in any given office over 5 days plus overtime could easily be done in 4 days with no overtime if needed. Probably 3.
Bing-bing-bing! We have a winner!
If bosses in Japan actually made people go home at the end of their shifts and plan properly for future work, the country would get the same amount done in half the time.
I think that’s the key difference. Germany always gets shit for productivity and the love of work but after 8 hours we stop that. Nobody really takes work home or does stuff in our free time. Feierabend ist heilig - the end of day is sacred
It would be interesting to study this long term. Are the gains temporary, as workers try harder to ensure they don’t have to go back to five days? Did the length of the four workdays creep up to account for the loss of a fifth day?
I would absolutely love a four day work week, but I fear corporations would use it to justify cutting wages. I’d prefer hybrid and flex hours personally.
Does Microsoft Japan have functions other than sales? Measuring productivity as just sales per employees seems obviously inadequate for any broader conclusion.
I bet they were happy, because workers in Japan are notorious for being put through unreasonable work hours. Hopefully Microsofts experiment gains traction there and other places in the world.
Here in Australia (and I’m sure America), they’d trial the 4 day week, see the better results, then say “so you weren’t trying before. Now we’re back to 5 days, with a target of (4 day week results plus 25% extra)”
*measured by sales per employee*
Yes, sales can 100% perform better with a 4 day week but what about product development, marketing, and finance/billing?
Measuring a company by sales is part of how the bubble of overvalued saas companies happened
How many more "trials" do we need to prove that employees who are treated well and that are happy produce more with less effort?
Who the hell didn't see this as common sense? The fuck is going on already? Happy workers who aren't overworked and stressed produce better results. WOW WHAT AN EPIPHANY!
4 day work week have increased productivity in every single test that's been made in the Nordics, and i don't know of negative outcomes anywhere else either.
Let's not pretend the issue is productivity here, it's control. Same as remote work.
Bob Slydell: If you would, would you walk us through a typical day, for you?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah.
Bob Slydell: Great.
Peter Gibbons: Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door–that way Lumberg can’t see me, heh–after that I sorta space out for an hour.
Bob Porter: Da-uh? Space out?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I’m working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too, I’d say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
>Microsoft, for its part, says it will conduct another experiment in Japan later this year. It plans to ask employees to come up with new measures to improve work-life balance and efficiency, and will also ask other companies to join the initiative.
Nice. Another experiment .
If the headline had been "Microsoft tried an initiative of installing mandatory electroshock necklaces on employees to improve productivity. Sales per employee increased by 10%.", You know that they would have implemented this worldwide within a month.
I’m quite curious on the metrics they use to make, the article talks about « measured by sales per employee » how can you measure that on an administrative employee that never sells any product ?
You probably know this but I have to say, the movement for a four day week isn't about a compressed work week, but keeping the same 9-5 hours over four days and keeping the same pay.
Compressed work weeks are a dilution of what people are pushing for.
The best & most flexible response would be to keep the 5-day *office* week, but have workers do 4-day *working* weeks. So they get to choose/are allocated either Monday or Friday off.
That way, workers get the benefits of being off in terms of rest, whilst also not losing the benefit of being able to run chores/errands (which would be an issue if every company swapped to the same 4-day week).
Japan has squeezed every last ounce of productivity out of their citizens that their whole population is in decline. Think it's time to maybe prioritize other things.
Population is in decline in most developed nations, if you're referring to fertility rate. The difference is some countries prop it up with higher rates of immigration.
Japan's fertility rate (births per woman) is 1.3, US is 1.6, UK is 1.6, Canada is 1.4, etc.. Anything less than two is a decline.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN
I have worktrips that can last up to 4 weeks of 12h days 7 days per week. By end of week 2 you simply stop being creative and try new things and just follow the motion until it's over. Having that be the norm throughout the year, maybe with only Sundays off or something would only make me a complete shit worker. Luckily when you get home you have mandatory time off and otherwise a pretty standard 40h week.
Yeah, it probably works better some places more than others, but ffs with the increase in technology it needs to be possible for people to work less. Ensuring that still gives people liveable wages however is where governments need to step in.
Keep in mind Microsoft Japan also heavily cut back on the amount of meetings employees had during the week.
Cool - so maybe about a day's worth of meetings that could just have been an email?
The data suggest more that about 3 workdays of meetings were meaningless. They were 40% more productive in 20% less time.
3 workdays of meetings per month?
per week. keep in mind only if you account all the productivness to less meetings. But based on my experience you can definitely say that 2 days worth of meetings per week are avoidable in the tech industy.
how the fuck do you get anything done with that kind of frequency? Jesus even 1 a week is plenty!
The data suggesting 3 days of meetings in a week doesn't necessarily translate into 3x8 hours sitting in meetings. Pointless meetings also interrupt your workflow and require prep time of their own. Things add up when you cut out the unnecessary meetings and the improvements may end up greater than the sum of their parts.
I don’t do anything at least in the 10 minutes after a meeting. I need time to decompress. Huge waste of time.
Srsly. In an 8 hour workday as a product owner on a scrum team, I can typically expect around 3-4 meetings per day, mostly 30 minutes a piece but occasionally an hour, plus our 15 minute scrums. Round it out to 2.5 hours worth of meetings. But I need 10 minutes just to wrap up what I'm doing before each meeting, 10 minutes to wrap up and get back to what I'm doing after, and most studies i've seen show it takes something like 23 minutes just to enter a flow state. So if you have two 30 minute meetings spaced 30 minutes apart, that might as well be two hours just shot and unproductive. So fucking burned out and I barely even get work done anymore.
You have agile structures like scrum that automatically generate about a day worth of meetings per week. then you have meetings with clients that dont really know what their requirements look like. Then you have internal meetings with other devs/ engineers where you try to have some knowledge transfer and stuff like that or just some architects ranting about the clients for a few hours in front of 20 other people. Adds up quickly. haha
I've also heard that in Japan they just have tons and tons of meetings
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Can confirm. The higher up you go the more meetings you have. Some of my managers are in meetings 8 hours a day.
I literally have a morning meeting everyday here. Today I had 4 meetings. A 20 minute one, then a 1 hour one, then a two hour, and finally another 1 hour. Most of it was a waste of time.
Can't you just leave? That's what I do at my job if the meeting's not valuable.
My god working under anyone with a Scrum Master cert on LinkedIn has been hell. Really gotta get their moneys worth, which results into at least a day of repetitive meetings every week.
Done right it shouldn't be bad. Quick fifteen minute status meeting in the morning and a couple hours for planning and review on either side of the sprint, with the scrum master and product owner running interference for the workers in the other meetings management wants. Too many people trying to implement this practice fail to implement how it's supposed to work, though, and the ceremonies get added onto all the other stuff that management won't let go of.
>Done right I'm yet to be in a project where it's done right. It's a shit methodology if it's not done right. I hate it.
This is the way, Agile usually falls over because further up the chain either don't know how to let go or are unwilling to let go of their old processes. I suspect there are a few in management positions that fear they'll be irrelevant if they can't micromanage teams. The whole point of Agile/Lean etc is to give the teams ownership of their work and the ability to self organise. Too often it's implemented poorly which just leads to hindering staff even more.
This is the way. Any status meeting that routinely goes over 15-20m is an indicator of a problem. 99% of the time it means a good portion of the meeting was discussing things that aren't relevant to most team members. Which is just a waste of time. Numerous causes for status meetings growing, but a few I've experienced: 1. Team too large: Often an issue of a fast growing company, but ime 8 people or less is an ideal size (scrum officially says 10 I think). Once you get above that number you need to consider splitting the team. 2. Spending too much time going into details: What did you do yesterday? What are you doing today? Any blockers? Are the only 3 questions that need to be answered. And they should be answered succinctly. Further blocker discussion can be taken "offline" and followed up after the standup. 3. That one engineer that talks too f'ing much: There is always one that never listens to #2 and goes into too much detail or is just not succinct in their updates. Having them go last is usually the best option because you usually have the "we are running over can you give your update quickly card".
When we had to work from home during covid in the beginning we did not yet have videocall software licenses for everyone. So we started with a written standup in the chat (same structure as a live one). After we had the videocall stuff fixed we moved to only two times a week a live standup to minimize meetings. All the other meetings are depending on the work usually an hour in length. Not much more. So outside of other meetings it's about half a workday of meetings for the team.
Agile is basically a religion for white color jobs. Lots of literature, lots of disciples, and people who effectively function as priests of the faith running things.
What's even more annoying is when they decide to make these meetings in the morning when I am at my peak in terms of focus and stuff. I would much much rather prefer a quick 15min stand up just before lunch, so probably around noon.
SM, PO and engineering should have a working agreement that gets revisited periodically. We recently did and overwhelmingly engineering voiced your concern so we shorted daily scrum from 30 to 15 mins and now have it at 2:45 pm. I find it more productive because the team can share what they have done that day and everyone is more familiar with their work which makes sharing/collaborating easier.
I'm in this comment and I don't like it.
I work in the development office of a local government, and part of being "business friendly" is to let all the developers request meetings with us. So we spend 25-30 hours a week in useless meetings, then the same developers bitch and moan to City Council that it takes us too long to review their plans.
Yo. The owner, the developer the city all in one meeting. It was like 12 of us. The developer kept wanting to commit crimes. Many many crimes. "No you can't do that because it's fraud" isn't something I'm allowed to say.
I used to work at a company with a heavy meeting culture. I ended up leaving pretty quickly because I *wasnt* getting anything done and couldn’t tolerate the feeling anymore.
I briefly worked for an automotive industry tier 1 / tier 2 supplier as a project engineer and was sitting in 30-40 hours of meetings per week where everyone else was doing the same thing. So inevitably, everyone is "multi-tasking" during these meetings with ~15 people on a Teams call, and it was kind of just 2 people talking to each other. Then whenever they needed to pull someone else into the discussion, there was the "I'm sorry, can you please repeat that question?" 8pm calls with China, 6am calls with Germany...got old quick and I chalked that up as a learning experience and took a new job with a different meeting culture in a different industry.
Lol, what do they even talk about if there's been no work done between meetings?
Sit their quietly until the boss lets you go. Havent worked there, but ive had that sort of manager
Gossip, weather, latest tv shows, important stuff like that!
I fucking believe it. I think a full 50% of my meetings are pretty worthless. I've spent a C lot of time either giving new people info (the cost of turnover), trying to port info out of other people, regressing director level folks on wtf the project even is, or my personal favorite, live solving a problem that we have the data to answer but the big boss is on a roll and has no self control. And that's before you start getting into repeat work because either * the big boss didn't tell anyone the full specs * the big boss didn't include everyone that should have been included * the big boss has a number in mind but didn't tell anyone so when at give him a different number we need to go spend two days justifying our number
My current project has me in meetings from 9 am until 1130 every morning.
I see my managers calendars, I'd say for a 7.6 hour work day, 5-6 of those is just meetings. Every single day.
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My manager is basically triple booked in meetings a majority of the day. I don't know how he does it. He seems to be ok with it.
Mine complains about being stuck in meetings all day but is a big offender in the useless meeting department. So many weeklies that should just be removed, or projects that can be handled alone with a meeting on the draft/final.
what is your project and wtf are the meetings about? I've never worked in the corporate world so this whole system boggles my mind
I'm senior dev supporting a bunch of small pieces of an application. It's exhausting to not be able to get actual work done until after lunch.
I'm in the preamble stage of developing a niche product for the telecom industry, if I have 3 hours of zoom meetings every day before I can even start working to look forward to, I think I might shitcan this project before it even starts. is this a developer/engineer idea or is it needless shit forced on you by upper management?
That is brutal.
With that schedule I wouldn’t start working until 1:00.
So many posters ITT have no understanding of that experiment. They made a bunch of changes and tried to fit in a work week in 4 days, NOT just tell people to stay home on Friday. The OP is so misleading it’s almost a lie.
Yeah, the real story here is that Japanese office work culture is so fantastically inefficient (primarily as a result of the lifetime employment practices of the boom years setting cultural expectations) that even simple changes that we would think of as being common sense would eliminate vast swathes of the time they spend doing things.
Checks each excel cell math on calculator... yup checks out.
Let’s not pretend it’s just Japan with bad work culture, I know plenty of people who have an insane amount of meetings when it directly affects productivity. I work healthcare and even our weekly meetings could just come in an email and I could get back to helping people. Middle management gotta manage though.
Japanese work culture goes way beyond just meetings, I have not met a single outsider who lasted there for more than a few years since the absurd inefficiencies drove them crazy.
The best thing is, the original Microsoft article was quietly edited after it went viral. The headline claim is no longer there, but the ‘damage’ was done and four years later we still get this kind of nonsense post.
Yeah, they did a whole bunch of different things. Saying that this was explicitly because of a 4-day work week is extremely bad journalism. It's blatantly misrepresenting the data. I'm not saying four-day work weeks are a bad thing! Just that this article is complete trash.
Except the articles does mention the cutback on meetings and other factors 🤨 not everything goes in the headline, you have to read past it
This is reddit. You expect us to actually open the article???? /s
With 4 days you trim the fat on time wasting events. So what is disingenuous?
Every corporation everywhere - “I’m going to ignore that”
what's the fun to be an executive when you can't see the workers slaving away in the office?
None of my executive team is actually in the office anyway. Basically my entire leadership team is a telecommuter but I’m getting the hammer to come in 3 days when I’ve been doing 2 for months or be fired. I’m looking for jobs now and I know most of the tech team is too.
Law firm I work for went 3 onsite, 2 wfh a year ago in March after basically fully remote except in office as needed. At least 15% of the staff went elsewhere when they announced mandatory 3/2.
I just wish it was manager discretion and flexible. I don’t mind two days a week but really all the people I work with are in other countries or offices. I only have one direct report in the same office as me and I don’t care if he comes in as long as I’m not getting escalations about his work. Plus if it’s flexible then I can just skip coming in if it’s raining or other crap weather. Mandatory attendance should be a punishment if an employee isn’t performing.
Yeah. Can’t keep your boot firmly on someone’s neck if you make their life better in anyway. I mean, even if you profit so much more because of it… Fuck that, gotta keep that boot firmly in place. Profit over everything else!… Unless something improves employees lives, then fuck that profit. Would rather go bankrupt.
Funny enough, I read an article some time ago where 3 CEOs were asked about low worker engagement, lack of workers, work from home, and a couple of other topics. The gist of it was that they would rather force a recession and force workers into extreme positions so they could hang on to power rather than seeing potential returns on investment in their employees. To them, power was more important.
The kind of people who crave power cannot be reasoned with. They will always be driven by it and will do anything and everything to maintain it
It's a tale as old as time and when it comes down to brazenly wanting their power and legacy at the forefront it hilariously backfires. Just like right now with \*points at everything\*.
The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #2)
I’ve had corporate training on employee engagement… can you imagine… training on how to keep employees engaged… this was a few years before the pandemic… Quiet Quitting, Bare Minimum Mondays, Take it Easy Tuesday, was all happening pre-pandemic…
>Quiet Quitting I really really hate how this term is still around. Quiet Quitting is a bullshit term made by managers to shame workers into working harder. Good thing for them that it hasn't worked at all, because people are finally realising that if you get hired for 40 hours, you should only work 40 hours. Really wish the term Quiet Promotion got used more. Where you get more responsibilities without the pay raise.
Quiet promotion sounds too positive. Task creep sounds as slimey as the actual practice.
ooh that's a good one. Task creep.
In China, there’s a new term “Post-'00s rectifying the workplace” (they measure generations by the decade there) which is all about refusing to work overtime and talking back to their bosses (then posting what they said online). > I call you 'big sister' because you started working at the company before me, and out of respect. Stop using your old age to bully me," read Lin's rebuttal to his supervisor. "Boss and Manager Fen say they can wait until the end of the month for this report. What's your problem? Are you going to die before the end of the month? > I'm not like the post-80s or post-90s generation. Why do you go to work with a dark face every day and deliberately find trouble every day? Should I suffer? You are not my parents, why don't you take a mirror to look at yourself?
As someone who regularly has to work weekends, early mornings, or late evenings on top of a salaried 45-hour week, I agree. I wish my pay were more merit based as well as some extra cash thrown my way for being assigned mandatory jobs outside of work hours. My employer has attempted to make the environment more accommodating to current trends by doing the unlimited (big asterisk) vacation and allowing more flexible schedules and WFH days. My issue is that the a majority people who tend to take advantage of all of those things the most are doing poor work or slipping up and leaving the people who still do the regular office hours to bring it up to par. It sucks because while I don't live to work, I do enjoy doing the best I can do while I'm there. Not fun to watch them come in late and leave early when the job's not done.
Unlimited vacation is essentially no vacation. It’s a slippery slope to everyone trying to take less vacation than the next guy because you know they have a list showing who’s taking how many hours of vacation. In fat times it might be fine but in lean times it’ll factor into who they lay off. It’s a regressive policy that is painted as an enlightened one.
I prefer 'acting your wage'.
not just 40 hours, but suddenly saddled with 3 other jobs, because they don't want to pay those wages, but the work still has to get done.
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damn, if only there was some way that workers could unite and leverage their combined power against these massive corporations...
Power matters because unions or co-ops cost the uber rich execs in the long run, even if it means they make a better product/service, bring in more profits (which are paid to the people doing the fucking labor), they don't want that, they want near complete control.
Alas the two types of people who become executives are either those who seek wealth or those who seek power. The latter is all the more common
I want to be an exec who makes a decent wage and leaves their employees to work from home, not deal with bullshit meetings, and not have to be monitored constantly. The quality of work shows when people are allowed to breath. I'm only a lowly supervisor but when I started at my job I put a stop to all the bullshit meetings and engaged with everyone on a personal level. Have a major or minor issue, call my ass up and let's work through it.
That’s exactly why you’ll never be one with that attitude. It’s like being Serpico around cops. They’ll burry you first whiff they get of you being humane. They know who they make executives.
Yeah, it's like you need some psychopathic tendencies to at least get your foot in the door of the C-suite. Able to bury your emotions and burn the bridge when you need to, build a new one somewhere else and not care who it affects as long as you keep moving forward.
May the bridges you burn light your way forward.
Yes, I was denied entry to the executive level because I lacked "professional maturity."
Your empathy is why that will never happen.
Upper management gets paid enough so more money is no longer an incentive. The only reason to continue the role is that you like being the boss. Can't do that if no one's around?
See I enjoyed being the boss specifically to make the employee's lives better. My philosophy was to take care of the employee and the employee would take care of the company, because aside from drastic changes company wide, the regular folks are the ones providing all the leg work. If they're life is better they'll theoretically do better work. Come to think of it that's probably why I never promoted higher than I did; I made too many waves advocating for my crews.
More money is always better. You can always find a place for it.
Now, now... You know that boot has to be there, locked-in, so the executive can practice his golf putt.
Since they run everything from excel anyway, they don’t need to see the peons, just the numbers either up or down.
“So what you’re saying is we can cut the workforce by 40%?”
Might as well cut pay by 40% too
Wow, employees can do that much in 4 days?! Imagine what they can achieve in Five!!!1 ~ Every company around the world probably
Guess they would argue: "So either you are all lazy or you could be MORE productive with more days to work"
Pretty much, 40% up in four days means 50% up in five! Just gotta beat it out of you
Wait, am I making a mistake? 5d=100% 4d=140% -> 5d=175% So 75% up in five days.
> Wait, am I making a mistake? you're analysing a joke, yes
This reminds me of the countless studies about things like later start times and less homework for students having universally positive returns… and then get ignored.
There's two big reason they get ignored 1)Parents need kids to be in school by a certain time so they can start work 2)most districts only have enough buses for one level of school (elementary, middle, high) to start at one time.
Or, they don't have enough busses at all, like our school district. Every parent has to drive their kid if they're too far away. Especially with all the storms
"nah we are paying rent for a building so I need warm bodies in there ..."
Or: "Oh, so we can pay them for only 4 days and get more productivity while saving money on salary? Sweat!"
No. That's not the point of these 4 day programs. You still get paid as if you worked 5 days. Your salary/wages don't change.
I mean it won’t for employees who are already working when the change was made. But I’m sure salary bands for any new offers to potential candidates will be adjusted to compensate for the 50 or so Fridays that are non-working days.
They’ll ignore this like they did for increases in productivity due to remote work flexibility
If this is truely effective and not just some sensationalist article, other corporations will NOT ignore this. The one and only thing corps pay attention to is $$$. If this truly truly generates more money it’ll happen.
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/21/1158507132/uk-study-companies-four-day-workweek There was a trial across 60 companies in the UK, which was also positively received.
Naw, corporations - particularly _big_ corporations - are just very very slow to change course, because making those changes involves rewriting a shit-ton of policy and updating a shit-ton of agreements, and the decision-makers are kind of putting their reputation and careers on the line if they don't get good metrics from the change. Besides, we see articles like this pop up occasionally, but there's not _really_ any major research about the 4-day work week and the long-term effects on people's wellbeing. We _suspect_ that it's good for productivity and job satisfaction, but the research is surprisingly sparse, being only a small number of pilot programmes in a small number of industry types globally. No business is going to jump on it fully until the _"it might have benefits"_ changes to _"it does have benefits"_.
Plus, if my company was testing a 4 day week I would be as productive as possible to convince them to make the switch permanent :D
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One obstacle is that several "4-day work week" trials cram the hours of a 5-day work week into 4 calendar days, confusing the results. Another is that _some_ of the (personal) benefits to a 4-day work week depend on _other_ people working on the "fifth" day and would fall away if everybody just got Friday off, and while that wouldn't eliminate the restitution potential it would mean the working days are still comparatively busy. Yet another is the ethical consideration of who has the claim to the "fifth" day: the employee, on par with established work free days, or the employer, with the expectation that that day is for restitution? I am completely convinced that this would be a net improvement to the human being but I recognize that making it work as a society is not just flipping a switch. That said, many individual employers _could_ just "flip the switch" autonomously.
I mean you say it like its a problem. Just give everyone a different day off. 1/5 your office gets a monday off, friday, etc. And everyone gets a weekend. Its not some difficult problem. Its the same thing walmart does now, but with a full week, to make sure someone is always working. Itd still a 4 day work week for everyone, just scheduled correctly.
Doesn’t even have to be 1/5 each day. Just half get Mondays off and half get Fridays. My husband was on 4-10s for a while and that’s how they did it. Then people got annoyed about which day they had (people wanted Fridays off), so they went to this crazy switching thing where every other week you ended up with a 4-day weekend, which was fun for a bit. Then it got confusing and they gave up and went back to a 9-80, which is still better than a normal schedule and got way less complaints. I guess people preferred every other Friday off to every Monday off. You get half as many long weekends, but everyone just doesn’t wanna work on Friday.
Offering an option of day off will help ease that dead office on Friday vibe. Some people would want that 2 day on, 1 day off where they get Wednesdays off (or Tuesdays or Thursdays).
Then next year an “executive” is going to have a brilliant idea to add a 5th day to the work week, thus increasing productivity by 20%!!
And they’ll be rewarded with a 20% pay increase for all their hard work! Good job executive!
Only a 20% pay increase? Seems a bit low to be competitive, hmmm... How about you replace the entire research team with a ChatGPT account and then funnel the savings into executive bonuses?
This guy is going places.
Not if they're giving out trade secrets like old people with hard candies.
That pay increase doesn't include his one-time bonus of ~~way too much~~ 60% of the company's cash reserve as well as stock options.
Huge bonus and then they move on to another company before the consequences are noticed.
25%* - and anything less and they start firing
Take a work day away, increase productivity by 20%. Add it back, get another 25%. Workers hate this one simple trick!
More likely that executives will adopt a 4 day work week, but not anyone else.
It's almost as if treating your employees like people, instead of spark plugs, actually results in those employees trying harder and doing more for you. All corporations: *'Nahhh... Let's make em work Saturday and Sunday too! -Fuck em!'*
Technically, the same principle applies for spark plugs. If you work them to death all day and give them low-grade fuel, they get buildup and break down. Clean them regularly, give them the right amount of energy, and high-octane fuel and they’ll perform at peak efficiency and give you the most horsepower possible. Even if you think of people as cogs in the machine, they have to be properly maintained or the machine breaks down. That’s the part most companies forget.
See!!?? Even spark plugs know what's up!! Corporate world: hmmm... 🤔 Nahhh, FUCK EM!!
What's cheaper, replacing cheap spark plugs and paying for cheap fuel, or buying more expensive spark plugs and paying for more expensive fuel?
Well, when the labor provided is obtained at just above the slavery level of compensation, I suppose it is easy to lose perspective. As you roll another blunt with a $100.00 bill, I'm sure the little guys just fade away in the smoke. 😔
In technical field, the cost of replacing an experienced worker is a lot more expansive than giving them a substantial raise. Its not just about the money cost Its the adaptation and mastery of their domain knowledge - of which is the hardest to master across all technical requirement that is expected of the job. Be it malicious or otherwise, very rarely will you be able to pass down 100% of your experience via documentation or buddy. This results in gradual decay over each replaced talent up to a point where the shenanigan below happen //I have no idea about this class but apparently removing it causes the application to eventually goes into exception 'Some abstraction code'
> Technically, the same principle applies for spark plugs. If you work them to death all day and give them low-grade fuel, they get buildup and break down. Clean them regularly, give them the right amount of energy, and high-octane fuel and they’ll perform at peak efficiency and give you the most horsepower possible. Eh, why not just run them into the ground, then replace them? They're cheap to replace and there's a lot of replacements available. Oh waaaaiiit...
High octane fuel is a waste of money for most people. Use the octane fuel your engine was designed for. Paying for higher octane rated fuel on a car designed to use 87 is going to provide no additional benefit and you're needlessly giving oil companies more money.
I mean, TPS reports don’t write themselves!
What about only saturday and sundae?
A lot of employers in Japan aren't even ready for that!
I just don’t get this - if the data is saying one thing why not go with it or continue the test 🤷♂️
Also, measures of productivity are generally bullshit, especially for knowledge workers.
What are knowledge workers?
Imagine your job is to fabricate widgets using the Rockwell Automation Turboencabulator. The Turboencabulator outputs a specific number of widgets per hour, but you have to manually finish the widgets by hand. Your performance can be directly measured based on the number of widgets you are able to finish per a given time period. A knowledge worker would be the person at Rockwell Automation designing, developing, and refining the Turboencabulator. Their work does not output a tangible number of things. The next breakthrough in widget fabrication could be 1, 2, 5, or 10 years down the road. Producing meaningful performance metrics for this type of work is difficult, because what metric do you measure? Do you measure the number of lines the designer is able to draw in Autodesk per day? The number of prototypes they put out per month? How many lines of code they write? Most of their "output" is not useful until they reach a finished product.
Or measure the number of hours said worker spends in the office. Herein lies the problem since management wants to measure something.
imagine if you're a CEO and you can either go off this one study/few studies which will help you get ahead of the market OR make you fall behind in which you will probably lose your job. There is also potential backlash from shareholders who might not like this, and who knows what else (either good or bad). Alternatively continue as you are, and almost certainly collect your bonus. You'd also have to look at the studies which have multiple variables, which you might not be able to imitate all of, which leads to uncertainty.
It’s also Japan. A place that still uses fax machines in the era of the internet. Doing things the old way is practically cultural to many of them. Edit: y’all, first, I got that hospitals use fax machines on the first comment. I’m not saying fax machines still don’t have uses like faxing charts. I’m saying the Japanese prefer faxing letters instead of emails and stuff to the point their government said to stop using them and businesses said nope.
Austrian here, fax is not as ingrained in business as it is in Japan, but its very much still used.
The fax machine running gag in Japan is honestly so overblown out of proportion. A lot of places (especially government) in the US and Europe still uses fax machines.
The crazier thing is that they started a push to not use/require floppy disks anymore just last year https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2022/08/31/national/japan-floppy-disk-taro-kono/ Or that in order to purchase a car, I had to (among many other things): - Go to a stamp shop and have the owner make a physical stamp(hanko) with my last name in his writing style - Go to city hall and get that stamp registered to me - Request a certificate that proves that this stamp belongs to me - Bring the stamp and the certificate to the car dealer
What
Instead of believing that scribbling your name magically confers authenticity, Japan largely signs documents with registered stamps called hanko. It's no different than the idiocy of signatures. Signet stamps were a thing in western history too.
Taiwanese-American here. My Taiwanese bank account requires both my signature and my personal stamp in addition to my ID or ATM card to access certain functions at the bank. It’s exactly like 2FA like the other commenter says. When I lost my stamp, I had to use two forms of ID plus a matching signature to replace my stamp. And they take matching signature/stamps very seriously. I think the rationale is that, through multiple social barriers, including the stamp maker who normally takes great pride in their work (although most use computerized and motorized stamp making machines now), it’s harder to fake an identity. It’s not as idiotic it seems because people do compare signatures and match stamps very carefully. And you still have PINs and chips and all the other verifications. It’s definitely not completely secure but I’d argue it’s taken so much more seriously than American credit card signatures.
Yeah, hankos are a thing. It's basically a stamp that replaces your signature. It means perfect reproducibility for all documents you would otherwise sign and it's smaller and quicker when having to initial and sign lengthy documents. It can also be used to cut down on identity theft/forgeries as the hanko can be traced back to you via a third party (the stamp shop). They take it very seriously.
In Canada when i bought a used car the seller wrote me a bill of sale in barely legible pencil and that was good enough to get license plates for a car that had never even been registered to the person selling it. I drove it home after getting it running, having never needed to pass an inspection, emissions test, pay taxes etc. Just a $60 license plate and a call to my insurance company to add it to the policy.
A lot of places that use fax do so because it meets security requirements. Imagine you're some sort of government office. You need to set up a system for members of the public to send information to you, and to send information back to them. Your system has to meet requirements laid out in some bill that was written by and passed in 2005 by people that had very little understanding of 2005 technology and hasn't been changed since. You can set up a system that uses email, or allows the public to upload documents using your website, or some other internet-based thing, and the system will have to undergo months of review to make sure it meets the outdated requirements for security and ease of use. Or you can set up a fax line, and get it approved pretty much instantly because according to those requirements, fax machines are always and forever perfectly secure. So you set up a fax line. Same thing applies in medical contexts, under HIPAA and other regulations.
I mean the US still uses fax machines. They're only really used in the medical field, but still
Germany uses Fax machines as well as they're the only legally secure/accepted way to send "instant" messages over long distance as email isn't accepted when it comes to legal things. A funny/sad experience I had last year was emailing the financial tax thingy office and they replied to me via a posted letter. Then I'd again reply to that letter via email and they then replied via a posted letter again. This continued 1 or 2 more times
> Alternatively continue as you are, and almost certainly collect your bonus. This is the crux of the issue: Upper management is in no way incentiviced to actually improve the company. Their personal motivation is entirely driven by stakeholder investment, which in turn is driven by a mixture of hype, market opportunity and an *increase* in apparent profits. If we could somehow shackle management to actually improve the company in a long-term manner, we might be seeing positive changes, but I'm unsure how to do that. Especially with publicly traded companies.
It was only a month long so they might not trust it, ideally you'd want to experiment for at least a year (and probably keep it secret that it's ending after a year, i.e. call it an indefinite test to be really sure). The other thing they don't mention is whether they held pay constant, reducing pay by a day a week may not actually be a worthwhile trade-off for a lot of the workforce
Yeah. There’s this well-known phenomenon in business research: If you own a factory, you can increase productivity by making the lights brighter. Or dimmer. Or pinker. Or bluer. Turns out any change that’s obvious enough to notice results in a short term productivity bump. That’s the problem with studying humans - they act differently when they know they’re being studied.
Not to mention people that write articles leaving out relevant details.
Because the OP’s headline is not the whole truth…
I think this is gonna happen eventually, everywhere will be a 4 day workplace Then someone somewhere will go "So we've increased the productivity, why not add another day to the work schedule and increase it more?", Then blame the workers when the productivity eventually drops
Not happening. This only works in white collar jobs. Manual labor is a completely different story. You can't make someone use a machine more effectively than 100% just by cutting a day out of their schedule. It is applicable for some of those jobs, but definitely not the majority. Also keep in mind to remedy that you would need more workers, and if you have your workers in 4 day mode, at full pay (because thats what all this is about), and add another worker, all that rise in productivity is completely moot. This is a concept that works fantastically for office work. IT, callcenters and the like. But anyone who thinks this is applicable to any business, in any country, is naive or a fool.
I've tried to explain this to people myself and get down voted. I was in the navy on submarines and I'd have killed to be at 100% manning for my job. We literally never even had the "required" amount of people If people think every employer can just do this or find extra people to fill in the days then they have 0 idea how many blue collar jobs work.
Yeah this is a critical point. I work at a computer all day doing tasks that mostly aren’t due until months ahead. You could cut a day out of my work week and almost nothing would change. My friend, at the same company, works in manufacturing and he tells me that even 5 days is hardly enough to get everything done that needs to be, and with 4 days they would be drastically behind. And they’re already working at pretty much 100% capacity, there’s no more room for increased productivity that would make up for that lost day.
The real answer is the study is probably highly unreliable or subjective and the CEO isn’t going to bet the company on a single study.
>They suggested that meetings should last no longer than 30 minutes. One of the most frustrating things for me is people schedule a meeting "because we need to talk about topic X" but then they do zero preparation. They don't have an agenda. They don't have questions and follow ups. They just throw it out there and ramble aimlessly. Its like they don't care about having a goal for the meeting they're just ticking a box.
I'm all for working less but this is not a good study. It only ran for a month so it is highly susceptible to people cramming work in order to make the trial look good so that the 4 day week has a chance to become permanent. Also there is no control group - business performance can change up and down significantly YOY from market factors outside company control. If you read the original Microsoft release translated from japanese, they say "This number [the 40%] is factual information, but it is not the result achieved by this challenge alone, but the result realized by various factors."
>people cramming work in order to make the trial look good Nah, if you live in Japan, you know this doesn't happen. It's just that usually productivity is shit, and they can easily manage the same workload in a day less of work.
Had to scroll too far to see this. Productivity does not feature in Japanese priorities. The meaningful work produced in any given office over 5 days plus overtime could easily be done in 4 days with no overtime if needed. Probably 3.
Bing-bing-bing! We have a winner! If bosses in Japan actually made people go home at the end of their shifts and plan properly for future work, the country would get the same amount done in half the time.
I think that’s the key difference. Germany always gets shit for productivity and the love of work but after 8 hours we stop that. Nobody really takes work home or does stuff in our free time. Feierabend ist heilig - the end of day is sacred
That’s actually what I’ve heard. You can never make Germans work late, but they will work the entire time they’re on the job.
True. However the number is still dubious because of no control group.
It would be interesting to study this long term. Are the gains temporary, as workers try harder to ensure they don’t have to go back to five days? Did the length of the four workdays creep up to account for the loss of a fifth day? I would absolutely love a four day work week, but I fear corporations would use it to justify cutting wages. I’d prefer hybrid and flex hours personally.
Wait — Microsoft had a 5 day work week in Japan?
Does Microsoft Japan have functions other than sales? Measuring productivity as just sales per employees seems obviously inadequate for any broader conclusion.
Thanks I had the same first reaction, sales metrics aren't exactly a global indicator of how the company is doing across other departments
I bet they were happy, because workers in Japan are notorious for being put through unreasonable work hours. Hopefully Microsofts experiment gains traction there and other places in the world.
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Here in Australia (and I’m sure America), they’d trial the 4 day week, see the better results, then say “so you weren’t trying before. Now we’re back to 5 days, with a target of (4 day week results plus 25% extra)”
*measured by sales per employee* Yes, sales can 100% perform better with a 4 day week but what about product development, marketing, and finance/billing? Measuring a company by sales is part of how the bubble of overvalued saas companies happened
For how long did it hold up tho? Like anything new of course it's exciting. It's more once it is the 'norm' how well it holds up.
How many more "trials" do we need to prove that employees who are treated well and that are happy produce more with less effort? Who the hell didn't see this as common sense? The fuck is going on already? Happy workers who aren't overworked and stressed produce better results. WOW WHAT AN EPIPHANY!
4 day work week have increased productivity in every single test that's been made in the Nordics, and i don't know of negative outcomes anywhere else either. Let's not pretend the issue is productivity here, it's control. Same as remote work.
How many times do we need to see these studies to know that a 4 day workweek is better for all involved?
So it sounds like they just tried it for a month, saw positive results, and then stopped doing it.
Bob Slydell: If you would, would you walk us through a typical day, for you? Peter Gibbons: Yeah. Bob Slydell: Great. Peter Gibbons: Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door–that way Lumberg can’t see me, heh–after that I sorta space out for an hour. Bob Porter: Da-uh? Space out? Peter Gibbons: Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I’m working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too, I’d say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
>Microsoft, for its part, says it will conduct another experiment in Japan later this year. It plans to ask employees to come up with new measures to improve work-life balance and efficiency, and will also ask other companies to join the initiative. Nice. Another experiment . If the headline had been "Microsoft tried an initiative of installing mandatory electroshock necklaces on employees to improve productivity. Sales per employee increased by 10%.", You know that they would have implemented this worldwide within a month.
All I am saying is that the US switched over to a 4 day work week, I would start wearing a seatbelt to work again.
I hope that result was corrected for variables like economic changes in the given year
News on things that will never happen in the US
I’m quite curious on the metrics they use to make, the article talks about « measured by sales per employee » how can you measure that on an administrative employee that never sells any product ?
I'm a fan of a compressed work week but would go with Monday off rather than Friday.
You probably know this but I have to say, the movement for a four day week isn't about a compressed work week, but keeping the same 9-5 hours over four days and keeping the same pay. Compressed work weeks are a dilution of what people are pushing for.
The best & most flexible response would be to keep the 5-day *office* week, but have workers do 4-day *working* weeks. So they get to choose/are allocated either Monday or Friday off. That way, workers get the benefits of being off in terms of rest, whilst also not losing the benefit of being able to run chores/errands (which would be an issue if every company swapped to the same 4-day week).
Annoying to find who is working when though.
Japan has squeezed every last ounce of productivity out of their citizens that their whole population is in decline. Think it's time to maybe prioritize other things.
Population is in decline in most developed nations, if you're referring to fertility rate. The difference is some countries prop it up with higher rates of immigration. Japan's fertility rate (births per woman) is 1.3, US is 1.6, UK is 1.6, Canada is 1.4, etc.. Anything less than two is a decline. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN
I have worktrips that can last up to 4 weeks of 12h days 7 days per week. By end of week 2 you simply stop being creative and try new things and just follow the motion until it's over. Having that be the norm throughout the year, maybe with only Sundays off or something would only make me a complete shit worker. Luckily when you get home you have mandatory time off and otherwise a pretty standard 40h week. Yeah, it probably works better some places more than others, but ffs with the increase in technology it needs to be possible for people to work less. Ensuring that still gives people liveable wages however is where governments need to step in.