Four day work weeks
The Sydney Morning Herald looks at the four day work week and maintains that it doesn’t work:
Packing 40 hours into four days isn’t necessarily an efficient way to work. Many people find that eight hours are tough enough; requiring them to stay for an extra two could cause morale and productivity to decrease. As for saving on the cost of commuting, it likely isn’t true.
As tempting as it sounds, I know for me a four day work week would be more difficult than working a standard 40 hour week.
I can’t really get to work any earlier than I do now since the kids can’t go to school at that hour, there’s not before school care until around 7am. It would really be hard for me at this point in my life to get home any later than I do what with sports schedules, dinner, homework and bed time preparation.
But, I never thought about it in terms of productivity. Do people get the same amount of work done in the compressed work week, or is it just an exercise in “face time”?
Very well writen,
I read a book called 4 hour work week, what a great piece of book.
I used to work offshore where it was standard to work 12 hour shifts. Of these 12 hours there is an hour lunch break, 30 minutes break in the morning and 30 minutes in the afternoon. Usually by late afternoon workers started to get tired or wind down, which meant a 12 hour shift only resulted in about 9 hours work.
I now work from home and find its not efficient to work a 10 or 12 hour shift and be productive. You can put the hours in but what you get done in that time isn’t much more than a standard shift. So I think I will be sticking to a 40 hour week.
Khaled
I feel like I commented on this already, or perhaps it was on a similar piece. The “problem” with the compressed week is that in many cases, it is already happening. Oh, not the compressed work week, the extra couple of hours.
It is not uncommon for many people to already be putting in more than an 8 hour work day. So, if I am already doing 10 hours, will I be expected to do 12 or 14 instead of the now “standard” 10 hours?
The 4 day work week has been something that has been “on the horizon” for quite some time now. I remember when PC’s first started coming into the workplace, and the promise that it was going to make people “so productive” that it would enable somebody to get 40 hours of work done in 4 days instead of 5. To that extent, people probably are more productive in that sense, but rather than enabling the 4 day work week, it just enabled corporations to squeeze that much more out of each worker.
And that is what has me nervous about this as well… that somehow it will eventually get perverted from a 4 day – 10 hour schedule into a 5 day schedule just with 10 hours becoming “normal working hours”