Tech CEO: Four-day work week didn't hurt or help productivity Civo shifted its workforce to a four-day working week and while it hasn't changed productivity much at the cloud biz, it has helped attract "new talent" and retain existing staff, CEO Mark Boost says. While Microsoft and Dell would prefer to keep quiet about work-life balance programs embarked upon during 2019 and 2022 …
Most articles I have read in serious publications and my experience as a contractor, with my productivity and that of colleagues is, flexible, remote working and reduced hours work better for everyone. JP Morgan, Citi Bank, as well as Microsoft and Dell all seemd to back track after the pandemic and either spouted lies to support it or just said because we say. So I suspect the author guessing at motives like investor anxiety or exec mindset and I would add sunk cost fallacy re property portfolios is probably closer to the truth than any argument against it the tech bros or bank CEOs might throw around.
I think flexible is more important than x days per week, as everyone has gotten used to scheduling their week to get work coordinated and done when needed. Makes folks sensitive to BS deadlines sometimes and staying responsive can be a challenge if you don't stay in communication even when you aren't "on"
I too wondered about property being a factor. You have to assume there are questions being asked about office cost be it owned or leased versus empty desks. But the tinfoil hat part of me also wonders how much pressure is being exerted by the finance world scared of commercial property prices crashing. By finance world in particular investment people with long term mortgages tied up as part of their portfolios, these would include yours and mine pensions etc.
Given the CxO world is very small and has at most 2 degrees of separation with many board members sharing multiple boards, how much of the WFH commentary is a result of water cooler conversations by the same small group of people?
Add in the usual CxO approach to life, that being everyone else is doing it so we should too, and not willing to stick their heads up above the parapet and say, yeah productivity is unchanged but the workforce morale improvement, talent retention and acquisition more than offsets any paper dollar loss of efficiency by having an office unused 3/7 days versus 2/7 days.
And final nail in the coffin if I can't see people working they mustn't be working stupidity.
"I too wondered about property being a factor. You have to assume there are questions being asked about office cost be it owned or leased versus empty desks. "
With nobody in the office or a reduced staff on Fridays/Mondays, the load on the AC drops considerably, water usage is down with fewer people using loo (and bog roll costs). If the productivity is the same and costs are lower, that seems like a win. There's no talk of there being any business advantage to keeping an office full more days each week.
-- flexible, remote working and reduced hours work better for everyone --
Now, rather than sitting in a meeting or pressing keys I suggest you try actually making something eg a car (since cars are often used as an analogy in IT) or digging ore out of the ground and see if things still work better
"everyone who isn't making something physical with their hands isn't doing anything" is a hilariously daft and easily disproven argument.
That is correct, but not very relevant because that wasn't their argument. They were saying that remote working, and to a lesser extent flexible schedules, don't work better for everyone because some jobs can't be done that way at all. Physical jobs are an example of things that can't be done remotely, and some that involve everyone being present simultaneously don't really work with flexible schedules where different subsets of people are present from one day to another.
It would be easy to argue that this point from them was somewhat obvious, because in a discussion of whether remote working is a good idea, the "unless remote working is impossible in this case in which case this argument does not apply" could be reasonably assumed. Or you could simply acknowledge it and put a limit on the "everyone" you are referring to. Or you could disagree with it and explain how they are more practical in those use cases than the statement suggests. However, you chose not to make any of those arguments. You chose to put words in their mouth which they did not say and argue against it on that incorrect basis. You've also got a contradiction in your argument, simultaneously accusing them of saying that people who don't do physical work are not doing anything and looking down on those who do physical work. They said neither of those things.
The OP may well have been attempting to make an entirely valid and unbiased point here. If that was the case, then the problem is that so many *other* people have been only too willing to post varying levels of tripe about how bad any forms of working other than traditional 9 to 5, 5 days a week at the office/factory/coalface/etc, is for the economy, for the country, for the individuals concerned, and also how dashed unfair it is anyway given that some people can't work like that, so everyone else ought to suffer increasingly archaic working practices rather than adopting improved practices as and when possible to do so.
As such, given how often articles that are in any way positive about adoption of alternate working practices get jumped on by such people desperate to try and persuade us all that the article is completely wrong and we need to be demanding a return to the bad old days, it's not unreasonable that the next time someone posts a comment which has the merest whiff of being anything other than a genuine attempt to kickstart a reasoned discussion of the subject, it gets a response such as this one.
"Physical jobs are an example of things that can't be done remotely, and some that involve everyone being present simultaneously don't really work with flexible schedules where different subsets of people are present from one day to another."
Because something isn't a Universal Solvent of Magic Bullet that works for every situation, that doesn't mean it isn't a good idea. If the vast majority of people that could work remotely did work remotely, imagine the number of cars not on the motorways and the possibility of there being space on a train to get somewhere. Some jobs might be a hybrid of remote and on-site work. I'd get a stern talking to if I were to do rocket testing in my garden, but I can design avionics to go in the rocket and build the electronics at home. Lighting the touch paper could be done elsewhere. (I'm not in aerospace anymore). The media production I do is a combination of on-site and home office. There's no point in leasing an office as a sole trader. I don't meet with clients at my home. Product development work is with remote clients that I may never meet in person or only see once a year at a trade show. Without all of the commuting, I get a good discount on my auto insurance.
And you have now demonstrated exactly what the original poster said. Pedantic or not, obvious or not, their comment was simply that these things do not "work better for everyone" because everyone means everyone. Or, as you put it: "something isn't a Universal Solvent of Magic Bullet that works for every situation". Neither they nor I said that remote working was bad or shouldn't be done when it is possible. We don't have enough information to know whether they think it doesn't work in situations where you or I think it does.
"Neither they nor I said that remote working was bad or shouldn't be done when it is possible."
Plenty of companies that are insisting on everybody returning to working in an office are suggesting that it's bad for people to work remotely.
Every company will need to sort out what can and can't be done at other locations. I think the big problem is having managers that have the training and temperament to manage people they can't hover over. Lots of managers get boosted into the role and have never received any sort of training. They've learned from observing the bosses they've had over time and those may have been exceptionally bad role models.
> Now, rather than sitting in a meeting or pressing keys I suggest you try actually making something
Au contraire, I suggest you read up on, for example, the "little meisters" who were the mainstay of the Sheffield cutlery (knife-making) industry during the heyday of Sheffield steel, for a century or more.
(That brown smelly stuff under *your chair* is bullshit, and the label on it reads "hypocrite")
I directly work with a Brazilian, a Dutch, 3 Spanish and a Londoner. Indirectly I work with a similar mix. I'm officially supposed to be in the office 3 days a week. In Manchester. No one I work with in either my immediate, or extended team work in Manchester. I managed to escape. Some of my colleagues were less lucky.
From TFA, quoting the CEO of Civo: "we saw no decline in productivity (I wouldn't say we had any gain)".
What's "productivity"? Is it hourly or is it weekly? The Fine Article gives conflicting ideas at best.
Quoting the boss of MSFT Japan (as of 2019), "I want employees to think about and experience how they can achieve the same results with 20 percent less working time", makes the impression that he wants his employees invent ways to become 20 per cent more efficient on an hourly basis to preserve the weekly productivity. As the article notes MSFT didn't expand the pilot and are not saying why - maybe the tradeoff didn't work out?
At the same time, "Everyone at Civo does their full week's hours during the four days." Hmm... This looks like no change in hourly or, indeed, weekly productivity. It's just that you cram your work week into, say, four 10-hour days rather than five 8-hour ones, and presumably you compensate for the degraded rest and family/social life for 4 days/week over the 3-day weekend. I don't know what was expected, but I can't say I am all that surprised. How happy this makes one's spouse/partner/children/elderly parents and how legal it is in one's jurisdiction may vary.
There was also the comment about hiring more staff for sales so customers (you remember those unimportant things) can talk to someone, I assume on the Friday. My simplistic brain goes "hire more staff to do same job = lower productivity" unless its the civil service of course.
" My simplistic brain goes "hire more staff to do same job = lower productivity""
There's a time I recall where I needed to get some widgets ordered and on the way the same day and a receptionist told me all the sales people were in a meeting. I told her I'll call the competitors and order from them if they're not in a meeting, which I did. I didn't need to talk with a sales person. Anybody that could check inventory and take an order so it shipped that day would be fine. Nope, only sales people could do that.
I've missed out on a job or two when I couldn't pick up my phone when somebody called. I'll ignore the phone if I'm with another customer since I find it rude when somebody I'm talking with interrupts our conversation to take a call. I will if it's my mother calling as she's older and it could be rather important and there's one or two others, but if it's not a number I know and isn't showing it's somebody in my contact list, no deals. My customers have their own ringtone(s). I don't look at the phone for the generic ringtone. I do return calls/listen to VM as quickly as I can.
No sales people available when customers call, no sale.
"how legal it is in one's jurisdiction may vary."
Before my mother retired from being a labor/delivery nurse, she worked long days with a 3-on/4-off + 4-on/3-off schedule. The downside was that they could have ladies on gurneys in the halls when it was very busy. Labor can be a quick or very long process from woman to woman and they only had so many birthing rooms. Legally, they couldn't stack them elsewhere in the hospital. It all meant that lunch on some days was a couple of bites of something chocked down in a hurry between cases. With an office job where lives are much less likely to be on the line, people can take the time to have a meal and a lot of the work is while seated.
The best answer to the question of how to define productivity that I've ever come across is based on a surprisingly simple metric. You're welcome. :-)
No one has worked on a Friday for decades. In the City most of my Fridays were spent hungover hiding in a corner & we had one broker who'd spend her time sleeping in the disabled toilets.
Giving people Fridays would see zero reduction in overall productivity, as no one really did any work anyway.
The office is much, much quieter and often almost empty.
I am not being interrupted every 10 minutes.
There are fewer messages on Microsoft Teams informing me of something and breaking my concentration.
Friday is usually my most productive day.
Oh, rather than a 4-day week, I far prefer the notion of a 5-day 7-hour day, say 09h to 16h or the equivalent in flexi-time (like 07h to 14h).
I've noticed that I get a lot more done in the mornings than in the afternoons.
It completely depends on the nature of your job - as I would agree with your synopsis of a day with few nuisance interruptions & being able to get into that magical state of working with no recognition of what's happening around you - but that is not how many jobs work at all. I often missed lunch simply because I was far too occupied with what I was doing, and never watched the clock because I loved my job ! Same with 'going home' ! Obviously someone doing repetitive work in a factory does NOT feel like that ! No comparison job to job in many, many cases, so I think these arguments about working hours make no sense in many cases. Luckily there are rules to protect workers from nasty bosses trying to exploit them !
“Oh, rather than a 4-day week, I far prefer the notion of a 5-day 7-hour day, say 09h to 16h or the equivalent in flexi-time (like 07h to 14h).”
Ideally we’d have the choice (for roles that it works for). My contract just states 35 hours per week so technically I could do that in one hit and the week is complete on Tuesday. Being more realistic I already do 10 hour days or more when WFH so having Friday off would be good for me.
Oh, rather than a 4-day week, I far prefer the notion of a 5-day 7-hour day, say 09h to 16h or the equivalent in flexi-time (like 07h to 14h).
At one point about 10 years ago I ended up with a commute that, if taken during *typical* hours, would have been 90 to 150 minutes each way, and my employer agreed that I could work 06:00 - 14:00. This cut my commute to less than 50 minutes in the am and less than 90 in the pm. I tended to get most of my days work *done* between 06:00 and 08:30 each and every day. Thereafter I was harassed by the Stupid Question For You brigade. Luckily, after about 18 months in that state I ended up with a back problem for about 2 months and was thereafter allowed to WFH. Unless, of course, the third party DC staff did something insanely stupid, such as sealing up the *new* Switch Room *BEFORE* the HVAC folks had set up the AC ventilation correctly, resulting in a rather toasty afternoon in the third floor of 3600 (IFYKYK) and taking out the entirety of not one, but THREE datacenters.....
Half the size, with a quarter of the alcohol content of this >>======>
About 30 years ago, I had a favoured customer who was also one of our suppliers. They usually wanted something picked up or delivered on a Friday after lunch. Almost everybody was in the "staff room" drinking - Except for one of their two receptionists who alternated at the desk/drinking. I had a 35km drive home, and got quite adept at keeping a single middy of low-alcohol IPA going for 2 hours (Australian beer is warm and pretty unpleasant by then). Fortunately, nobody noticed.
"Apart from British Leyland. Seems like 80% of their cars were "Friday afternoon specials". They got a lot of work done before the weekend!"
Many companies will ignorantly set up their bonus programs in a way where there's a big scramble at the end of some period to get X done. There was a company that we carried that built test equipment. Production would get bonuses on units shipped, not working units shipped, so we had to make sure we tested everything before delivering to our customers, especially towards the end of a quarter/year. The issue was that their warranty department would get the defective/non-conforming units back to repair and that was accounted for separately for the bonus awards production would get.
A friend who worked a 4 day week found that the option was either Monday or Friday. This gave them a 3 day weekend. Regarding the extra hours, I find that I am working those long hours anyway so a day less of them would be a God send. Who in IT does not grab a coffee on the fly and eat at their desk while still taking calls? So technically we are doing those longer hours anyway.
Hours is a poor measure of productivity.
We have all seen how often stuff gets rewritten or features continued to get fixed multiple times because the past efforts were pathetic.
Just because someone sits many hours doesnt mean they are producing quality.
I've upvoted, and just after hitting the up arrow I wondered how many people, IT or otherwise, would be happy to be paid on their output -quantity and quality. The only ones I could come up with quickly were artists, especially the dead ones where a single painting goes for multi-millions.
"I wondered how many people, IT or otherwise, would be happy to be paid on their output -quantity and quality. "
It depends on how much control the person had. If you are just a cog on a big wheel, your output can depend on many things you have no control over.
There should be some reward for working more efficiently. Somebody highly efficient working from home and getting their assignments done in 4 hours each day get rewarded until it's spotted. Until a person has worked for some time and learned that doing that in front of the boss means being assigned more work, not a raise or days off so it's better to stretch out things so there is margin to pull rabbits out of hats when needed.
Depending on what you're doing with the extra hours, shortening the week may not really do anything. That's why it's so important to understand whether they went from 5days/40hours to 4/32 or 4/40.* If you find that you're having to work extra hours to achieve the results they set and they shorten the week but don't adjust timelines, you might end up having longer days anyway. It'd be nice if having an extra day off would improve my productivity so I could achieve the same thing on 80% of the working time, and that might actually happen for me from time to time, but I don't think I can count on that. It's not as simple as counting worker hours to determine how much I'll get done, but there are things I have to do which will only get done if there is time to do it in, and if I'm expected to do it and work fewer hours, something will have to break. In my experience, what breaks is that I end up working longer hours anyway but I don't want to, which isn't a good thing to do routinely.
In other four-day pilots I've seen, improvements in productivity have often been ascribed to reducing inefficiencies like unnecessary meetings, and those would certainly help. However, if they aren't willing to do that or if you're in a job that already manages meetings well**, that won't show any improvement to contribute to it. I also have my doubts that a company that temporarily cancelled unnecessary meetings will stay with that policy because it's a clear indication that they started unnecessary meetings before.
* Or whatever normal weekly hours they were using before. The question is whether they're reducing the hours or just rearranging them, and if they are reducing them, do they adjust any timelines accordingly?
** There are at least some jobs like that. I've worked at places that managed to keep the meeting count and duration low and make most of them relevant to the job. Certainly not all of them, but it happens. This is definitely more enjoyable, but it's hard to improve efficiency because there is less wasted time that is easily freed.
"I've worked at places that managed to keep the meeting count and duration low and make most of them relevant to the job. "
The useless meetings can often be in reaction to something such as a prominent news story or somebody that got sacked for something like sexual harassment. All of a sudden, everybody needs to be put through a course, sensitivity training, etc even if the incident was way off the norm. There then needs to be a follow up to that meeting and then meetings to see how well those courses have improved the corporate culture.
Not in my experience. I'm sure that can also generate useless meetings, but the ones I'm most familiar with are ostensibly related to work. For example, the primary mainstay is the team meeting, where you and your colleagues meet to go over what you're working on. That can be a short update meeting where you give short progress updates and talk over things where team coordination can be helpful, and if you're frequently having useless ones you reduce the frequency. That's it being done well. Or you can have meetings every day because it's a daily meeting and you shall not question its dailiness and, to fill in time, you slowly step through the task board even though people either already know about things or don't have any reason to care. That could easily be a four hour per week difference. Or you have inter-team meetings which are regularly scheduled even though it doesn't seem to serve a purpose. Or there can be meetings that have a purpose but are much longer than they need to be. Or there can be meetings that have a purpose, are much longer than they need to be, and are mismanaged so much that the purpose isn't achieved in the first place.
Enrolling everyone in a course they don't need wastes time, but that eventually ends after everyone has done that course. The course probably lasts a couple hours and the reviews you mention might double that. Bad meetings that seem related to the job are harder to end because they seem like they should be helping and they occur on a schedule, reliably wasting more time. Fortunately, I've experienced only bad and good jobs for meeting wastage; I know people who have gotten terrible ones that waste a lot more time on pointless meetings than the worst places I've ever worked.
Other places trialled this & found it increased stress levels as people felt under more pressure to achieve deadlines in the shorter week - you might be doing the same hours overall but a working day is a working day and sometimes the extra day/delay is what saves you. So it's not necessarily great, I guess people see the result they want to.
I've been doing flexible hours and a 4 & a bit day week for years; the Friday hours are only vestigial but it's amazing how often that nominal extra 'day' comes in useful. It's not like it interferes with the day off as it's only a bit of a morning.
Funny thing is that for all the benefits it was supposed to bring, I suspect we only shifted to that pattern because it matched the actual levels of Friday working especially post-lunch.
I guess a 4 day working week appeals to management when you still want people to be working rigid hours 8-6, and it seems tempting to employees for the long weekend, but I honestly prefer the flexibility to have late starts or early finishes when I want and spread the effort out a bit.
There isn't a one-size-fits-all solution to how people should / need to work nowadays. Each team has differing needs and demands. A good company should recognise that and give the teams what they need to succeed. For some that might be five days in an office, for others it might be four days working from home - there's a bazillion permutations of working patterns and locations.
Saying that marketing should work the same way as support who should work the same as customer service is simplistic, reductive thinking by management that can't think of any thing other than the status-quo.
Making people work in a way that's inefficient and really not necessary will only end badly. Those people will only put up with it for so long before they leave. If your plan is to have your best and brightest go elsewhere then by all means stick with your rigid 'the CEO has decreed this, so it will happen' edicts - just don't complain when you're left with the deadwood.
I was in a 2 year study with complete autonomy working 4/10. It was 2003, Verizon . In order understand the result I was number 5 in the group, therefore I can state that the 4/10 AWWS garnered LESS productivity . Now there were definitely areas of higher productivity when a deadline had to be met, however after a 2 week push at a full 10 hour day everyone was overworked resulting a lot of hours of non-productivity being entered in the logs. One area and the only one that showed any benefit was a job that required a worker to travel 30 miles to and from to run jumpers which is just productivity work which amounted into 8 hours of jumper running everyday instead of 6. Bottom line Verizon scrapped 4/10 and I agree it was awful productivity wise. and very stressful. We also had less participation in volunteer overtime jobs because we were all ready tired.
I liked the introduction Captain Vimes gave to Cheery where he told her they work to the job, not the clock and he's never seen evidence of some mythical creature called "overtime". I like to work that way as well. On some days I might work 9 hours and others I might hit a logical stopping point at 6-7 hours. It's down to setting a goal to accomplish a certain thing. If I'm left unbothered, I can get into a zen-like place where the clock disappears until I come up for air. I do have to make sure I eat on a schedule or my blood sugar will bottom out and I become as useless as a stone for the rest of the afternoon.
This makes oddball schedules easy. My schedule is 4x10 and I both weekend days. An extra 2 hours per day at a desk job is barely noticeable but that extra day off every week sure helps! This schedule also takes me out of a forced weekend rotation that nobody likes. Course, it helps that my kids have grown and moved far away for their own work so I don't have to worry about making time for younguns. This gives me 3 weekdays every week to tale care of business. So far as work performance goes, I'm meeting my metrics perfectly at the minimum levels.
If they want me to exceed the metric minimums, that's a whole different problem the company needs to fix.
At my previous job was that I wanted 4x10, and one orher coworker wanted 4x10. To maintain coverage throughout the whole week, my manager proposed, and we accepted, alternating Mondays and Fridays off.
This meant on week #1, I had Monday off, and Michael was there to cover for me. That same week, Michael had Friday off, and I was there to cover for him.
On week #2, Michael had Monday off, and I had Friday off.
Effectively, we each had alternating two-day weekends, and four-day weekends.
It worked well for us, and for our manager, too.
..notices little change in "productivity"...
Of course not. Its not a real f*cking company. Its just a bunch of guys in an office somewhere.
Get back to us when they have $100M+ in revenue (profitable, net not EBITA) and a few hundred employees.
Very different story,
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