Germany's 4-Day Workweek Pilot

3 4 1 year ago

My company (located in Canada) has experimented with 4 day weeks, and adopted a "4-day weeks for summers" perk

Personally I noticed the same things. I am less stressed, but more or less just as productive. It seems counter intuitive, I suppose but the extra time to rest does mean I'm more fresh and alert for the time I work

I'm glad to see countries taking this research seriously and I hope more companies move towards this

toomuchtodo2• 1 year ago

I think there are two components to this, from a systems perspective. The first is sentiment. Lots of people in positions of authority and power have their identity tied up in their work. They would work 7 days a week if they could. This is the culture they want to push down (think Jamie Dimon [worth ~$2.4B] demanding 5 days a week in office in typical Boomer fashion). Sentiment takes time to change (Overton Window [1]). The second component is worker rights and power to demand reduced hours since we're already so productive in the aggregate [2] [3]; this is inevitable due to structural demographics [4] [5].

(4 day week proponent, almost all 4 day week trial results are very favorable, work to live, don't live to work)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

[2] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-visual-breakdown-of-who-o...

[3] http://oxfam.org/en/research/multilaterialism-era-global-oli...

[4] https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2020/09/18/the-great-...

[5] https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-42657-6

bluefirebrand2• 1 year ago

Lots of people in positions of authority and power have their identity tied up in their work. They would work 7 days a week if they could. This is the culture they want to push down (think Jamie Dimon [worth ~$2.4B] demanding 5 days a week in office in typical Boomer fashion). Sentiment takes time to change (Overton Window [1])

Yes, unfortunately this doesn't seem likely to change much either because people like this tend to promote other people like this, which makes it difficult to displace the outdated attitude

Germany's 4-Day Workweek Pilot

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