Unilever said all 81 staff members at its offices across New Zealand will be able to participate in the trial...
Only 81 possible candidates, and not all of them might choose to participate.
I'd be curious to see the results of a trial involving thousands of employees. Some subset of 81, though... almost meaningless.
There's a tremendous inertia when it comes to work weeks. The five-day is locked in pretty firmly in the developed world, and a company that tries to change that risks getting out of synch with suppliers, subcontractors, and partners. "Today's Thursday. Our office is closed on Fridays, so we'll have to schedule that call for Tuesday, because one of our suppliers is closed on Mondays."
I mean, they can try it, and employees might like the extra time off, but it might well slow things down and ultimately result in commensurately lower salaries and bonuses.
> I'd be curious to see the results of a trial involving thousands of employees.
Perhaps you could run one at your company?
Absent that experiment, this is the one that Unilever is running for everyone in their offices within one country for a full year.
Consider the wonderful Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics [1] and how it applies to any kind of experiment or well-intentioned initiative, when presented to 'people that know better'.
> The five-day is locked in pretty firmly in the developed world, and a company that tries to change that risks getting out of synch with suppliers, subcontractors, and partners. "Today's Thursday. Our office is closed on Fridays, so we'll have to schedule that call for Tuesday, because one of our suppliers is closed on Mondays."
Well, a) just because it's common doesn't mean it's good, or that it's still relevant, or that it's healthy, or that it's ineluctable.
b) there's no suggestion with ANY of these trials, or any organisation already offering part-time work for their staff, that they shutdown entirely for one or two days per week - rather, their workforce is spread over the (for now, common in the west) five weekdays, with varying personnel engaged. If you think organisations that are looking to reduce working hours for their staff are assuming the company is going to operate on a 4-day week, then you may have misunderstood the intent.
To add to the point about the 8hr day/40 hour work week, it came from a serious labor movement in North America in the mid 1800s.
Which brings up an interesting reality of our time, that a push to bring about sane changes is coming from companies and not the workers (which could sadly be caused by the fact that workers have been utterly wing clipped in our hyper competitive economy to ask for anything at all).
^^ That came about in America because average people were fighting for it. Our new changes in remote work or short work week is oddly coming from ... god knows where. What incentive does the company have here? Someone has to follow the money to find the truth if companies are the catalysts for these initiatives.
I have a hunch that if a company is behind the movement, the end goal is to simply cut the reliance on labor and cut staff or freeze hiring.
> the end goal is to simply cut the reliance on labor and cut staff or freeze hiring.
One possible explanation is to reduce labor costs while still keeping around key workers (and their irreplaceable institutional knowledge) most of the time.
For example, there is little point in keeping an old and experienced technician on full pay 5 days a week, when you know he's mostly overseeing others and fixing the occasional issue; might as well put him on 4 days, saving a day's wages (or moving the equivalent of his net wages to tax-efficient pension funds), and sell it to him as a quality-of-life improvement. Overall productivity is probably the same, but costs have gone down and morale up, as s/he moves towards retirement.
Or take a smart developer. Instead of haggling over 20% time, unofficial side projects, conference talks etc, sell him an extra off-day that is paid as a half-day.
Amateur athletes? HR people? etc etc... I mean, modern offices have people dedicated almost exclusively to organizing silly group activities; there is plenty of spare time that can be cut, to everyone's benefit.
But companies would only push for this at scale (as in saving a days worth of wages across the company is noticeably profitable in comparison to output from the workers). Identifying this as a net positive towards profit leads to the harrowing conclusion that, at scale, they don’t need as many people.
Not taking away anything from your point, just pondering the implications of shifts like this in the economy.
Edit: I also want to add that many people in the service economy literally fight for extra shifts. The only hopeful outcome from these types of moves from companies is if they genuinely maintain salary and headcount amongst white collar workers. We have watched the blue collar economy get fleeced over and over and it’s important we remain vigilant against companies bearing perceived niceties. The incentives just don’t align.
> the harrowing conclusion that, at scale, they don’t need as many people.
That might be true at the same time as the realization that they are increasingly struggling with loss of knowledge on employee turnover, since they rely on complex systems more and more.
> I also want to add that many people in the service economy literally fight for extra shifts.
Anything shift-based already works under custom rules most of the time. Where trade-unions are a thing, for example, they often reduce working times "in solidarity" to avoid layoffs, it's been the case for decades. Or they do week-on-week-off etc etc. I don't expect those areas to significantly reduce their hours across the board, at least not until it's normalized in white-collar sectors first.
> The incentives just don’t align.
I am as suspicious of the owning classes as the next guy, but it's not unusual to see the most enlightened industrialists trying to find a better balance for all parties in the equation. See for example XIX-century mill-owners building entire towns out of their own pockets, including schools and community centres, because it benefited them in the long run as much as the workers in the immediate.
I am not particularly suspicious of intentions here, but rather skeptical that it can work piecemeal. France tried something like that in the '90s but got weak-kneed when it came to enforcement, which means it didn't work in practice and got watered down into irrelevance very quickly (I don't know if it was eventually scrapped entirely).
Your hunch may be right, but I'm optimistic because a) I don't believe it's a concerted initiative, and b) at least some of the toe-dipping seems to be happening for genuinely 'this is better for all of us' sentiments.
This potentially wishful thinking may end up being proven wrong, but ultimately what we all have going on now simply isn't tenable over the next 10+ years, so any and all kinds of experiments are probably a good thing.
"The five-day is locked in pretty firmly in the developed world, and a company that tries to change that risks getting out of synch with suppliers, subcontractors, and partners. "Today's Thursday. Our office is closed on Fridays, so we'll have to schedule that call for Tuesday, because one of our suppliers is closed on Mondays."
Last week I was surprised to find our engineering team in our Washington DC were all out of the office on the Thursday, I needed a remote machine repowered.
Friday is a bad day when you work with the Middle East. I believe some countries work Saturday-Wednesday and have Thu/Fri off
Of course right now in New Zealand it's 3AM on Tuesday, but it's 6AM on Monday in LA.
>"Today's Thursday. Our office is closed on Fridays, so we'll have to schedule that call for Tuesday, because one of our suppliers is closed on Mondays."
Sounds like your company's bus factor is too low. This is such an obtuse and presumptuous observation. How do companies open 7 days a week exist when the work week is 5 days?! Just because your employees only work 4 days doesn't mean the company is only open for business 4 days. You can shift your employees in such a way as to avoid these pitfalls. Use your imagination a bit.
This seems counter to the longer trend of knowledge workers coordinating asynchronously and working when focused & inspired.
Speaking personally, over the years I probably wasted 10,000 hours... sitting in an office in the late afternoon, waiting for silicon valley traffic to clear enough to go home.
No, HN is for compile times and waiting in line at the COVID testing center, 30 minute meetings where the first 29 minutes are spent getting the newbies up the speed and ...
Companies have found that it is much more rewarding to keep workers working 40 hours (in Europe) or more (many parts of the world, including the US) or more, and to translate the productivity gains into bonuses for top management, dividends for shareholders and increased share prices (for shareholders and top management) [1].
Without the necessary regulation, this process will not be significantly altered either, in my opinion. I firmly believe that hardly any (large) company will be prepared to significantly improve conditions for employees without external pressure - at the expense of shareholder value.
For example, it is perfectly normal for a company like Accenture to pay a 10% higher dividend for the past fiscal year, while dismissing 5% of its employees worldwide. We don't even have to dream of wage increases for employees in the 10% range here. And ACN is just one example because I happen to know the numbers right now.
What company increases its employees' wages by the same amount as it increases the dividend for shareholders? I hardly know of any company that does that.
This is not bad in itself. It's just the first step in the market evolution. Given a free market (barriers aside) an equilibrium will be found sooner or later, but this step needs to happen first.
Talking about a free market with perfectly informed, rational actors is like talking about perfect, frictionless spheres in a vacuum in physics. It's fine for theorizing, but useless once you're building things in the real world.
If every employee knew what all other employees earn, what their training is, what their workload is and what degree of productivity they have, as well as the return on investment generated by their own labor force.
And, what this would mean in comparison with other employers (i.e. comparative salaries, etc), we could think about whether we can speak of an (ideal) free market. To do so, the possibilities to change the company as well as the actual profession would have to be transparent and open.
In addition, most theories on the free market also assume rational actors. Which has been sufficiently refuted as a model of reality.
But even this would not be the problem if the basic assumptions above were fulfilled. But in most cases they are not. I do not know what the colleague next to me earns. I don't know how much ROI my employer gets with my work performance and I certainly don't have the chance to get analogous data to other companies in the market. In addition, as an employee I am also very much tied to the local area due to family situations and therefore cannot act like capital on the free market worldwide.
All in all, in this "game" of the employee is always the weaker market participant - which is why, for example, there are facilities and institutions in consumer markets that protect the consumer, because there is an imbalance in information.
For this reason there is (at least in Germany) state intervention in the employee market just as there are trade unions or works councils. There are analogous instruments in many markets worldwide - to create a counterweight to the imbalance of information and power.
I feel like the blue collar economy is still dictating the reality of the white collar economy. They work service hours where you have to literally be somewhere for a shift. That is what is defining the standard for other types of work in a misguided fashion. It took a global pandemic to have companies come to their senses (by sheer force) to make remote work a first class citizen. Change is too slow because we’re tied to antiquated concepts.
Why are some professions doing a shift? Does your software open at 8am and then close up for the night at 5pm? If so, then yeah you need shift workers. If not, then please, just stop it.
...you really want to be on call 24 hours a day? Because that is what you are asking for.
The shifts are good for you, because they limit the times when work can command your presence and force businesses to hire multiple people to staff the day. Remote work is already showing the flaws of the reverse, because now people have issues separating work and real life since there is no clearly modeled time delineation any more.
Most of us decently paid professionals could do something like that, whether it's working 15 hour weeks (might be hard to find something like that
) or working a contract for a few months each year or just quitting after working 37.5% of a normal career. That's my plan.
It would be especially possible if you lived similarly to how average people did in Keynes' day: e.g. smaller housing, limited car ownership, home cooked meals, simple hobbies. The beauty of it is you still can take advantage of new tech because it has become so cheap.
I'm surprised this is news. Here in europe you can work 32 hours if you wanted to, but you make 20% less money. Would you work one day less for 20% of your base salary?
In terms of reward, this is like a 25% raise. Imagine getting a raise of 25%.
I'm interested how much the raises the past ten years were. Is this a big thing, or is this an overdue raise for the past ten years.
Will they compensate the lost labor with new hires? If not, you could also see it as Unilever firing 20% of its workforce, and it could indicate something has gone wrong with their business (I know, corona is probably the cause, but what if it is something else).
Initiatives to work smarter sound promotional. It sure sounds better than 'our sales people have nothing to do during corona'.
> “If we end up in a situation where the team is working four extended days then we miss the point of this,” he said.
I believe this is lip service. They will still ultimately expect 40 hours of work to be done in 4 days, regardless of what they say now. I'd rather stick to 5-8s, so I have some personal time in the evenings.
I'm always sceptical of these proposals. There are no free lunches in economics. Less production will result in less revenue. Companies are only going compensate employees for value of their labour, so less labour will eventually mean less compensation.
Perhaps for some reason that I don't quite understand people get more (or an almost equalivent) amount of work done in four days as they do in five, but if not, this is just going to result in lower wages.
At the risk of sounding trite, I suspect a hundred years ago some people were wary of the 5 day week too, and yet here we are, for the most part, enjoying <sic> the arrangement of two days off per week.
> Less production will result in less revenue.
I gather the intent is that there won't be 'less production', and consequently won't be less revenue.
And/or perhaps the reduction in production won't be linearly correlated with the reduction in revenue.
> Companies are only going compensate employees for value of their labour, so less labour will eventually mean less compensation.
As with any large multi-national organisation, examining the remuneration of the exec layer may reveal some disparities with how profit is shared, and there may be some interesting options to explore there.
> Perhaps for some reason that I don't quite understand people get more (or an almost equalivent) amount of work done in four days as they do in five, but if not, this is just going to result in lower wages.
Consider that Unilever, a company valued at around $150b, likely has people that have already thought out the implications and risks of this plan.
> There are no free lunches in economics. Less production will result in less revenue.
Ironically, the free lunch, is an actual example of a free lunch in economics that does exist (The free lunch was in olden days, where bars would provide a free lunch. This endeared it to its customer base driving traffic back for evening drinks. The cost of the free lunch was much less than the profit from the extra alcohol sales, resulting in $$$ for the bar)
As far as a 4 day work week goes, there are tons of factors. Maybe the worker is happier with lower wages and more time off (i could make more money if i worked 80 hours a week, but i don't because the cost to me is more than the value of the extra mo ney). Maybe people have similar levels of production for 4 day work weeks. Maybe there's not enough work to employ everyone for 5 days but is enough for 4 and they think that is a better trade-off than laying peolle off. Maybe 4 day work week is non-monentary compensation that allows the employer to attract better talent. Etc.
Do you think that people are spending all 40 hours of their workweek working on the most important task to increase revenue?
My theory, at least with software engineering, is that we all struggle with burnout. You can spend 40 hours "in the office" per week, but as you get burned out, the amount of value you add in those hours decreases. If you take a day where you don't open Slack or think about work, then you reset some of that burnout, and your next 32 hours will be significantly more productive than 40 would have been. (You can probably measure it sometime. Look at the 40 hours before someone goes on a two week vacation, and look at the 40 hours immediately after that vacation.)
This isn't data, but my team has one person taking every Friday off. We do Thursday-Thursday oncall shifts, and outgoing oncall takes Friday off. I haven't noticed any change in productivity from myself or our team since we've implemented this policy. One person-day per week doesn't matter much; there is probably some tiny and low priority task that doesn't get done as a result. But the important stuff keeps happening, and the team is in a better mental state the rest of the time.
I don't think that 32 hours of software engineering per week would look a lot different than 40 hours of software engineering per week, averaged on the scale of months or years. 40 is an arbitrary number that has nothing to do with the mechanics of thinking about software, or even the typing-in of software. It's probably worth another look. (I have no idea how it translates to other fields.)
That does not imply there is an inverse causal relationship between working time and GDP, perhaps if the working hours had kept the same the GDP would have increased even further.
Much has been written about the productivity gains of industrialization being erased at the household level when women started working in large numbers. The gist of it is we went from ~40hr a week of work outside the home at the household level to ~80 (obviously those numbers aren't exact because not all households are a married couple and the are people who are self employed, etc, etc). But obviously the home stuff is still getting done so the net amount of work being done is increased (less productivity gains from technology). Just google "women in the workforce macroeconomic impact" or something like that.
Whether this is a net positive or net negative is basically boils down to whether you think people are better served working outside the home or better served doing household things.
Also, all your comments are dead by default. You might want to make a new account.
One of the consequences in the UK at least of having two parents working meant more money could be spent on housing costs, thus house prices increased, and then you had to have 2 people working decent jobs to provide the same lifestyle a generation before did with 1 person. This would have been offset by the extra money to be spent on childcare, but that was given large tax benefits.
Work doesn't scale linearly. If you'd work 7 days a week for 14 hours for a year you'd not get 3 times as much done as someone working a standard 40-hour week for a year.
Depends on line of work - ie in software development, definitely not. In factory working on some conveyor belt, definitely. You will probably collapse from overwork at some point though
If you visit any Unilever factory you will find they are heavily automated. They really don't need many staff to run.
The value creation in these sort of businesses has been shifting to knowledge workers for some time now. It would be foolish if Unilever and similar companies didn't start questioning all their traditional working practices.
The problem with the "knowledge economy" is nobody knows how to measure it. If you sit there making 600 dohickys in a 40 hour week, and reduce hours to 32 hours, and you make more than 480, your productivity has increased. If you make 300, it's gone down.
If you work a 6 hour day or 10 hour day instead of an 8 hour day, do you have more or less output as a developer? If you're a sysadmin, what's more productive, the admin who automates everything and sits there on call in case something breaks, but otherwise watching TV or riding a bike, or the person who spends weeks doing repetitive work which looks busy but leads to a far worse outcome?
that's called part-time and where I live (Germany) it's your right as an employee to do it.
I currently work 34h/week at Microsoft, fridays off. Instead of 40h/week 5day week.
I threw in 2 extra hours per week because you end up checking your mails, going on a late night call w/ PST colleagues regularly anyways.
Worst thing is to tell yourself you work 30h/week and get payed for it and then end up working 35-38 hours.
There is no right for sure, just Microsoft is big enough and friendly to allow such model. Big Corp I work for was extremely hostile towards my intention to reduce work hours to 32 weekly. After European HQ intervention it happened, I made some enemies during the process. And when third of the group left this company I was forced to do 40 hours again.
The country consists of two islands, the North and South. The North is warmer and the South colder, especially when you go to the South of the South island. New Zealand is extremely diverse in nature, you have everything from tropical jungles, to sand dunes, volcanoes, glaciers and amazing mountains. The North island is more populated than the South, but in comparison to the US or UK the whole of New Zealand is very sparsely populated. The country has more sheep than human and is geographically extremely isolated when you think that the closest neighbour is Australia which is a 4 hour flight and even Australia is extremely isolated when you compare it to an international melting pot like the UK. Like with everything in life this has pros and cons. Overall it's a beautiful place to be, stable and good economy, great work/life balance, amazing outdoor opportunities and a friendly culture. If New Zealand wasn't so far away from everyone else then I'd consider moving there myself, but not being able to quickly jump on a two hour flight to see old friends and family is a huge problem, especially when people get older they seem to value their relationship to friends and family increasingly more.
I agree with you on the melting pot comment, but (pre covid) jet age travel makes the whole 'isolation' point somewhat moot in my mind. you can be on a direct flight from Aukland to eg. San Fran that takes ~12 hours. is that really that much different than the ~9 hours it takes to go from eg. London to San Fran? Maybe I just like travel (and airplanes) ;-)
My brother moved from the UK to New Zealand a few years ago, and I've managed to visit him all of once - it's much more than a day of travel from here, with the added disadvantage that neither he nor I live near any of the convenient airports. Travelling to, say, New York from the UK is a lot more doable: I can get from semi-rural countryside in the UK to Manhattan in maybe 12 hours. There's also a considerable difference in cost.
(To the poster upthread asking how it compares to the UK: I only spent ten days in New Zealand, but I thought it was great. Sort of like the Lake District here, but on a vast scale. I also recommend the beef and cheese pies - a lovely healthy snack.)
When you have a 2-week mandatory quarantine in Australia and NZ it makes the concept of easy travel a bit stretched. It's really shown how isolated they are.
When considering moving countries, things like a 14 day quarantine that will be gone within 12-18 months aren’t something I would personally factor in. UK also has the same quarantine period- except no one takes it seriously and it isn’t enforced.
The residents of Stewart Island would like a word.
The northern tip of New Zealand is the same latitude as Sydney Australia, but because the country is relatively narrow (east-west) the climate doesn't have the variability that you get along the comparable latitudes of AU.
No matter where you are on the planet, you're a long way from 'most everybody else' - it depends if your criteria for happiness are proximity to a vast number of people you don't know, compared to low cost of living, healthy environment, sane governance, low population density, good soil, gentle climate, etc etc.
I'm NZ born and raised. It can but pretty but also cold, isolated, poor (though last 20 years have been good), rural, friendly but blunt culture, multicultural but racist, welcoming but progressive-snobby, expensive low quality housing, high suicide rate. Lots of clean air due to low population density.
You dont realize how far away from everything it is. Sure there are the 12 hour flights to anywhere except Australia, but also the jetlag, opposite seasons from the North.
I'd be curious to see the results of a trial involving thousands of employees. Some subset of 81, though... almost meaningless.
There's a tremendous inertia when it comes to work weeks. The five-day is locked in pretty firmly in the developed world, and a company that tries to change that risks getting out of synch with suppliers, subcontractors, and partners. "Today's Thursday. Our office is closed on Fridays, so we'll have to schedule that call for Tuesday, because one of our suppliers is closed on Mondays."
I mean, they can try it, and employees might like the extra time off, but it might well slow things down and ultimately result in commensurately lower salaries and bonuses.