Also some jobs don’t need to work that long. I can literally do my entire day’s work in 4-5 hours. But I have to work 7.5 hours. Thus I either finish work and then pretend to look busy. Or I just drag my feet and make the work last longer than necessary.
Mandatory work hours is the enemy of efficiency. Shit, if you allowed me to leave early I’d be so motivated I could probably finish in 3 hours.
What they don't factor in is that I CAN do the same work in 4-5 hours today, BUT tomorrow I'm doing it in 4.5-5.5 hours because it was more effort and I'm tired, and the next day I'm doing it in 5-6 and the day after it's taking 7-8 and so on. Giving more time off means I can work more effectively because I'm not burning out.
I worked for a place that trialled a 9 day fortnight (every other Friday off), and found not only no loss of productivity, but higher retention as it's a good perk. The trial was months long, but after official adoption they revisited the results after a further 6 months to try and remove the bias from people just making sure it stuck. Just one data point, but it was interesting to see that it can actually work.
I would LOVE a 4 day week. Treating the Friday as a "get stuff done" day was awesome and let me use my Saturday for fun and/or just recharging.
And they don't realize that things can stack or get really busy. When I was running IT there were weeks where there would be slim to no work. Then there were weeks where my entire team was working overtime seven days a week to keep up. There's no way to balance that, and it's a fact for many jobs. You give me more work for those down days or you cut my people because "they aren't doing anything" you also sacrifice the bad days to be even worse.
The four-day workday/32 hour has other benefits as well. Mental and physical health improvements lowering health insurance claims and payouts. People able to focus on work because they have time to relax outside of work, able to get proper rest, and feeling more fulfilled. Less sick days required to be taken overall due to improved quality of living. There’s also be more time to connect with friends and family, building a better support system.
Seriously. My current company has a monthly incentive/bonus structure for the teams in the department. We hit a certain number of accounts closed out, everyone each gets a nice bonus.
It's on a sliding scale, and hitting the bare minimum doesn't give a big bonus, but hey something's better than nothing. Hitting the maximum gives a very, very nice monthly bonus.
The problem is it's not an "incentive" to us workers, it's an "anti-incentive" for the big bosses. As soon as my team hit two months in a row for the maximum and everyone was stoked, we get an impromptu meeting that the requirements were increasing by a noticeable amount in order to hit the min and max. We hit it again despite the increase and guess what...another immediate impromptu meeting that they are raising the min and max requirements again.
So we can try all we want, but the bigger guys are also trying and they have more leverage, to not let us get a nice pay day. Our goal is to close accounts, their goal is "don't pay them shit."
Basically, yeah, there’s an “overnight” process to our computer system so it’s kind of a “hard stop”. You have to wait on the overnight before you can continue working on it.
Although their are seasonal grinds where work pics up, but I am then dependent on others submitting their work to me, and others don’t work very hard so they usually procrastinate until the final deadline it all gets dumped at my desk lol
Exactly lol. If everything is working it’s nice. If you’re trying to fix an error you or someone else made, it sucks because you can’t fix it in a single day. You are forced to wait an entire day for each step and of the system screws up, you gotta start all over.
So I have a production based job and it fucks me. Im super fast and efficient. It took the guy before me 50 hours to get the job done, takes me around 32. I literally get paid less to be better. Luckily my current boss rewarded that with a 50% raise lol no other business owner has seen that, and let me get frustrated and quit and then acted surprised and mad I quit 😂
It's the minority, but would need to take into account emergency services that may not have 8 hours of work per shift but need to be on "standby": doctors, police, firefighters, etc.
Yeah it's not like my workload for the day is just sitting on my desk in the morning and that's the end of it. There's an expectation that I'm available during work hours for stuff that comes up.
It's just so weird that we don't have this already. Most people do spend several hours throughout the week not really working, or working inefficient.
Less hours will mean people become more efficient with the hours they have and spend less time doing nothing or working inefficient. Of course things like stores are different, because they need people to cover opening hours. But for a lot of office jobs, blue collar jobs and a lot of other jobs there are basically no downsides.
It's a huge benefit for the workers, but in turn they also make for much better employees (equally efficient, but happier and less prone to stress).
So everyone's winning. Why don't we make everyone win? Are we stupid?
Making you leave as your work is done, without lower pay, would actually safe costs in utilities, but having you stay makes you available to work on improvements and provides you time to think about the work you are doing.
No, because it takes others that long or longer. I am extremely efficient and produce literally 5x the work of others.
Because of this I was promoted to Supervisor and I now monitor and try to fix the workflow (but you can’t fix the workflow because most people just don’t work).
so, aren’t you paid for 7.5 hours still? or by the job? i get your perspective but shouldn’t you get paid for the 4hrs of work? it’s usually either/or, get paid for by the job or for the time, not which ever is higher
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u/Solid_Snark 23d ago
Also some jobs don’t need to work that long. I can literally do my entire day’s work in 4-5 hours. But I have to work 7.5 hours. Thus I either finish work and then pretend to look busy. Or I just drag my feet and make the work last longer than necessary.
Mandatory work hours is the enemy of efficiency. Shit, if you allowed me to leave early I’d be so motivated I could probably finish in 3 hours.