
4 Day Work Week - Seeking Feedback
The 4 day work week seems to be gaining popularity. We have discussed it in the office, though nothing definitive as of yet.
The idea we are mulling is that everyone works 10 HR days for 4 days. Monday - Thursday.
The Pros:
- Saves commuter time / money
- Saves company energy costs
- Our free time is in larger blocks and a consistent 'work day' to do errands and appointments.
The Cons:
- Longer days - though 8am - 6pm isn't bad really.
- Some organizations can't have one day completely shut down
At Savvy, we have to offer at least some support on Friday's. So we could do a rotating schedule. However that offsets the environmental benefits for the office (less energy used).
There are lots of other options to help solve the support dilemma. One is that one of the staff members has Monday off instead of Friday, and that person offers support on Fridays, but works from home. That way the office is still shut down, but support is still available.
Any of you have direct experience with this?

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I'd think if you support working from home - than that would be the ideal solution.
I think in a lot of cases you still have to have people in the office on the fifth day, even if its not a full staff. Telecommuting can probably help there with the environmental concerns.
We do have a lot of telecommuters in my office (regrettably I'm not one of them, the people who do it live much farther away than I do), working 1-3 days in the office and the rest from home. It works well as long as you have seamless communications systems (phone, vpn, etc). At my company everyone has a Blackberry, and our phone system is good - it can forward calls to a home or cell number. We have a couple conference lines always available. The key is to keep it as "normal" as possible whether they are in our out of the office.
Good luck, I look forward to hearing how it goes!
I've worked in environments that were similar to the 4 day week - more like a 50 hour week followed by a 30 hour week followed by a 4 day weekend (then cycle back to the 50 hour week again)... and yes, it did work really well. The real issue for most companies is that, if they're customer service oriented, as we are at Nylon, it's difficult to let people not come in on one of the 5 work days without it affecting business.
I personally would be a big advocate of 4 10 hour nights for developers. We don't sleep anyway and many of us are more productive outside the 8-5 schedule. Save on A.C. and an easier commute.
I think many companies are going to have to look more seriously at telecommuting now.
Regarding State employees, Billy said "we offered them a four day week,
but they said there was no way they'd work the two extra days."
As a person that works in the service industry, servicing marine safety equipment and boatsI feel that this could be viewed as something quite beneficial to the industry.
I think it is about time for the United States Government Officials to step-up to the plate and figure something out and make it a labor law, rather than depending on the public to try and figure it out, because some companies would comply, while there are those (like the one I work for) that would say, " there is no way I am going to let some politician determine how I work my employees."
I would love to see the vacation law passed and i would love to see the gov't. officials step -up and say you work in this industry, you make this much per hour, in every career or job, instead of a person in Ohio getting paid $13.00 an hour to pack life rafts and service boats and marine safety equipment while the guy in Texas is doing the same making $ 15.00 per hour or the person in Virginia making $20.00 per hour,or the person from California doing the same job making $36.00 per hour. It is not fair labor practices.
This is a site promoting the 4 day work week with armbands and stickers. I thought it was worth a shot to help build support.
In my opinions 2 days off isn't an optimal life schedule to fully center oneself and recoup expired energy, deeply pursue personal interests, manage home-life, family-time, errands, as well as indulge in at least abit of tequila inspired debauchery.
I've worked 7 days many times, and taken 4 days off afterward, and it was AMAZING. I accomplished much more than usual, and didn't have to spend a Monday morning winding the project back up to where we left it on Friday. A 7 day workweek s is a great stretch of time to focus intently on projects, that otherwise are abruptly interrupted by half-assed 2 day weekends.
Let's begin by offering a 4 8-hour day workweek as an option. Wouldn't this also potentially offset unemployment, via distributing labor over more employees?
Many would gladly work half as much for half the pay.
I am doing some research about this topic and I created a website which collects signatures for this idea.
So if you agree to have 4 working days per week please come and sign it at www.4workingdays.com
Thanks a lot,
Thomas