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Comment by everdev | Hacker News Reader

I think 37signals tried this about a decade ago. It's neither new or surprising.

The state of Utah did it in a massive way, it was a huge success, saved some money, improved employee morale, and productivity, so naturally they switched back shortly after[0].

The biggest issue was that people didn't like government services closed on Fridays. But instead of doing shifting or trying anything to mitigate that, they simply gave up.

The depressing thing is that this pattern happens over and over, be it remote work, work hours, work days, work dress, or a million other things. Society just "pins" normality arbitrarily then keeps returning to that.

[0] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102938...

The Utah experiment involved "four tens", or 4 10-hour work days. It was still a 40 hour work week. The posted article discusses eliminating an entire work day and shortening the work week by 8 hours, rather than spreading them out over the remaining 4 days. cf. http://www.governing.com/columns/utahs-demise-of-the-four-da...

It is in fact massively inconvenient when government and/or financial services are closed while other people are trying to get work done. After all, they are the backbone that supports all other economic activity. A couple of hours of discrepancy at the end of the day is tolerable (and sometimes even desirable), but a whole day of downtime is too much.

We need to automate a lot more of the public and financial sectors than we currently do. As long as a significant portion of work needs to be done face-to-face, there will be pressure to synchronize everyone's working days and hours.

As grandparent said, shifting would be enough to mitigate that. Some work Mo/Tue/We/Thu, while others work Tue/We/Thu/Fr, others Mo/Tue/Thu/Fr... etc.

A government office is not a supermarket. The clerks at the front might be interchangeable to some extent, but most of the people in the back office aren't.

In order to utilize shifting in a typical government office, you will need to train a lot of people to perform many different tasks involving many different laws, and come up with new procedures to assign clear chains of responsibility. Especially if the shifts are as complex as you describe. Utah might have decided that it's not worth the hassle.

Besides, if you could simplify and streamline a task so much that any on-duty employee can handle it, you might as well automate it all the way. In other words, tasks that are well suited for shifting also tend to be well suited for automation. The only exceptions are 24/7 jobs such as the police and emergency services.

Your argument is reasonable and well thought out, but I don’t think this could not be overcome. Eg people get sick every once in a while, and go on holidays, and seminars etc., and offices have to deal with this one way or another. Look at it this way - office workers are now available max 40h per week, out of 168 available hours per week, so how big a difference can 8 hours less make? Dependents would eventually get used to this, just like they have to work around the fact that offices are mostly closed on weekends.

I agree that shifts are often not possible.

Conversely, it's also massively inconvenient that whole classes of activity (doctors, mechanics, dentists, public services) are only really available when I'm also supposed to be at work.

A flexible four day workweek would help a lot with this. Got Tuesdays off? Find a dentist that's open then.

Or the government automates jobs. In Prishtina, Kosovo about 50 clerk jobs were replaced by a single automated machine which would give you all kinds of documents, certicicates, etc. It cut down waiting time from hours to minutes. Not to mention that it works 24/7 all year. Some people (especially people not used to tech) did not like it, so the municipality put a single clerk next to the machine. Still much better.

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