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Comment by spydum | Hacker News Reader

I definitely want to believe, but they implemented this for one month. So literally four days off, and declared success? Couldn’t many of those measurements be just standard deviations? Curious how productivity gain was measured and whether or not this is just a honeymoon period and at some point it settles back to baseline..

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There's also the issue that Japan is quite notorious for a work culture that prohibits people from leaving to early and staying at office for a long time sometimes doing very little work. So the opportunity to increase productivity (or just not getting less work done) is probably bigger because there's a lot of slack to cut out.

In Germany we have a very different culture. You come at eight or nine and leave at four or five, you have your break but otherwise you're basically supposed to work. I have a hard time believing that cutting an entire day out is going to increase productivity a lot.

A german company did a similar experiment with positive results: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-5-hour-workday-gets-put-to-...

Note that they explicitly did it with the intention of clamping down on informal breaks, socialising and other "distractions". The founder heavily suggested he decided on this solution because he wanted to cut down on on-the-clock use of Facebook, private conversations, etc. They basically enforce a rather strict work focus during those 5 hours and justify it by offloading that overhead into leisure time. Also the 5 hour cut-off is socially enforced with a strict "countdown".

Our company is in the same region of Germany and we independently started experimenting with our work time but our focus was employee well-being via stress reduction and encouraging our employees to use the extra free time for self-care.

We ended up with a flexible 25-40 hour work week (or similar 60-ish % adjusted for non-40 hour positions). The goal is to keep each employee's work hours as close to 25 as possible but allow for "overtime" (up to the full 40 hours) if necessary. If we notice employees are working "overtime" over a longer period of time, we rebalance the work load or adjust timelines as possible to get them back to 25.

Despite the reduction of work hours by 30-40% the effective work output only shrunk by 10-20%. But the real benefits are social.

>and whether or not this is just a honeymoon period and at some point it settles back to baseline.

I think some label that temporary boost in reaction to novelty as the "Hawthorne Effect":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect

Yeah, the elephant in the room here is that they have no explanation how productivity is measured, and if they shouldn't create a lag model because you don't expect every single employee's performance to be directly & immediately related to the day the day sales of the group.

It also doesn't take into account the habituation process that all humans are subjected to. Employees might work harder when the 4 days workweek is introduced. And might return back to a lower normal once they get used to it. And if that happens, how can you convince people that they should be working 5 days a week again?

Probably what happened.

Why not just give everyone an extra random day off a year. At the beginning of the year there is a draw to pick the next random day off from the work calendar. Make it into a public holiday. Random Day!

Also the article said people took 25% less holiday, which could make it just 3 days off, depending on what the typical number of holidays taken for this month is.

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