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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

Most systems don't have a nice, clean, linear relationship.

You did a reductio ad absurdum in one direction, let's do it in the other: if hours worked directly translates to productivity, then we should be able to add more hours and continually get more productivity. Why not add Saturdays and Sundays back in? Then we can go to 10 hour workdays. Maybe 12 hours?

Even aside from the humanitarian arguments against this, it should be obvious that there reaches a point where the marginal return for additional hours is negative—where adding extra hours reduces total productivity.

Experiments like this are designed to find out where that inflection point is, and the evidence that's coming in so far suggests that the inflection point is somewhere below 40 hours. More research is needed, but that's exactly what is happening.

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> Experiments like this are designed to find out where that inflection point is, and the evidence that's coming in so far suggests that the inflection point is somewhere below 40 hours. More research is needed, but that's exactly what is happening

If someone's job is in customer service and the key part of their role is to answer the phone when it rings/respond to the email when it arrives ... you don't need research to determine that if they are not there, the phone/email doesn't get answered.

If you let them stay at home on Fridays, either you pay someone else to come in on those Fridays, or you accept that phone calls/emails won't be answered on Fridays. Ever.

This appears to be really easy to propose/promote when it's not your company :(

If the customer service rep works more hours, at a decreased productivity (tired workers make mistakes, over-stressed workers may be more impatient) such that the marginal return becomes negative, then YES! it becomes more cost effective to pay someone else to come in on those Fridays.

Just like we don't expect those reps to also work evenings and weekends, even if the company has 24/7 support.

The article points out some indirect benefits, like improved employee retention, which would decrease training costs and result in more experienced reps working the phone/email, which may improve customer service and relations.

This is really hard to promote, which is why there have been experiments along these lines for the last 5-10 years.

Here's what I think you're missing: Most people who answer telephones for a living are not paid to answer telephones. They're paid to answer customers.

If I'm speaking to someone who's worked too much for their capacity (whatever that is) and I get a curt, wrong, or bad-mannered answer I'm very likely to take my business elsewhere. In fact I've done so, to the tune of a few good thousands, a few times. Off of a repeat bad experience with customer service.

Would it be better for the business for that same position to be filled with someone whose energy were better at the time I rung?

(To give you credit, some positions do need to fill shifts and it is what it is, but you can always split them between more people)

> Most people who answer telephones for a living are not paid to answer telephones. They're paid to answer customers. If I'm speaking to someone who's worked too much for their capacity (whatever that is) and I get a curt, wrong, or bad-mannered answer I'm very likely to take my business elsewhere

(Warning: anecdote) I've just phoned my son's school to tell them he's poorly and won't be there today. The receptionist who answered the phone is "the grumpy one" (there are two at this school, the other one is lovely).

Of course it's possible that the grumpy one could well morph into being lovely if only they were given more time off, but I doubt it. I've spoken with both of them dozens of times, and it's utterly predictable, one is always lovely, one always isn't. Some people are great with customers, others just aren't.

> some positions do need to fill shifts and it is what it is, but you can always split them between more people

There are small businesses where teams are, unsurprisingly, small. Having worked both with and in such places, I'm not sure how feasible the "split between more people" actually is.

Fair enough. Incompetent people should either be trained or fired, no argument there. The point is that in many (most?) jobs it's mutually beneficial to employer and employee if work is done at peak performance. But some people should just...go do something else for all our sakes.

I've been a one-person customer support team for thousands of clients myself. Working till 6am to answer all emails in under 24 hours got old very quickly. There's always another way to do things.

A business that can't expand or improve while treating employees well is probably not a business that should exist.

>If someone's job is in customer service and the key part of their role is to answer the phone when it rings/respond to the email when it arrives ... you don't need research to determine that if they are not there, the phone/email doesn't get answered.

You're correct that the phone doesn't get answered. But that's not "productivity". Productivity is the function of the hours worked and the results gained. Their job isn't just to answer the phone, it's to resolve problems and leave a customer satisfied. Too little sleep and a foggy brain? Might take them more time to resolve an issue. Might leave them unhappy and the customer can detect that.

The results might surprise you, they could be more productive and more phone calls are answered in less time because issues are resolved quickly. To get around the problem of no phones being answered on a Friday you could propose a rota so staff is properly covering every day of the week. If everyone is 20% more productive, then every day can afford to have 20% less staff. Problem solved. 24/7 businesses already rota customer service staff.

Maybe the rest of the staff are more productive and there's less problems. The knock on effect being that there's 20% less phone calls. The problem sorts itself there, they don't even need to be more productive.

Lets say that there is no productivity increase at all. Well, hire 20% more staff then. Large companies can afford it. The wealth gap is widening, capitalists with hundreds of millions or billions of pounds have convinced workers there's not enough money to go around, but we know that's bullshit.

> If someone's job is in customer service... you don't need research to determine that if they are not there, the phone/email doesn't get answered.

Except perhaps in the case of very small companies with a single CS person - someone else can answer the phone?

Can they never have a holiday too?

Several weeks back, in the thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33561648 , I hit Google Scholar to find seemingly relevant papers. Here are two showing negative productivity.

The first is munitions production in England during WWI. There was linear production in hours worked, up to about 48 hours per week, then the marginal product went down; going negative after about 63 hours. See Figure 5 of "The Productivity of Working Hours", John Pencavel, 2014 at https://docs.iza.org/dp8129.pdf for a graph.

On a more national level, "The effects of working time on productivity and firm performance: a research synthesis paper", Lonnie Golden (2011) at http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_protect/---pro... points out:

] A recent analysis of 18, mostly European, Member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development explores the degree to which longer annual hours have been associated with per-hour productivity at the national level, since 1950. It finds that the responsiveness of per-hour productivity for a given increase in working time is always negative. Not only are there decreasing returns on added working time, the returns in the form of added production diminish more rapidly for longer working times. When annual working time climbs above a threshold of 1,925 hours, a 1-per cent increase in working time would lead to a decrease in productivity of roughly 0.9 per cent at the threshold and a fully proportional decrease of 1 per cent past the threshold of 2,025 hours (Cette et al., 2011).

40 hours work vs 40 hours office is not the same thing though. Maybe diminishing return starts at 30 hours of work, but still you can benefit from some relaxed schedule at the office.

30 hours work at 40 hours office time vs 30 hours work at 30 hours office time would have different outputs for sure.

If those 10 relaxed hours actually mattered there’d be a measurable productivity drop. If it’s not measurable or significant, then those 10 hours don’t matter and we should get them back for stuff that does.

No company is measuring hourly productivity, especially in anything beyond the lowest levels.

It doesn't matter—if a company joins in one of these experiments and drops everyone to 32 hours, we should see a decrease in company-wide productivity if OP is correct that the downtime is useful. If it's not useful, then we should see stable or increased productivity (which is what most companies are reporting).

I don't disagree but 100:80:100 has also stuff like this:

> Certain teams/divisions were unable to fully (or partially) participate in the trial as a result. Others found themselves working compressed working hours (10 hours in 4 days) as opposed to reduced working hours. Managers, across all levels, seem to find it particularly difficult to reduce their working hours, as one respondent says, ‘the work just doesn’t stop’.

> At times, this concern was connected with a reported perception of ‘variable behavioural change’ whereby some employees improved their workplace behaviours while others ‘took it as a gift and didn’t change’.

Even if some workers stay the same and some improve their behavior, that would overall be an increase in productivity which seems to line up with what most companies report after running these types of trials. Organizationally, you care more about total output than any one individual. If you have good managers you can trust them to address the individual variances if and when they see fit.

32 hours a week would be great but I'd even be thrilled to have the opportunity for 4x10 instead of 5x8.

I think seven days a week would be more productive, but it's culturally impossible in the West (thank God).

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