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Comment by steveridout | Hacker News Reader

Six-hour days may be more productive, but this won't prove it one way or the other because:

- The people working six hour days have been told that this may improve productivity so the excitement of being part of the experiment may indeed encourage them to be more effective in the short term

- They have a strong incentive to work harder because if the experiment concludes that six hour days are more effective, they will likely get to keep working six hour days.

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How long do you think the experiment needs to run before the Hawthorne effect you allude to is no longer a confounding effect? 2 years? 10? Longer?

The relevant Wikipedia page suggests that two months is about the upper limit for excitement-based productivity gains, so 1 year should be enough.

Also, those working 8 hours may be demotivated by knowing that the 6-hourers get exactly the same cash while needing to work less.

Annoyingly, the article doesn't say why Kellogg's stopped their 30 hour work week. Is it unsustainable in the long term? Then it might be a good idea then if A) your business is creative and not an assembly line and B) you plan to sell your business before the strategy becomes unsustainable. They still had a small amount of departments working 30 hour weeks until 1985. When the company was handed over to new management in ~1947, it seems that the management immediately went on a crusade against 30 hour weeks without reason, creating incentives to work in 40 hour week departments and other things.[0]

Personally, I loathed 40 hour weeks at jobs where things are repetitive or physically demanding (I have terrible ankles at 28 from so many on-my-feet positions. I'd probably work 50 hour weeks at a programming gig, switching between studying concepts, coding, and studying existing code simply because you can change up the work sequence.

[0] http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/2962

You can't compare assembly line work with what most of us do.

Workers at Kellogg's voted for more hours and a corresponding wage increase. Last 530 workers went to 8 hour work weeks in 1985.

Maybe not the same reasons, but I read that the four day work week was ended because of benefit costs (e.g. health care coverage). Fewer hours meant more employees, which meant more benefit overhead. I also read that the works held a mock funeral for it. The were not happy going back to five days.

Depressingly:

http://money.msn.com/investing/post--what-happened-to-the-6-...

In the '50s, a new management team arrived, one that may have tended to "denigrate and 'feminize' shorter hours." They became embarrassed by the short hours that they were working -- shorter than the shifts worked by men at other local jobs. They changed their rhetoric, downplaying the freedom that leisure gave.

Six-hour workdays wouldn't let them keep up with the Joneses, and many men did not receive much enjoyment from their marginal leisure hours. "Like management, senior male workers were concerned about the loss of status and control. Several men told about the friction that resulted when the men spent too much time around the house: "The wives didn't like the men underfoot all day." "The wife always found something for me to do if I hung around." "We got into a lot of fights." Many of the men confessed that they were at loose ends when they were working six hours. [Mr Zine]

Or rather, the effects will be tainted because it's not a double-blind experiment with a randomized group.

Does it matter if it works?

The first of your points is the Hawthorne effect, and I agree that we should not conclude anything from short term productivity increases.

But your second point is just absurd. If wanting to keep your shorter working hours turns out to be such a good incentive to work harder and smarter that it improves productivity on the long run, then how does this not prove that shorter hours improve productivity?

Becsuse you'll only do it while you're being measured.

Does it make such a big difference if people are slacking off for 6 hours or for 8 hours as soon as they're not supervised?

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